Secret Passages

It started as a mischief but turned Zamir into a foot fetishist. In those days Zamir and two of his friends used to gather at Sharif’s house everyday after college, since it was the best time and place to ogle college girls and flirt with them. It happened so one day when Sharif was showing his friends a pirate telescope, which his father had brought from Dubai. The telescope was in Zamir’s hands when a flock of honeys in their white uniforms passed by. It was probably by instinct and not by design that of all the places he pointed telescope on their nubile marching feet. The stir in the flock of girls, who would pass through those streets everyday - straight-faced, chin-up, and ignoring those naughty admirers -, was unexpected and spectacular. They were startled out of their wits like a devout Hindu pundit who suddenly finds himself on a narrow street with a black feline sitting at one end and a shudra coming from the other. They tried to hide behind each other; they straddled; they stumbled; but there was nowhere else to go; and that pleased the boys immensely.

Had girls not reacted that way the boys wouldn’t have repeated that adolescent prank. But why blame just the girls; man’s mental growth stops at adolescence too. For the next few days boys kept on playing this prank until they got bored and by then all the girls also knew what to expect in that street. But for Zamir, it was different; the ecstatic experience had introduced him into a different realm.

The word ’fetishist’, however, has such negative and perverse connotations that it begs a deeper understanding of Zamir’s mindset to do justice with him. Zamir, by nature, was an idealist – a romanticist – who craved and idolized beauty in the universe that enveloped him. Romanticists like him are also genetically predisposed into categorizing the objects of their attention into either of two categories: acceptable and unacceptable. Some of the irresolute among them proclaim the existence of a third category as well, namely ’neutral’ but that is just to dodge their own conscience. Instinctively, romanticists are driven to cause change in what is not harmonious with their nature. They crave such challenges. But whether you blame it on Zamir’s upbringing, his circumstances, or the social construct around him, the fact was that he never learned how to cause a change because it was just not in him to take a stand, or express dissent, or rebel. His self-doubts, his insecurities, and his lack of convictions were always standing in the way of his nature like a heartless gardener who does not allow little children to pluck flowers or chase butterflies. Torn between the worlds of self-doubt and that of his nature he learnt to look for the secret passages instead – the short cuts that could lead him through the paths of least resistance to gratify the cravings of his nature; window-shopping is always safer than shoplifting and cheaper than buying.

What really is beauty after all? Beauty is a melodious rhythm of nature that resonates the inner self of the beholder. It’s the manna for a romanticist, which nurtures his soul. So when Zamir beheld the exquisiteness and delicacy in the nadir of anatomy of those Venuses, his inner self strummed to the rhythm. He couldn’t help but reminisce his first lesson in piano - Fur Elise . He fancied that Beethoven would have created that masterpiece in his mind while tickling the delicate toes of a damsel instead of stroking the piano keys with his limbered fingers. Even though Zamir had learnt how to play piano and violin at the local American Center quite masterfully, yet that was as far as his mind could take him. His accidental anointment with beauty and his vision could not inspire enough to kindle the proverbial light bulb above his head so that he could create a masterpiece that was better than Fur Elise. His inner conflict made him follow the secret passage instead and turned him into a foot fetishist.

One day, when Zamir was sitting at Sharif’s doorsteps, he noticed an unusual pair of feet thru the telescope. Unlike college girls, those milky feet were donning a pair of yellow flip-flops, with each having a fairly large sunflower at the yoke. The toes were painted bright red and flip-flops were accentuating their brightness even further. Zamir removed the telescope from his eyes to examine the owner of those snow-white feet. He was not as much disappointed to find out a woman clad in a shuttlecock burqa as he was surprised to see her unlocking one of the doors in the street and rushing towards the apartment upstairs.

"Hey did you see that?" Zamir asked his friends, who were busy horsing around in the foyer.

"See what?"

"A woman just went into Rehman’s apartment"

"So what?"

