The scorching sun of the 1990s glared at the unplanned town of Sherbetpur with its zigzag streets and perennially haphazard dwellers. It was the hottest May on the records. The small abode of Abba Jaan, in the congested part of the city near Qila Road, was shamefully trying to hide in the corner beside the newly renovated house of Doctor Salim. But the street on the other side gave it away. Inside the poorly planned two-room house, the glasses embedded in the window frames vibrated whenever a heavy vehicle drove across the adjoining road. The walls with their inferior quality paint revealed their secrets explicitly. The gaudy blue paint on the damp walls was coming off in scrapes revealing an even flashier shade of pink. And those who looked closely saw a pale tasteless yellow beneath that. The smaller room belonged to Abba Jaan and the other one to his son’s little family.
In the smaller room, the even smaller windows looked right into the street. A calendar with a picture of the Kaaba hung on the wall opposite to the windows. The curtains were drawn to prevent the noise, flies and the heat from coming in. The wind was dead. Abba Jaan was trying to sleep on his cot kept at the very centre of the room. He looked at the white ceiling fan over him. The three blades were moving so slowly that he could count them. The whole system of the motor and the blades was hanging by a rod. Wires protruded in numbers clearly more than required. With every revolution, the motor gave a jerk.
Perspiration from the afternoon summer heat was all over his body. A fly was sitting on his mesh vest. Drops of sweat trickled down his dark, worn out face. Some of the drops lost themselves inside his long salt and pepper beard but others made the pillow under his head damp. He decided he’d rather not die of a heat stroke. He shouted to his son to turn the fan regulator from one to three. Sweat still poured down and he realised it wasn’t enough. He got up himself and rotated the regulator with his thin wrinkly fingers to five, the highest speed possible. He looked at the fan as closely as his eight year old grandson in the adjacent room was looking at the newspaper puzzle to find five differences between the two pictures. He noticed that axis of the fan was not vertical and it hiccupped when the fan was on its highest speed. It looked like that the fan would fall down any moment. The vision of the fan dropping and his splattered body made him cringe. He thought of moving his cot but even at its highest speed, the flimsy fan didn’t provide its air to anyone even a feet afar.
‘Not again!’ he grumbled to himself.
He called his son loudly and spoke in Urdu, ‘O Firoz! See—Arré upar. Above! This wretched fan! It is going to kill me someday. Because of this constant fear, I have to sleep with my head under the fan; So that if it falls, I’d die rather than losing my legs. You wouldn’t want a handicapped father, would you? Get it repaired unless you and that witch of yours want to kill me and inherit my wealth quickly.’
Firoz was accustomed to this same argument every once in a while.
‘Abba Jaan! It is working perfectly fine. You have created this stupid superstition in your head. Wherever you go, you start acting like a lunatic and embarrass us. And no one wants to kill you, certainly not us, at least not for this hundred and fifty square yard plot of ruin.’
‘You-you have no respect for your ancestral home. You have no respect for your Abba. And now I have started to embarrass you? You weren’t embarrassed when I carried you to your school on my shoulders. You weren’t embarrassed when I used to take you to the annual fair. But now that responsibilities have entered your life, I embarrass you! You will only respect me when I am six feet under the ground. Then you will pray to Allah seeking his forgiveness. Then you will realise my worth. Only then—’
‘Acha! Okay! I will call the electrician. You can sleep in the other room for now.’
Abba Jaan mumbled something under his breath and grabbed his Khes, his Khadi throw and started walking to the other room. His elder grandson Abdul was buried in the newspaper on one-half of the bed and his daughter-in-law, Fatima was trying to put her seven month old boy to sleep. She was singing him an age old rhyme-
The fan spins over his head
My baby sleeps on the bed
Sleepy-sleepy he gets hungry
Eat some peanuts, O baby!
The boy was asleep in seconds. She saw her father-in-law and signalled Abdul to vacate the other half of the bed. She covered her hair which was black with a hint of orange from the henna she applied every month. Abba Jaan threw himself under the cool breeze of the fan over the soft mattress. His frown turned into a smile and all his frustration evaporated away with the sweat, leaving him cool and calm. He dreamt of heaven, of mesmerising angels offering him soul-quenching rose water, of immaculate gardens with intricate fountains, of him sitting under a tree with a huge trunk and cool shade, of everything beautiful…
‘Grrr’
He suddenly woke up by the sound of Abdul bouncing his plastic ball off the wall.
He rubbed his eyes and when they opened, they were transfixed on the fan.
‘Firoooooz! Quickly!’ he shouted.
Firoz came running to see what was wrong. Fatima was standing behind him holding the baby.
‘What happened Abba Jaan? What happened?’
Abba Jaan had got up from the bed and was gazing alternately at Firoz and Fatima.
‘This—This fan! See. See the motor; how it is spinning wildly. Do you want to give me a heart attack?’
Firoz frowned. This madness had to end.
It was forty minutes past four and he had to open his grocery shop at five p.m. He took the keys to his shop and told Abba that on his way to the shop, he would ask the electrician to check both the fans.
The electrician, Rajesh, was a childhood friend of his. He was clean shaven and was wearing a white and orange striped shirt with bell bottomed brown pants. At the very sight of Firoz, he jumped.
‘Please tell me it is not about your ceiling fans again. Fourth time in one fortnight! No! Please!’
