The Jungle Full Movie In Urdu.epub
Harriet Wehrenberg
My wife was shaking me awake. She held my flailing arms and hugged me as I whispered over and over again, Nearly killed him twice. Nearly killed him twice. It was a dark and very long night. Not even the fajr azaan from the neighborhood mosque could soothe my fears.
Saleem, Wasif, Ali Malik, and I. Always the four of us banded together against the uncertainties of a city running on trepidation. In this season of yoking and yearning, of bereavement and besetment, we started doing the thing we did, for with fear and death and sulfur in the air who would stop us? Who would point and say, watch it, children, you must survive your age. Must get through one hell to enter another.
Three kilometers from our muhallah was a graveyard. Five acres of crumbling headstones, weeds, and overgrown grass. We sat in the shade of the banyan grove on the other side of which lay my grandfather, and that was where Wasif came up with the twist.
It was Grandfather who told me many stories. He was an unsmiling tall man, browned by years of rice-picking on the family farm in the country. Sitting with his arms around my very pale-faced grandmother, he spoke to me of terrible legends honed in the villages far from Lahore. Tales told by braziers not yet replaced with heaters; in the heart of pitch-black nights not slashed open by gleaming airplanes.
In retrospect it was stupid and dangerous, but really, how could we have known? How could we have understood? At the time, it was enthralling to give meaning to their slaughter; and the game was taken up ecstatically by the boys, especially Wasif.
Backwoods folk, country folk scoffed. You never could talk to them about Richter scales and earthquakes and monsoon winds. They held onto their dark worries, dismissing scientific explanations of red dust blowing from the mountains, howling across vast plains, carpeting the cities in its wake.
Saleem was silent. I was silent. He was pale, his full, almost feminine lips colorless as grave-slabs. He had been chewing them again, and the lower one was torn, a shimmer of pink visible in the shades of gray. He is scared, I thought. He is terrified. Why?
It was the year of the Hadood grounds near Lahore Railway Station. Scores of prisoners were brought there blindfolded, hands tied behind their back, tethered to bamboo posts, and lashed one by one. Public hangings occasionally followed.
The sky was a blood-soaked mantel as we trudged down the streets. A steadily building wind clutched newspapers, daubed them red, and hurled them away. Plastic shopping bags spun, the burning air visible through their flesh, and rolled away like heads. Sprinkles of vermilion dust blew in my face, crawled into my eyes, and scrabbled up my nose as the gale shook a bloody fist at us. The crimson storm was gathering strength.
The place many Lahorites had named Bad Bricks stood like a weed amidst the cheerful residences under Sherpao Bridge. The neighborhood was great, suburban to the core: two-story walled villas, gleaming Jeeps and vans, and manicured lawns. Short flagstone driveways coursed parallel to the grass. Happy residents parked their cars underneath hanging terraces. Snug, welcoming red brick houses.
The house was dead. Weary, stunted trees leaned against its rain-bleached boundary walls. Paint was gouged off its sides like skin off a maimed beast. Rusted black iron gates that must have gleamed once hung open like mouths frozen in agony, twisting and shuddering in the wind.
Today, however, I looked at the lawn. It was a jungle. Weeds grew frantically, high grass wavered in tentacles. Uprooted plants and undergrowth sprawled over cracked gardening pots. Patches of underbrush stirred; with wind or life, who could tell? What puzzled me was the absence of animal droppings. There should have been dried bird-shit and turds from stray cats. No garbage either. No rotting banana skins, orange rinds, or gnawed chicken bones. Just pebbles, broken ceramic, and shattered brick.
Not much left to tell. The house is baptized Bad Bricks. Neighbors whisper it is haunted. Something shuffles inside the place at twilight. Rumors of visitations, of faces at windows, of moonlight congealing like blood on the iron gates, and the LDA gives up. It leaves the house to smolder like a pile of litter.
Wasif waited. Above us thunder screamed. Lightning ripped the clouds open, spewing their slippery guts forth. Rain reddened by the storm began to hiss around us. Silver-brown lines of water snaked down the driveway, curling around our shadows. The storm began to whirl and dance.