"Hello!!! Rehman lives alone in his apartment" Zamir sneered at his friends for their folly.

"So? She could be his relative; mother, may be"

"I don’t think so. No one’s mother has feet like hers, and she was wearing a shuttlecock"

The conversation was abruptly interrupted as they saw Rehman turning around the street corner. Walking in long strides he quickly shut the door behind him. They could hear the sound of his hasty steps.

But there was still more to come. Soon after Rehman closed the door, another character appeared around the corner. He was a tall, dark, stocky fellow in white shalwar kameez with Mianwali and trouble written all over his face. He approached the closed door, looked at it undecidedly and then sat right there on the doorstep.

Boys were quick to smell trouble in the air and they wanted to savor every moment of what was about to happen when that door would reopen. The college girls were long gone and now other than an occasional pedestrian the street was deserted. The boys started discussing various scenarios about the relationship of three characters. The unanimous guess was that the dark cuss sitting outside was a jealous boyfriend because if he were the husband or a blood relative he would have knocked the door down by now.

After half an hour of excruciating wait the stocky man rose up and slinked to the side of the door before it flung open; he might have heard the footsteps approaching. Just as the shuttlecock stepped her creamy sunflower foot outside, suddenly, the stocky fella pounced upon the woman and grabbed her by the wrist.

The woman, jolted by this sudden intrusion, screamed in shock. Soon she sensed the gravity of the situation and a struggle ensued between the two. She started bawling and dragging the man all around the street in circles; she even rolled over on the street but man was determined not to let go. A couple of pedestrians stopped by but either they were too dumbfounded to interfere or they were little hesitant to mess with a 6’2’’ guy with an intimidating persona. A few minutes later parishioners from a nearby mosque started coming out at the end of prayers and gathered around the commotion. The boys looked at each other and raced towards the rapidly enlarging crowd to get the ’front seats’.

The woman who found herself surrounded by so many people, abated her physical struggle and decided to try feminine oratory skills of pleading instead. People were still trying to figure out what had happened.

"What happened here, bhai sahib?" a person asked the stocky fella.

"Ask her, what was she doing upstairs," the man replied while gritting his teeth and pointing towards the door that was still lasciviously ajar.

One short sentence said it all. The facial expressions of people changed abruptly – the surprised and inquisitive gestures were replaced with salacious anticipation of juicy details. More than that people were dying to see what was inside that shuttlecock. Their prayers were answered soon when suddenly she lifted the front of her burqa up. Many in the crowd gasped in awe. The femme fatale was hardly 19 or 20. With her red voluptuous lips, and her black eyebrows bowing over her bright green eyes she had the kind of angelic innocence on her snow-white visage that gives juvenile boys hot flashes and besets them to behave like grown-up men. The hour-glass figure below her chiseled neck, on the other hand, was of the kind that makes grown-up men act juvenile and it jabs the middle-aged ones to get their Salajeet prescriptions refilled. On top of all that, she was unmindful that the sharp red lipstick that matched her toenails, had spread all around her lips and mingled with the color in her cheeks that reddened with her struggle. Zamir’s heart suddenly filled with newfound respect for that dawg, Rehman. Probably every other testicle in the crowd wanted to bow before him in humility as well.

The girl had pleaded herself hoarse and now her pleadings were interspersed with tearless sobs. "Allah di qasmay main uttay dabbay lain gayee saaN (For God’s sakes I went upstairs just to get cardboard boxes)" girl pleaded her case with the crowd. Even though her excuse sounded plausible, because Rehman did own a grocery store around the street corner and he used to handle a lot of cardboard boxes everyday, but no one in the crowd believed her. Some people even uttered "yeah right".

