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The Charmed Life
by Achmed Abdullah
1917
On the day when death will knock at thy
door, what wilt thou offer him?
Oh, I will set before my guest the full vessel
of my life--I will never let him go with empty
hands.
--Rarindranath Tagore
Contents
* Chapter I: The Meeting
* Chapter II: The Call
* Chapter III: A Fools Heart
* Chapter IV: Depths
* Chapter V: Nerves
* Chapter VI: Out and In
* Chapter VII: The Miracle
Chapter I
The Meeting
Kiss happiness with lips
That seek beyond the lips.
--from the Love Song of Yar Ali
I met him in that careless, haphazard and thoroughly human way in which one meets people in Calcutta, in all parts of India for that matter. He and I laughed simultaneously at the same street scene. I don't remember if it was the sight of a portly, grey-bearded native dressed incongruously in a brown-and-grey striped camel's-hair dressing-gown, an extravagantly embroidered skull-cap, gorgeous open-work silk socks showing the bulging calves, and clothtopped patent leather shoes of an ultra-Viennese cut, or if it was perhaps the sight of Donald McIntyre, the Eurasian tobacco merchant in the Sealdah, abusing his Babu partner in a splendid linguistic mixture of his father's broad, twangy Glasgow Scots and of his mother's soft, gliding Behari.
At all events something struck me as funny. I laughed. So did the other man. And there you are.