Pure (Short Story)

 

Pure

By

Tipu Salman Makhdoom

(Translated from Punjabi)

 

The glittering cutting edge of the steel blade, emerging from the yellow cheerful grip, was razor-sharp. A feather-light brush was enough to send the apple slice tumbling. Amidst the relentless rhythm of the blade, a dark chuckle escaped him as he instinctively shielded his fingers—though what purpose did they serve now? With the precision born of habit, he nudged the glistening apple slices aside, his hands, unlined yet bearing the silver frost of age on the wrists, gathering the discarded cores into a small mound. Two full kilograms of small, crimson mountain apples lay dismembered, their stems cast off. He then drew a bowl closer, meticulously extracting the liver-hued, fish-shaped seeds from the cores, accumulating them until the bowl held just under half its capacity. He shook it, a quiet assessment in his eyes. Not half, no, but decidedly more than a quarter. A faint smile touched his lips, "What was all this fuss about these paltry seeds?" he mused. They were merely a macabre flourish, a splash of color for what was to come. The true architects of his final peace awaited: the two strips of sleeping pills.

His retirement, a quiet shadow, had not yet stretched to its second full year.

 

He wasn't entirely certain, but the faint echo of an Alan Turing film seemed to whisper the grim statistic: that half a bowl of apple seeds held a lethal promise of cyanide. These, he had gathered not with conviction, but on a whimsical, almost casual impulse. And if she were to be by his side in this final descent, he imagined her delight, her fascination with embracing an end so starkly mirrored to that of the brilliant, tormented computer scientist.

 

A fleeting urge nudged him to Google, to ascertain if Turing's end had truly been so, or merely a cinematic invention. But the impulse swiftly faded. "What matter now?" he murmured to the empty air. Who, in the barren landscape he left behind, would ever trouble themselves to ponder the curious tableau of apple-less seeds clustered beside his corpse?

 

Instead of simply swallowing the seeds whole with water, or even reducing them to a bitter powder, he envisioned a different ritual: grinding them fine, then stirring the deadly dust into wine. He would drink from a cup, just as Socrates had faced his hemlock. Turing's poison, indeed, but in the eloquent style of Socrates. If she were still alive, he knew she would have meticulously adorned his lips with an eager, breathless cascade of kisses. He smiled, a faint, melancholic gesture, at the imagined leaps and ecstatic cries that would have greeted his macabre conceit.

 

He poured a half-bowl of water into the grinder, then, with a tilt, added the seeds. The lid clicked shut, and at the press of a button, they began their frantic dance within a turbulent, watery vortex. He turned for the wine, then paused. No need for such prolonged pulverization; he mused, lest the poison itself somehow diminish. After barely ten seconds, he silenced the machine. Retrieving the wine from the cupboard, he hesitated, caught between pouring the seed-laced slurry or the wine first into the waiting cup. The decision eluded him, for suddenly, the girl's tear-streaked face, her gasping sobs, all dissolved into a blurry, indistinct ache. With a decisive lift of the grinder's lid, he poured the wine directly into its whirring chamber.

 

With two strips of pills now a quiet weight within him, he began to pace the house, a restless circuit. He moved with a careful, almost superstitious dread, fearful that an immediate follow-up with the wine might provoke a sudden rebellion of his stomach, thus unraveling his meticulous, desperate plan. After a quarter-hour of this aimless wandering, a deep, insistent heaviness began to press behind his eyes. He returned to the table, poured the doctored wine into a cup, settled onto the bed's edge, and commenced the slow, deliberate ritual of sips.

 

With the wine finished, he made sure the doctor's email lay nestled within the correct pages of the Bible. Then he lay back, his thoughts drifting, untethered, to the girl. Her smile, her laughter, her tears, and the ghosts of her unfulfilled dreams drifted through his mind. He closed his eyes, the Bible a quiet weight on his chest.

And slowly, the world behind his eyelids began to dim, until all seeing ceased.