With her persona she looked totally alien in her burqa as well as in that crowd. The only thing that was not alien was her accent; anyone could tell that she was from a nearby village. A few decades ago, when government started building the great dam in the area, almost all of the male population immigrated to England for work. Some of them brought back obese and ugly white Englishwomen with typical crooked, manky and yellowing British teeth, as trophy wives. Some of these white women, who were probably social rejects in their own country, were so well absorbed in the society here that one could see some of them middle-aged ones plastering cow-cakes on the walls of their rural houses. Cross-breading sometimes works wonders and one such wonder was standing right there in the crowd, trying to free her wrist.

A middle-aged, circumferentially challenged bearded man, who happened to be the assistant Imam sahib of the mosque appealed to the man in a propitiated tone "Beta! Obviously she’s committed a grave mistake. Laikin bachchi hay jaanay dou (Let the poor thing go)"

In a crowd where every pair of eyes was stuck to her breasts, upon finding a backer who seemingly was not interested in or was merely incapable of frottage she found hidden strength from somewhere and freed her wrist from the clutches of her heartless apprehender. She shot towards assistant Imam sahib and embraced him, " Chacha Ji " she beseeched hoarsely "save me – Allah de wastay help me; trust me, I didn’t do anything wrong". Imam sahib squeezed her tightly against his chest and while his stubby fingers felt her reedy but velvety midriff, he pleaded once again. But after reading the ’unconvinced’ sign on stocky fella’s face, the girl unglued herself from Imam sahib and looked for another savior who could be more persuasive than Imam Sahib.

Zamir hustled his way to get closer to the girl wishing that it were his chest where she rested her head rather than that of the fatso Imam Sahib. She vaulted towards Zamir and held her eager savior’s arm and bawled, "Help me! MaiN beqasur haaN (I’m innocent) ". Zamir could feel her nails penetrating deep into his arm. Her grip was so tight that it started to hurt. The girl was literally clutching at the straws, Zamir thought. But suddenly, as his eyes locked with her emerald green eyes for a split second, that proverbial telepathic moment struck between them when two minds can communicate with each other without saying a word. Two messages were conveyed to Zamir in that brief moment. The first message said, "Don’t you even think for a moment that I am weak and not in control"; and Zamir could see that there was absolutely no fear in her eyes. Instead, her eyes were reflecting the kind of confidence that shines in the eyes of that besieged queen, who resolutely encourages her soldiers to keep fighting on, and ensures them of victory. However, in fact, her valor is not due to her convictions or her trust in her soldiers but it is because of the reason that she knows a secret passage out of the besieged castle. The second message that Zamir read was that the girl had rejected him as a worthy savior as well, as she assayed him with her pretty but unfaithful green eyes.

The connection then snapped and she let his arm go in a manner as if she had touched a wilted vegetable. The stocky fella advanced aggressively towards her. The girl stepped back while bawling and pleading and fell into the arms of dwarfish but sprightly Malik Sahib, the self appointed social worker of the neighborhood. Probably it was the smell of inexpensive shampoo emanating from her hair that made the kind-hearted bigamist’s heart tick with ambition like a cheap clock. His nose was almost buried in her thick curly hair anyway. With his arm around girl’s delicate neck, he boldly came right in between the girl and her tormentor and spoke condescendingly "Beta, misunderstandings do happen between husband and wife sometimes. Forgive her. She will not do it again"

But Malik Sahib’s comments irked the hell out of the guy because it seemed that another word from Malik Sahib and he would punch him in the nose. " I am not her husband, or brother or a yaar or a pimp, I am a police inspector trying to do my job, ok?" the man snarled while gritting his teeth.

The crowd was taken aback. Malik Sahib unlocked his chokehold on the girl’s neck and she immediately took cover behind him. There was a pin drop silence in the crowd. In those days, a police inspector was considered the demigod in the community, who could destroy people’s lives with the snap of fingers. Zia-ul-Haque’s Islamic Martial Law was being enforced mercilessly. The bribe-taking, racketeering, corrupt-up to-the neck police became his morality police and prime tool of oppression. The child molesters, fornicators, boozers, schoolteachers, students, and political dissidents were being flogged with the same stick publicly in the city centers. The whole country was horrified and shocked by the way it was being terrorized into submission to the strongman’s whims. Zamir genuinely felt sorry for the girl although he couldn’t help suppress the image of that girl’s white fanny being flogged in the female ward of central jail. He wished that he could be there. With that wanton thought he felt a burning sensation in his arm where the girl had grabbed hold of him earlier.

