English Translation of a Punjabi Novel Drawn Out Death Drawn Out Death By Makhdoom Tipu Salman (An English Translation of a Punjabi Novel) MTS ePublishing Lahore MTS 1st Punjabi (Shahmukhi) Edition : 2019 Original Punjabi title: Addhi Mot, توم یھدا ਅੱਧੀ ਮੌਤ Published by Sanjh Publications, Lahore. 1st English (ePublished) Edition: 2019 2nd English (ePublished) Edition: 2019 All rights reserved Table of Contents 1. Chapter 1- Right & Left …… 5 2. Chapter 2 – Nature …… 21 3. Chapter 3 – Bank …… 39 4. Chapter 4 – WhatsApp …… 57 5. Chapter 5 – Disease ….. 77 6. Chapter 6 – Class ….. 95 7. Chapter 7 – Whore ….. 113 Chapter 1 Right & Left I first looked in from space, like a satellite. No human – and indeed no living thing – is visible from that distance. The world itself looked like a small ball in no way distinguished among innumerable balls big and small, dark and luminescent. Then I returned earthside and took flight like a sparrow. It was a street of Lahore‟s Jauhar Town, lined on either side by rows of ten-marla, double-storey houses. Three or four of the houses had a tree standing guard out-front. One had chairs arrayed on the lawn, in the driveway, and outside the gate – chairs made of shiny metal frames clad in red Rexine. Parked in the Drawn Out Death street were a dozen cars and a few motorcycles. Inside the house were a couple of dozen people, some standing and some sitting in the red chairs. I assumed the point of view of the gecko clinging to the porch ceiling. People arrived in twos, threes, and fours. Men would stay outside and women would go inside the house. I entered the house as a mosquito – whining and buzzing around people‟s ears and noses, hands and feet, arms and legs. Women sat on white sheets and children ran about. At the center of the scene was a cot holding a corpse covered in a white sheet. It was my corpse. And this was my house – or rather it used to be while I lived. I circled my body for a while but soon tired of it and found a perch on the curtain rail to keep an eye on the proceedings. I had been dead for four hours now. Death had come as I rode my motorcycle along a busy road. I had a flash of something rushing at me from the right, and then everything fell to the right. Next, I found myself flying like a sparrow. I saw 6 MTS that a car had overrun my motorcycle, and I lay there on the roadside, my skull torn open against the footpath. There was blood everywhere. A crowd had gathered. As my house was nearby, a couple of bystanders recognized me and rang up my home. Then I – err my cadaver – was carried home. It seemed all my emotions and feelings had died with my death. I was neither angry with the motorist who had crushed me against the pavement to death nor felt any sorrow on seeing myself dead. Nor did I even get misty-eyed on seeing my wife and children wailing. Aimlessly droning like the two or three flies buzzing around my body, I got home. My life of a half century was in front of me. Nothing was obscure, nothing incomplete. I was roaming about pointlessly, now a satellite, now a sparrow, now a mosquito. I could travel back in time at will – could even freeze time if I wanted. In fact, I had already taken a tour of my time in this world, taking in a birds‟ eye view of my life. 7 Drawn Out Death Born to a clerk, I had gone to public school. My father had a cauldron of rice cooked to feed the poor when I matriculated placing in first division – and several cauldrons when I passed MA History. What was the point in all the revelry? It was not as if I had drunk deep of the Pierrian Spring. I had passed the exam by learning canned answers from cheap guidebooks by rote. What difference would it make if I had failed? It was not as if I could now eat sushi and summer in the Swiss Alps. I was still eating the same old vegetable ghee parathas with lentil gravy and would not take a day off from work for fear I would be transferred to a far off station. Things would have been scarcely different if I had failed. At worst, the annual pay raise would have been somewhat slimmer, and the relatives would have been a little less jealous. I would still die right here in a motorcycle crash. It would have been different if my father and his father had been successful in bringing about Red Revolution – if they had not been cowed by batons and prison terms and hunger. That would have indeed 8 MTS made a difference. For then, nobody would eat sushi if I could not, nobody would have a car if I could not. What a life had been mine! Even wild beasts have it better. In that moment, I could see only one difference between my life and that of an ox yoked to a seed crusher. His burden was different from mine – and that was all. Or rather, there was one more difference: The ox is kept blinkered by the crusher operator, and I had been kept blinkered all my life by the society. Idly floating in the air, I had wandered onto the porch when I heard a stern voice question me, “What are you doing here?” The question was aimed at me – for all other voices sounded as if coming from the bottom of a deep well. It was then that I noticed two small beings accompanying every person, one perched on each shoulder. They were small but beautiful humanoids – tiny sprites of light. I glanced at my own shoulders and found no such being there. 9 Drawn Out Death The question had come from the sprite sitting atop the right shoulder of a twenty- four or twenty-five year old man. “I have died. My body is lying inside,” said I, at a loss for anything better to say. “I see – but why have you not gone Beyond?” asked he. “I don‟t know – this was my first time dying,” I blurted out, and then laughed as the comedy of the situation caught up with me. “I mean I am new to this.” “Okay then – ramble around. Delays do occur occasionally due to technical issues. These people cannot see you – just us, Right and Left, can,” saying this, he extended his right hand which I shook, then also shook hands with the sprite perched on the left shoulder of the same young man. “How long does it take to go Beyond?” I asked Right. “No idea. Seconds, centuries,” he said uninterestedly, glancing around. The young man moved on and I floated along. “Who are you?” I asked Right. 10