Read Online Fire in the Unnameable Country by Ghalib Islam - Free Book Online

lovemaking. My father snorted like a horse and tried to keep his balance on the shifty ground as the hairy man directed him to a spot where the spines of the shelves had not yet dissolved, and, one by one, he began to toss the correct roundmetal containers to the floor.

    It was impossible to remove the vagabond from Mamun’s shoulders. He had the property of screaming in several languages and hissing in a dangerous way whenever he felt threatened, or to asphyxiate Mamun by pressing against my father’s neck with his thighs. Supervisor had no time to consider yet another medical claim from a man who had extended his last one for nearly three thousand days, and by then, Gita, Shukriah, and Chaya were so busy with the hosiery shop that they thought of Mamun’s problem as purely a social accident, the result of a petty conflict between him and one of the tatterdemalion vagabonds ofthe cigarette shop. At dinner, they provided the stranger his own plate of food, which he took in his raised seat, and he would apologize when he spilled the contents onto my father’s head while eating.
    Since Mamun M could not stand the wretched odour of the man-sized parasite, he was forced to bathe him, and I will not try to relate the acrobatic difficulties of going to toilet for two. While it is true that since the year of the sleeping plague no one in the unnameable country had fornicated, the utter lack of privacy and inability even to lie down next to Shukriah at night was an added reason for his despair. In the evenings, while my father tried desperately to read the paper or to pass the time in some other idle silent way—since he was ashamed of his condition and no longer visited his friends at Xasan Sierra’s—the bow-legged stranger would babble endlessly, and switched between languages so often that only Hedayat had the patience and the time to sit at their feet and listen.
    At that time, because my father thought I would be able somehow through my silence-strangespeech to pry the unseemly weight off his shoulders, he tried to understand me a little, even to get to know Niramish. My friend, meanwhile, had begun to gain the added problem of adolescent sweat glands on top of the odour of curried vegetables for which he was universally known, but even he felt sated by the knowledge that Mamun M’s difficulties outweighed most people’s. And he who had been laughed at all his life could not help giggling at that odd sight of a hairy man picking nits off the head of a perfect image of gentility/ middle-aged father starched collar rolled sleeves, reading.
    Ask him, baba, Mamun would insist, and I would try, but to zero avail. For months I was incapable of coaxing the minotaur to reveal his history, where from you are, why in the labyrinth, and so forth. We have noticed that the hairy stranger is no Caliban and can speak perfectly comprehensible phrases, so why the roundabout and foreign. Another way to ask: glossolalia: what provokes it. Another still: does it alwayswork. As we have witnessed, its origin is usually the confluence of several hidden organs, historical individual spontaneous illogical-unusual to name a few. How came this stranger to possess this strange ability, and why the unnameable country. Does this trick of the tongue exist elsewhere in the world, I mean. Since it would be many months until the days of the Ranas, Q and Masoud, linked to whose life stories Hedayat’s own glossolalist abilities would mature, cajoling the stranger off my father’s back would have to take another route.
    At that time, my friend and I were too busy wandering alleys glass bottle or cataract marijuana gaze, watching crowd actors in one camera shot or another in our city-turned-movie-set, snickering young boots, kicking dust at all their shit. I must note that I have never seen a single moment of The Mirror because they were manufactured for export but I know its various feature-length scenes have been shown