Ali Malik was the first to step forward. He reached for the door, paused, grasped the rusted handle. Perhaps I was the only one who saw the hesitation, that tremor in his fingers as they gripped the metal tight. He yanked the handle and flung open the door. Oil-hungry hinges creaked. Dust rose, moved forward with gentle arms to embrace us, and dissipated.
Wasif had a flashlight in his hands. In the tatters of daylight the bulb glimmered, and woke up as he flicked the switch. A knob of light shot at the rain, expanded into a vortex, and cut through the cavernous gloom.
We were returning from school. Saleem was beaming. His grandfather, a clerk at National Bank, had visited that weekend and given him a crackling five-rupee note. We frequently pooled our allowance and my share of this treasure was secure. Visions of samosas and keema pakoras danced before our eyes. I suggested we take a detour along Kabootar Purah, where most vendors sat.
Slowly, I walked forward until I stood directly below it. It was a massive, heavy-looking gunnysack dangling from the fattest branch. When the wind picked up, the tethering rope stirred and the sack turned gently. Its bottom was black at the center.
Saleem moaned and dug his heels into the grass as he scrambled. I followed him and we both fled through the trees, out the grove past the deserted construction site with its monstrous yellow digger trapped in a ditch.
For a moment, all those old fears burrowed out of my heart and sat on its stony ground, watching me with dull black eyes. In the shadows, gunnysacks flapped and twitched with the moaning thing, the bloodied nightmare that wore body bags.
I placed the skulls on the floor. Took the wrapped shopper out of my pocket. Unfolded it, brought the matchbox out. Flick! The flame touched the candlewicks one after the other. In their trembling light the skulls began to grin.
Of the plot, I remember nothing. Only that it petrified me, like it did us all. We were plunged into a coma of listening. The story was about the worldskin melting away; a moaning, juddering melt. About effervescing in death and rising like blood vapors. Truth be told, we were induced into a near-death state ourselves, a rigor mortis that left as quickly as it came once Saleem stopped speaking.
I flexed and stretched my back. Ali coughed. Wasif threw his head back, shaking off the stiffness. Saleem just sat there, silent. Unmoving. Perhaps he was waiting for applause, a standing ovation to the masterpiece he had written and performed. He knew perfectly well that no one would best that story, its elegant, haunting prose, the powerful narrative; and I opened my mouth to congratulate him.
Wasif broke into a run, leaving everything behind. Ali followed, his eyes bone-white, mouth gaping. I ran too. We clattered up the steps. Thud! Thump! Thud! A nightmare memory fretted and laughed inside my head. A darkening grove with no way out. Wasif and Ali fled to the hole of light at the top. They burst out the doorway, dusty hands flopping at their side, and I leapt after them. Last step, and my foot punched through the rotten wood.
Frantically I yanked at my leg, eyes bulging, fingers clawing at the edge of the doorway. Below me, behind me, the stairs creaked, snorted, and began to scream as something made its way toward me. Wood splinters dug into my flesh and blood began to ooze.
A shadow that crawled up on all fours. A face that flashed in a quick loop of light, features muffled, a black cowl spilling onto its singed forehead. Was it the reporter with his eyes scooped out; or the epileptic maid, eyes sewn together by the undertaker with thread, strands of it hanging over swollen cheeks, lips drawn back in the seizure agony, foam curdling and bubbling at the corner?
Was that spit glistening on those yellow teeth? Spiders hanging from her hair, his hair, my hair; pouring out from the caverns of our cheeks, dropping down, scuttling away? Were those hands twisting into claws, elbows bent at impossible angles, as if in catatonic seizure, as if in rigor mortis?
I fled through the pursuing, hollering, tugging crimson storm. Wasif and Ali were long gone, and as I ran past the lawn, out the gates to the end of the street, I turned my head helplessly to look at Bad Bricks one last time.
It was a matter of time before Saleem staggered home that night. His eyes were cracked marbles, his hair completely white. He shivered uncontrollably, head cocked to one side as if in torticollis; his fingers snapped and pinched as if trying to grasp the corner of some cloth. And he stank. Musty jute sacks. Dead insects. Rotting meat and wildflowers.
Maybe sometimes old maids die, unwanted, unloved. Hell, what do I know? Maybe sometimes children grow up in a limbo filled with body bags hanging from trees like slaughtered goats, a nightmare that never flickers, never recedes from us.
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