Masterpiece
By
Tipu Salman Makhdoom
(Translated from
Punjabi)
The
cigarette held between his two fingers looked like a cannon that had just
fired. Just as a cannon, after shooting its ball, leaves behind only the thick
smoke of curses, so too from the cigarette's tip, the smoke curled and danced,
swirling around like Rumi's white-robed dervishes. Before he started the day's
difficult work, the Lawyer Sahib was trying to relax after all the day's hard
work. It was as if all the noise from the courts and the tough legal fights had
flowed from his brain into his blood, then into his lungs. From there, with
each breath of cigarette smoke, he seemed to be pushing out all those bad
thoughts. His clerk had neatly stacked piles of case files on the table. Most
of them were torn, old, and well-used, but there were some new envelopes too.
This had been his routine for forty years; it was nothing unusual. All the
cases were ready; he just needed a quick look to refresh his memory. Lighting
another cigarette, he opened the files. He took puff after puff, turning the
pages, and moving the completed files aside one by one.