54. AATHA HAI YAD MUJHKO GUZRA HUA ZAMANA

On Sundays and other holidays my dad would start rearranging the books after removing the dust and the tiny insects you usually see making the old books their safe haven. He would often sit tight for hours together pouring on some interesting works of Muqaddamah, Gulisthan or Boosthan, Makhalath Rabbani or poetry of Ghalib and Allama Iqbal.

He was proud of Arabic Tafseers of the Holy Book, the Quraan. On these occasions, teacups after teacups would only he love, forgetting time, food and family. Wills was the brand of fags he loved after every cup of Brook Bond strong tea he sipped. The entire house just smacked sort of a nightclub you visit on weekend.

Most evenings I would fabricate alarming episodes from what I had heard from my maternal granddad, adding it with a bit of my own mind's eye and tell my younger sisters and brother stories, who would hear them very acutely, already scared by the shadowy and poignant  backdrop of the open backyard with the enormous  and tremendous  neem tress.

Southerlies sent howling winds making the gigantic mammoths swirling as if they were moving ahead slowly to catch us. At times, I found myself spooky as my own stories overwhelmingly frightening to me too. On such moments cutting the stories abruptly short, I would sneak into the house with my listeners with some strategy.

Most evenings while we sit with my family I would see, and I was convinced, some old man with a turban covering his head putting on a white long open coat and pajama walking to and fro on the foyer. He was more a specter. He would not see us and gave the impression to be unaffected about our being there. Not once but this, I saw on several occasions. He had become a part of our company, a member of our family to me while never known to others. None of my family members ever bothered to see him, as they did not ever appear to perceive him. For all that he had never once taken trouble to look at anyone of us or ever tried to talk to me. Still I loved him and his charisma. At occasions when he was not present, I was down in spirit. Might be it was my starting of visual hallucination.