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Moonlight On The Roof - contd

by Yunus Mohamed
(Durban, South Africa)

‘Fareez stop that, can’t you see you are upsetting my Bilquis, can’t you see?’ Naushad said angrily shaking his fists at me this time . The stick he brought out with him to the yard lay on the ground next to his feet. ‘Go to hell Naushad.’ I said. “He that stole my one and only beloved from me, how dare he be content, how dare he threaten me?“ how dare he use the words like ‘My Bilquis’ I thought to myself through the mind's whisper.

‘May God curse you on this earth and in the hereafter Fareez?’ Bilquis said to me before getting up and running back into her house tears racing down her crimson cheeks?

Naushad picked up the large stick and flung it at me; it bounced against the gutter of the roof and landed just near an old car parked at the entrance of their driveway. No one knew whom the car belonged to; it had been parked there for many years now. Old neighbors said that a “Jinn” drives it at night and just before sunrise it returns the car to the very spot. But I said to the elders later ‘It cannot be a Jinn, it must be a vampire”.

I looked up to the moon and said, “Go, go, go. Go to another house brighten the hearts of the inhabitants there; don’t you know Naushad stole my only earthly possession my only wealth, ‘MY ETERNAL LOVE’? Could Bilquis not see that the love in my eyes for her shone like a galaxy of stars, the weight of my love for her like the weight of an ocean? But all I could hear was ‘bitter silence’ against the heartbeat of the humming universe.

Finally the moon moved away. Funny, I thought, how the moon starts off thin as a rake, hungry and malnourished but in a month is so fattened with light. Bilquis is the moon and I am the sun, we make love at every eclipse. But poor Naushad, he doesn’t know that, does he? After all, it’s our little secret. Is it not dear Bilquis? Oh, Poor Naushad poor, poor Naushad!

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