Suddenly, a jolt and a loud obscenity brought him back from his fantasy world. The girl had taken advantage of those precious few moments, when crowd was struck dumbfounded and crawled her way out on all fours. The policeman was the first to notice her absence. It was his obscenity that woke Zamir up, along with others in the crowd. He saw the girl racing towards the end of the street.

The policeman was yelling obscenities and threats on top of his lungs. A posse of young street urchins was the first to start following her. The policeman followed them while urging oncoming pedestrians to stop the girl but pedestrians were so dumbfounded that instead of stopping her, they stuck themselves to the walls to give way to the Pied Piper and her mice.

The herd mentality prevailed and Zamir started running along with the crowd as well. Up ahead, the sunflower girl was running as if her life depended upon it. Her sunflower flip-flops had become airborne like flying debris from a flaming drag car and her shuttlecock was flowing behind her like Catwoman’s cape. One of the kids who was running a few steps behind her clutched at the edge of her burqa, causing it to fall off her head along with her doputta. She kept on running. It was an unbelievable sight to see a lusciously curvaceous green-eyed witch being chased by a lynching mob. She had turned around couple of street corners when she suddenly entered a street that was blocked by a large colorful tent where a marriage ceremony was in progress. Outside the tent several cooks were busy preparing food in huge cauldrons. As they saw the commotion at the end of the street and a girl running barefooted they froze with spatulas and ladles in their hands. The girl hesitated for a second but instantly found a small passage on one side of the tent and entered into it. The people inside the tent were already curious about the noises and they froze with bewilderment when they saw a girl without any chador or doputta hustling her way through the gathering. The Qazi Sahib on the altar forgot to recite the wedding rites and the guys who had been distributing chohaara (dried dates) had their hands left hanging in the air along with those who were receiving them. As the crowd approached the entrance, the girl had already made it to the opposite end of the tent. The life suddenly returned to the people at the wedding as they saw a crowd of kids and adults forcing their way into the wedding area. The people started yelling ’kya hoa’, kya hoa’ and the whole scene turned into one from a cheesy Desi movie. Meanwhile, Zamir did not waste time and cut his way thru the crowd to the other end. As he exited the tent he saw the girl turning around the street corner and by the time he reached there she had already disappeared.

The crowd scrammed into the side streets and few minutes later Zamir found himself wandering alone. He wasn’t sure that his friend had even joined the posse but one thing he was sure of was that the girl – barefooted and without chador - could not go far, unnoticed. He felt a burning sensation on his arm again and rolled his cuff up. The impression from her fingers had tinged his skin red.

He tried not to think about her but the thought of her being with Rehman kept on coming back like an affectionate but icky relative who spends all his vacations with you. In fact Zamir was trying to deny his own ravenous desires that were gobbling up his senses and his denial was only vivifying his already tumescent arousal even more. As much he tried to suppress his wanton thoughts they kept on creeping into his consciousness like threads of smoke that ooze out of the crevices of closed doors and windows of a building on fire. Once you open a single door of that building, the oxygen so enrages the stifled flames that they come stabbing at you like an angry cobra that swoops down on its prey. Zamir was in denial because he was scared of opening that door and he had no idea how to put those flames out either. The taut muscles in his neck agonized with an overwhelmingly prurient stress. He desperately wanted to sit down somewhere to compose himself.

