“Telli! What’s it going to be, eh?”
There was me, that is Sikandar, and my three sangbaaz, that is Bott, Kadir, and Mudd. Mudd being really Mudd, and we sat in the Jumma Khanqah making up our magaz what to do with the Friday morning, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
The Jumma Khanqah was a religion-plus jaai, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these jaais were like, things changing so jaldi these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being written much neither.
Well, what they sold there was deenplus, religion plus something else. They had no license for selling it, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new cheez which they used to put into the old deen, so you could gryt it with azzadi or revolution or resistance or one or two other cheezimeezi which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen hours admiring Jannah And All its Holy Angels and Saints in your left chapinkhor with lights bursting all over your magaz. Or you could gryt deen with stones in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty tim-woh-te-be-akh, and that was what we were gryting this morning I’m starting off the story with.
Our pockets were full of dayar so there was no need on that score, but, as they say, money isn’t everything.
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You know how rest of the story goes: A free woman would get killed. Brittle men would be lampooned. Boy would be sent to special prison where they try to cure him, creating another kind of monster. Boy would find old his friends are now woking as IkWEENIS. A Batte Kommunist ji would take up the cause of Sikandar and try to expose the true face of “State” to the people…Pandit ji the mad victim who would be disposed soon enough. Sikandar would have his humanity restored and the symphony of violence shall continue.
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