‘Raju Bhai, what can I do? I don’t know how this notion has lodged itself in Abba Jaan’s head. And I can’t figure out a way out of this. Please just go and show your face to Abba and quote some jargon. It will keep him satisfied for a week or so. Do this for your brother. Please?’
Raju knew he couldn’t say no to Firoz for long.
‘Okay. I’ll go but first take me to your shop and let’s have some chai and those Marie biscuits that we had the last time.’
At his small shop on the street, Rajesh and Firoz sat down on small wooden stools. Raju called the small boy from the nearby tea stall to make tea for two. After two minutes, the boy came back running with two small glasses brimming with tea. Firoz wiped the tea on the side of the glass with the back of his hand and after a slurp of tea, he spoke.
‘Raju Bhai, I’m under so much stress due to Abba. Wherever he goes, he starts pointing at ceiling fans saying absurd things. And I get embarrassed everywhere due to his antics. Even when my in-laws came he started shouting about that fan. Imagine how I felt— ’
‘Why don’t you buy a cooler? They are so popular these days. That will end the whole saga’, Rajesh suggested.
An old lady came to buy some lentils and rice. When Firoz asked for money, she asked him to write it into her account. When she went away, he spoke again.
‘See? Right there! Most of my customers pay me at the end of the month or sometimes never. I have not much to save and most of it goes for the kids. Then I give some money to Abba every month. Even if I get a cooler, then there is that extra electricity bill to deal with. And there is no power supply for most of the day anyway. Moreover, we don’t even have sufficient water supply to take a proper bath. How can I spare buckets of water for the cooler? Without water, it would be as good as a carpenter without a hammer.’
‘I think that maybe with the arrival of your second child, he feels neglected. Maybe he just desires attention from you. Throw him a daawat, a feast. A nice dinner of Rogan Josh and Mutton Biryani and he’d be lost in that taste for months. At least he would stop shouting at you.’
Firoz’s mind seconded his friend’s advice and he regarded that he was indeed neglecting his father lately. Maybe all Abba needed was some care and attention.
He closed the shop at ten o’clock and headed home.
On his way back home, the pace of his steps slowed down as his mind drifted to the earlier conversation with Rajesh.
‘Why am I earning for if not for my family and Abba? I can buy a cooler. So, what if the bill comes out to be a few extra rupees? I could manage that. I’ll get back all the money people owe me. What if the water supply is only in the early mornings? I’ll fill two buckets of water myself the very first thing in the morning to ensure that water is available for the cooler. And aren’t the elections coming up? Oh yes, they are. We’ll have twenty four hours of electricity this summer at least. I’ll think about the future in the future. We’ll drag Abba’s cot into my room and all of us could enjoy the cool air on our faces.’
The next day, he opened his cash drawer. In one-half, there were a lot of five rupee notes, some tens and twenty ones and around a dozen fifty rupee notes along with a lot of coins on the side. In the other half, there was just a latch. He pulled it to reveal another compartment containing a few crumbled up currency notes of hundred rupees. He took all of them out and went happily to the market. There he bought a cooler along with a stand. The owner of the shop told him that the cooler will be sent in an hour mounted on a rickshaw. Firoz decided to rush home and give Abba Jaan the good news.
As he walked down the road towards his home, he thought of how euphoric Abba Jaan would be on seeing the cooler. The kids will have a comfortable home too. And Fatima would be happy too. Though she never spoke of her hardships, he knew how much she suffered in the summer heat. Perhaps she would make jaggery rice for the occasion. Maybe she would find a strand or two of saffron to add. His mouth watered at the thought.
When he reached home, he didn’t find the usual fragrance of the lunch. As he entered the house, he saw Doctor Salim at the door. He approached Firoz and hugged him. His eyes were red. So were his hands but Firoz was too scared to notice that.
‘I am sorry. I couldn’t do anything. When I came…When I came…he-he was, he was already-he was—’
Before he could complete the sentence, he burst into tears. Firoz’s heart started to pound out of his chest. His head started to spin. For a moment, he forgot to breathe. He silently prayed to Allah as he entered the lobby. And when he did, he was dumbstruck. Fatima was sobbing on the floor of the lobby with her hair scattered and uncovered. Both the rooms were bolted from outside. As he walked towards his wife, she looked up into his eyes. He opened the door of Abba Jaan’s room and saw the gruesome scene. Abba Jaan’s face had a long gash that ran across his left eye oozing out pools of red. His shocked eyes were wide open and his mouth revealed his yellow-brown, blood smeared teeth that stood like moss-covered headstones in an unplanned, abandoned cemetery on a mound. His ribcage was crushed and his chest was sunk in and filled with blood like a dried up lake after the first rain of the season. The killer ensanguined fan lay on the floor, grinning shamelessly, bathed in its first and only kill. The blades were a little twisted at different angles in different directions. The central part had formed circular red stains on the white khes and like a mad serial killer was now stamping its name on the floor. Firoz stepped inside and rushed to Abba Jaan. Breathing heavy, he pulled the khes over Abba Jaan’s head, ran outside the room and bolted the door again. He stood with his back towards the door looking at Fatima and then at Doctor Salim. He noticed blood stains on his shirt from hugging Doctor Salim. He looked again at Fatima taking continuous deep breaths. Tears rushed down his eyes as he slowly sunk to the floor.
‘Ya Allah!’ he breathed.
About the Author:
Aayush Verma is a Civil Engineering graduate. He is the founder and former editor-in-chief of a college magazine, Eunoia. In his spare time, he writes poetry on Instagram (@aayushwrites). He lives in India.