Then he saw a pair of oncoming pedestrians who looked like a mother and daughter from their appearance. The older one was in a dress that her daughter should have been wearing instead, and with her dieting carved figure she seemed to be in the prime of her cosmetic youth. But in fact she was desperately trying to hold on to the robe of her fleeting youth like a caddishly assiduous beggar who doesn’t let go of the robe of that kind-hearted man who has already handed out everything in his pockets. As she gave Zamir an incessantly penetrating once over, he shuddered with a sort of libidinous embarrassment and lowered his gaze. Big mistake, because such a gesture poses an intense challenge to the daughters of Eve and they set out on conquering that who denies them so. Zamir knew about such "sexy aunties" very well, and he used to call them "crotch watchers". He tried very hard not to look up but the intense feeling of two laser beams penetrating a certain part of his anatomy was so strong that he couldn’t resist.

The younger one, though clad in a dress that her mother should have been wearing instead, was in the prime of her natural youth. Zamir lowered his gaze instinctively that time and noticed a pair of supple and well-kept feet. It seemed that she treated her delectable biscotti feet way better than her sun-soaked bronze face. The proud arches of her feet were of the kind that adds an extra bounce to a women’s gait so that she appears to be dancing to an inaudible rhythm when she walks. Zamir’s inner self resonated with that rhythm. Those arches reminded him of the body of his violin, and the way he would hold it on his shoulder while his cheek gently caressed it. Zamir tried to lift his eyelids that seemed to be burdened with the weight of the world and looked at the girl. She was casting a fleeting glance at his crotch.

He almost hyperventilated; his knees wobbled and his hands shook with an insuppressible twitch. Heedlessly he stopped by at a kiosk and bought a pack of smokes. He lit one up even though he had never smoked before. He wasn’t becoming a smoker on that day either, but only trying to evade his own self behind the smoke screen of the cigarette. The kiosk walls from inside were plastered with posters of scantly clad actresses. The lascivious sneers of those pouty babes in push-up bras made his cigarette quiver between his fingers. Zamir averted his eyes and saw a sticker on a sidewall that read " Namaz paRh, iss say pehle keh teri namaz paRhi jaye (Offer your prayers before your (funeral) prayers are offered)". Upon reading that he became deeply unsettled and waffling like a gutless wannabe thespian who is booed out of stage on his first performance. He hung his head low and started walking; though he wanted to run instead. He impulsively caressed his arm again. Like a rainforest fly that lays its eggs on the skin of its hosts, her grip had spawned Eros on his skin; and like the midgets who crawl their way into the skin when fly’s eggs are hatched, the spawned Eros had also crawled under his skin. Now, like a mercilessdjinn, it possessed Zamir.

In a sense Eros - the sum total of all our impulses - possesses us all. It keeps us into its servitude throughout our lives and rewards us with bliss as we obey its commands but one day a voice from inside whispers to us that there exists a whole wide world beyond our hamster-in a-wheel like existence. We start feeling that we have had enough of Eros’ largesse and we get a sudden urge to disobey it and run away from it. Man is like that pet bird who finds out one day that its owner has forgotten to close the cage-door. Just like it takes a little while for bird to believe that it is free, when man breaks away from his vassalage he remains unsure of his freedom and thinks that his Eros might be playing a trick on him. But he prefers the ambivalence and uncertainty of freedom to the certainty and safety of servitude anyway. Thirsty and unsure of his destiny, he starts chasing the mirages of oases in the uncharitable desert of life. Sometimes he perishes without any redemption and sometimes he accidentally stumbles upon the oasis of Agape and finds his salvation. Zamir was thirsty; his desires were arid; and his Eros was chasing him with a vengeance; chances were, that the sticker in the kiosk might have led him to Agape, hadn’t the thought of Lubna got in his way.