 

He'd first laid eyes on her on her very first birthday, an angel of untainted innocence. She had cried herself into utter exhaustion, her tiny frame trembling. Being the first time she'd encountered this particular uncle, her wails would erupt the moment he drew near. But he, it turned out, possessed a stubbornness that outmatched even a child's. He would lift her repeatedly, enduring her shrieks, and relentlessly kiss the flailing, screaming bundle.

At that time, twelve years had already slipped by since his own marriage, and the stark reality had settled: he would never have a child of his own. Akbar, her father, knew this too, which was why he never intervened, never stopped him from provoking his daughter's tears. He simply remarked that Western medicine had made great strides, promising to send tickets for both husband and wife to travel, enjoy a trip, and undergo a thorough check-up. The calls continued, the invitations persisted, spanning a full decade. Finally, Akbar ceased his efforts. His wife had passed; how could he possibly go for a check-up now?

 

In a desperate flight from his loneliness, he had plunged himself so deeply into work that when the company finally retired him, sending him home, his heart seized in the second week. After that second, brutal attack, the doctor's words were stark and unflinching: his heart, he was told, simply would not survive a third.

 

The first year since his own heart's first rebellion, and barely two weeks since the second's assault, had yet to fully wane when Akbar returned. For good. His wife, too, had been claimed by the earth. Leaving both his sons adrift in foreign studies, he had brought his little girl back to her grandfather's house, a pilgrimage towards death.

His lifelong neighbor, old Akbar, now wept with the unrestrained anguish of a child. Through his tears, he confessed one day, "You were the lucky one, friend. There is no greater torture than watching your own child wither."

The girl, it turned out, had contracted AIDS from the unclean bite of dental tools.

 

The thought clung to his mind like a burr: he was spared, for his child was not dying in his hands. He wrestled with it, a cruel calculus—was this a blessing, or would it have been a profound mercy to have walked eighteen years with her, only to perish alongside her? When Akbar, shattered, would come weeping to him, he found himself caught between a fleeting surge of repulsion for the raw, open wound, and a dark, insidious envy.

Now, when she saw him, the girl no longer cried; she laughed. After a few more days, he noticed her laughter was for everyone, indiscriminate and bright. Yet, as the days blurred, he saw it: her eyes, those windows to her soul, did not mirror the mirth. For the very first time, a sharp, unbidden pity pricked at his own heart.

 

He began to speak with the girl, and in their shared words, they discovered a mutual fascination for philosophy and cinema. In a matter of days, a deep intimacy bloomed between them.

Though their combined time was tragically short, each day unfolded as if they possessed an eternity, boundless and ample. The girl, it seemed, had merely been awaiting an opening. Gradually, their conversations swelled, consuming hours that vanished like smoke. Within two months, they had unspooled the entire tapestries of their lives for one another. Movies, heroes, fashion, friendships, joys, sorrows, dreams—what facet of existence remained untouched by their eager exchange?

 

Within a single month, a quiet stability had settled into their strange kinship. The earlier eagerness, that frantic urge to confess "I must tell this too, lest I forget that," had now receded. Sometimes, they would even sit in silence for an hour, like newly buried corpses awaiting the angels of reckoning. Each felt the other must be contemplating their own imminent dissolution; and in that, both would be correct.

From the seventh week onward, their conversations subtly shifted, abandoning the dusty annals of history for the sharp edges of the present.

One day, the girl asked if he had ever read the Bible.

"No," he replied.

"I have," she said, her voice soft. "One of my friends was going to become a nun; she was always reading it. I've read it many times."

He, who had not even finished the Quran, remained silent.

"I think Priests and Jewish Rabbis haven't read the Bible at all," she ventured.

He nodded in quiet agreement.

"Have you heard the story of Prophet Lot and his daughters?" she then asked.

 

He shook his head, a silent negative.

"Okay, then tell me," she pressed on, "when at the dawn of human life, there was only one couple in the world, whom did their children marry?" He was about to formulate an answer when the girl simply rose and walked away.

On another day, she asked how he felt about living without a wife. He fell into a deep contemplation. For a fleeting moment, he considered painting a cinematic tableau, just as he had been dramatizing his past life. But then, a profound sadness enveloped him. Both stood at the precipice of death, both destined to die childless; what pretense remained?

"Without a wife," he murmured, "life is just lonely. Sad, empty."

"Then why didn't you marry again?"

"I just… didn't understand what happened. It just passed like that."

"It hasn't passed yet."

He wanted to interrupt her, to cry out, "What's left?" But he held his tongue, thinking of her. The girl continued.

"It's still here. Whether little or a lot, it's there and it has to be lived."

"Yes."

"However long life is, it will pass. That's its only job. We have to make it good and bad ourselves."

"Yes."

The memory of his wife deepened his sorrow.

"Tell me, why didn't you marry again?"

"Am I of an age to marry?"

"What age is there for marriage?"

The girl laughed mischievously, and a faint smile began to touch his own lips.

 

"Yes, there's no age," he conceded, "but the West is different; here, older people are forced onto a more ascetic, yogic path." His sadness, it seemed, had been swept away by her laughter.

"Then you should have found a girlfriend," she pressed, "secretly." The girl continued to laugh, a clear, unrestrained sound.

He simply smiled, falling silent. Along with his wife, the fleeting images of two old girlfriends surfaced in his mind. After meandering through various topics for a while longer, the girl departed.

She returned the following day, her words flowing freely as she spoke of her college friends, most of whom had boyfriends, while she had none. He listened, a silent anchor to her monologue. As she spoke, a quiet sorrow began to color her voice. From lighthearted descriptions of playful antics between boys and girls, her narrative drifted to their whispered confessions of love and yearning. Then, mid-sentence, she fell abruptly silent. The air in the room grew heavy, thick with unspoken emotion.

"I never let anyone near me my whole life," she finally murmured, "so I could give my all to my destined one."

"What is your age anyway?" he blurted out, the words escaping before he could recall them, realizing instantly his blunder.

"My age is what it is," she retorted, and then the tears came. He listened in silence as she continued, her voice breaking.

"I'm dying. You know it, and I know it. I got a sex-related illness without ever tasting sex. I, who was the queen of every boy's dream in college, am now untouchable for them."

 

She buried her face in her knees, her slender frame shaking with uncontrolled sobs. To witness such radiant youth consumed by this bitter, weeping end stirred a deep, unbidden grief within him, bringing forth his own tears. He wept for her, for the fading memory of his wife, and for the stark, desolate prospect of his own solitary departure. In that crushing moment, Akbar's words, once a comfort, now echoed with a cruel irony: he was better off, spared the agony of watching his child perish.

Through his own rising tears, he rose, drawing the girl into a tight embrace. "No, Akbar," he whispered into her hair, his voice thick with sorrow, "you were the fortunate one. You are here to carry your daughter's bier, and your sons await you. I will die alone. Who will bear my coffin? Who is left for me now?"

They poured out their hearts to one another in that confined space, their shared grief swelling until emotions became an overwhelming torrent. They clung to each other, sobbing loudly, lost in the echoing chamber of their mutual despair.

 

As a fragile lightness settled upon them, their racking sobs softened into hiccups. They remained entwined, he upon the sofa, and the girl below, her head nestled against his chest. In time, even the hiccups faded, and he became aware of their awkward embrace, a consequence of unchecked emotion. He sat with legs parted on the sofa, while she knelt on the floor between them. As the girl stirred, rubbing her face against his chest, her breasts pressed against his thighs.

A sudden, unwelcome tension stirred within him, and he realized with a flush of embarrassment that the soft friction of her body had awakened his own. What must she be thinking? This child, he reasoned, could not yet comprehend that a man’s flesh often acts beyond his will, springing to life at the mere brush of a woman's form. Especially if that man's wife had been seven years in the grave, and he sought no solace in the arms of strangers.