Lubna a.k.a. choohiya was Sharif’s next-door neighbor and everybody knew that she had a crush on Zamir. Whenever Zamir was at Sharif’s place she would hover around her gate, yelling at the kids playing in the street, and as she’d attracted Zamir’s attention, she’d kiss her toddler sibling feverishly. She was persistent even though Zamir had snubbed her at every single occasion. For Zamir, her chocolate complexion and her spaghetti like arms, like those of Popeye’s sweetheart Olive Oyl, were too much to bear. As if that was not enough, she had two protruding incisors that had earned her the name ’choohiya’ or ’the rodent girl’. Zamir loathed those teeth with a passion.

But it is impossible to block someone out of one’s mind despite an intense dislike. The thoughts about such people are like that cheap, ugly, and oversized sweater that your stingy relative brings you as a gift from Dubai and you dump it into the farthest corner of your closet along with a lot of contempt and grudge; but whenever you open that closet the contempt and grudge seep back into your mind straddling the pungent fumes of mothballs. Zamir had dumped Lubna into ’unacceptable’ shelf long time ago. But today when Zamir opened the closet in his mind, quite strangely, he did not feel any contempt in his heart. Instead he felt elated. He felt like someone who accidentally rediscovers that once hated sweater not only fits perfectly now but it is according to the latest fad as well. As Zamir started wondering why, it was not long when Nirvana dawned upon him like it once dawned upon Buddha. He realized that the cause for his perpetual melancholy lied in his own way of thinking. He was so used to judging and discriminating people on the basis of their appearance that he had refused to anticipate any good in them; which was absolutely cruel and wrong. He immediately made a solemn pledge to himself, upon this realization, that he would never judge people on the basis of their appearance again. He felt that he had freed himself from the shackles that had chained him to the ball of his conscience. The clouds over his mind cleared up and dawn rose. The Prince of Kapilavastu, who had been living the cognitive life of an ascetic yogi for the past half an hour, had found the cure for his ailment. He was, however, unaware that a tiny little vein close to his left ear was chanting ’Lub-na…Lub-na…Lub-na’ in an inaudible whisper, as it pulsated in synch with his heartbeat. As he turned around the corner he wondered if Lubna had curves.

Needless to say that Zamir’s sudden edification had anything to do with the reawakening, if any, of his so far dormant rectitude. In fact, Zamir belonged to the most pathetic generation in the history of sub-continent whose one-day-at-a-time philosophical outlook towards life was inferred from Hollywood movies and S.E. Hinton’s books. Their values were as hollow as the mattresses under which they hid their Hustler and Penthouse magazines. But the blame cannot be placed entirely on them, the whole Pakistani society was coming of age after the adolescence of centuries. The sudden explosion of visual mass media- the TV and the VCR – was restructuring the social make-up and its norms at a breakneck speed. The culture of "bazaar" was seeping into every household like filth that starts flowing backward in a chocked drain. The adjectives like Baaji and Aapa were becoming obsolete as media was introducing men to the intricacies, delicacies, and secrecies of female body like never before; and women were metamorphosing themselves into Madhuris, Poonam Dhilons, and "crotch watcher" as the premium was being put on that commodity. The young ones were relentlessly being brainwashed into believing that romance was the sole purpose of life. They were being shown the destination but not the way to get there. So what else they could do in the absence of role models other than becoming a generation who was always looking for short cuts and secret passages – whether it was to get thru the board exams or to live civilly in the society.

Zamir’s parents, on the other hand, belonged to a generation of coward, beat, and disheartened people who swallowed the ultimate defeat and humiliation. They were the people from whom half of their country was snatched away while they could not muster up courage to gouge the eyes of their perpetrators. Every man is born Ubermensch but cowardice is the Kryptonite that impregnates man with apathy and malaise. It is not in the nature of man to accept defeat and subjugation, but when he does he goes against his own nature. He becomes malevolent, mean, and malicious to those who surround him. He starts looking for secret passages to get ahead in the rat race of life. But then like a rat he gnaws at the very purpose of his existence and corrupts it. That generation as bureaucrats, engineers, doctors, teachers, nurses, shopkeepers, and as citizens created a sphere of malevolence, corruption and greed around them. Their corruption was the secret passage and their guilty conscience tricked them into believing that they were getting away from their impotence and incompetence thru it. They did not know that their secret passage was only leading them to a dead end because it made them lose the virtue of being role models for their young ones.