 

He tried gently to loosen her delicate arms, hoping to ease her back, but the girl only clung tighter. After a hesitant pause, he tried with more force, and she, murmuring, "Just let me stay in your lap for a while," slid down. Her head came to rest on his thigh, dangerously close to the hard, undeniable lump beneath his trousers, her cheek pressed against it. Why deny a dying girl this solace now? he thought, and silently began to stroke her hair. Yet, barely two minutes passed before he couldn't bear it. "Come, sit on the sofa, child," he urged, taking her arms again. She slid, settling beside him on the cushion, her head finding rest once more.

"Is sex a dirty thing?" she suddenly asked.

"No, kid, who told you that?"

Instead of answering, the girl lifted her head with a snake-like grace, her eyes boring into him. He felt a sudden surge of nervousness. Had she noticed? Was she angered by his body's unwelcome betrayal? He had no explanation to offer. This tense silence stretched for a full forty-two seconds, then, without a word, the girl rose and left.

Sleep eluded him that entire night. His thoughts churned, a relentless cycle of the girl and his own defiant flesh.

 

The following morning, the girl arrived early, and the sight of her bright face brought a sigh of profound relief to him. She entered, her smile wide and unburdened. Her first words were an eager inquiry: what would he like to drink? Still nursing a quiet fear, he softly requested tea. The girl happily began preparing it. He remained hesitant, a knot of apprehension in his stomach, until she finally handed him the steaming cup. As she did, she kissed him twice on the cheek—one near his earlobe, the other tantalizingly close to his lips. Instantly, his heart surged, and the familiar engine of his penis revved to life.

The girl settled opposite him, sipping her tea. Against his will, his gaze drifted to her breasts; they were, undeniably, beautiful.

"Uncle, have you never read the Bible at all?" she asked.

"No," he replied.

She then steered the conversation back to his wife, a tender, unspoken bridge between their lives. Later, she left to have lunch with her father, returning only at night. A Bible lay in her hand. Quietly, she placed it on the bed before him and departed. He picked it up, noting a page placed within. It was in Genesis, chapter 19, where verses 31-38 were strikingly highlighted. He opened the page and discovered it contained an email, a month old, from the girl's American doctor. The message was stark: the girl's heart was profoundly weak, incapable of tolerating extensive medication. Should her condition worsen, treatment could be administered, but at significant risk. In the tears that welled in his eyes, the funerals of the girl and his wife merged into a single, sorrowful blur.

 

The girl's body lay prepared for its final journey when the news reached her father: he had committed suicide. He rushed into his room, and the first sight that seared into his vision was the froth that crowned the man's lips. A book rested upon his chest, clutched still in the dead man's rigid grip. Akbar, his heart hammering a brutal rhythm against his ribs, gently, violently almost, pried the volume from the corpse's grasp. It was the Bible. He recognized it; it belonged to his daughter. Inside, an email lay tucked—an email he had already seen. His eyes fell upon the highlighted verses:

 

31 One day the older daughter said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man around here to give us children—as is the custom all over the earth.

32 Let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father.”

33 That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and slept with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.

34 The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Last night I slept with my father. Let’s get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father.”

35 So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him. Again he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.

36 So both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father.

37 The older daughter had a son, and she named him Moab; he is the father of the Moabites of today.

38 The younger daughter also had a son, and she named him Ben-Ammi; he is the father of the Ammonites of today.

 

Emerging into the sun-drenched courtyard, Akbar informed the Mullah to wait, insisting both funerals must be performed as one. The Mullah hesitated, his gaze snagging on the Bible clutched in Akbar's hand.

"The funerals of 'Na-Meh-Ram'—strangers who could validly marry—should not be performed together," the Mullah stated, a tremor of disapproval in his voice.

Akbar's glare was a sudden, fierce blade, startling the Mullah into submission, who, beneath his pious facade, was more keenly attuned to the impending ledger of his fee for the sacred rites.

. "Alright, sir," the cleric mumbled, his head dropping. Akbar strode away, and the Mullah, exhaling a deep, burdened sigh, muttered to the man beside him, "Those who venture abroad return as atheists. They parade about clutching Bibles, utterly ignorant that every divine command holds profound wisdom."

"That's right," the other man agreed, also lowering his gaze in tacit disapproval.