Zamir was walking in the streets, prepensely, with his heart filled with newfound Nirvana and yet he was capricious; his eyes were blindfolded with the juxtaposed images of Lubna and sunflower girl. The djinn of Eros was steering him like the Old Man of the Sea who mounted Sinbad’s shoulders and forced him into servitude. His sleepwalk could have lasted till eternity had he not been rudely awakened from his slumber by finding himself wandering in Kamran’s neighborhood.

As Kamran’s image appeared in his mind his heart filled with a blinding rage and his mouth with bitterest of the tastes. Such was his rage that had Zamir known consciously who was riding on his shoulders then, he would have grabbed Eros by his neck, slammed him down to the ground and stomped over his face.

There was history behind such bitterness. It so happened last year that Zamir was passing thru this neighborhood one day, and saw his Aapa along with a bunch of her classmates passing thru the street. Meanwhile he saw that Kamran approached them and tried to handover a piece of paper to Zamir’s sister. Aapa ignored him; but as she tried to careen her way around him, Kamran grabbed her by the wrist. Upon seeing that Zamir bolted just as a bullet leaves a barrel. When he approached them he heard Kamran snarling at her sister "You think you are so high; have you seen your face in the mirror, kaali kuttiya (bitch)". Without a second thought Zamir pounced upon him and a fierce but short fistfight ensued. Some pedestrians and the girls intervened and broke them apart. The next day Zamir went to Kamran’s neighborhood along with his friends, armed with hockey sticks and baseball clubs. They found Kamran and few of his friends already awaiting them. Kamran, ended up in the hospital with multiple fractures. Needless to say that in the end police and parents got involved. After much bickering and interference of community leaders, the parents struck a truce and reached an agreement that from that day on their respective offspring would never trespass each other’s neighborhood again. Police dropped the charges after taking heavy bribes from both sides.

Zamir quickly made an about turn and as he started walking hastily, he felt himself sinking to the nadir of insignificance in the universe around him as the buildings, the people, and the voices, started growing bigger, taller, and louder. His Aapa’s face was now juxtaposed over those of Lubna and sunflower girl. Just a moment ago he had plans for Lubna but now he was wondering whether he would ever be able to see himself in the mirror again. He felt that pedestrians, children in the street, and the pye-dogs were all smirking at him. He cursed himself. He cursed his parents and he cursed the world. He was angry at everything around him as he made an acquaintance with his self that day. He cursed his conscience as well, wondering where the hell was that son of a bitch when it was letting him concoct his wanton plans; it never, even once, raised its head then. Damn him. But as much he tried to hurl his anger outward or towards his alter ego, it ricocheted back at him until Zamir curled onto himself like that frightened caterpillar who is pocked by a curios child; but Zamir didn’t get poked, he got skewered.

He heaved a sigh of relief as he found himself entering his own street. The side door of the gate was slightly ajar, but he knew that nobody would be at home at that time. He gritted his teeth and cursed the street cricketers who would scale the wall to retrieve their ball and opened the side gate from inside everyday. His indignation was further compounded as he thought about the daily chore of heating up his own lunch, something that he hated with a passion. As he stepped inside he felt that he had heard the froufrou of someone’s clothes. He listened intently and soon discovered that the sound was coming from behind a pillar in the porch. He quietly grabbed a hockey stick lying against the wall and zapped to accost the person behind the pillar. He recognized the person first, the disbelief, however, struck him seconds later. She was none other but the sunflower girl. There was anguish on her face but her eyes - her eyes were shinning with the confidence of that queen, who happens to know a secret passage out of her besieged castle.