Abdullah And The Goat

On the very afternoon that Abdullah, a waiter at the Gulistan restaurant on Mohammad Ali Road, was about to give way under the massed weight of the miseries, stacked up one over the other like dirty dishes, of his aged parents in Mirzapur writing to him to ask, although very gently, for a little more by money order every month so as to keep up with rising costs, and his older sister in Faisalabad, who had been married three years to a dealer in copper vessels, writing at the same time—and some of the letters of her missive were smudged, no doubt from falling tears—that her husband was giving her trouble and was probably having an affair, all this over and above the dull ache in Abdullah’s own heart as a consequence of his feelings, which he knew would bubble over in some unseemly manner any one of these days, for the restaurant owner Reza Ali’s daughter Shehza—on the very afternoon that Abdullah was fretting over these matters and barking orders into the kitchen, glowering at his own face in the mirror above the washbasin every time he passed it, and whisking away plates from under the noses of the restaurant’s patrons, sometimes before they had fully finished eating, an uproar suddenly broke out on the pavement, and the news arrived that the big white bad-tempered long-horned goat they had been fattening outside the restaurant for Ramzan had escaped.

- Chandrahas Choudhury

“It’s gone! It’s gone!” roared Reza Ali, jumping up from behind the counter and leaning out as far as he could to keep within his sights the disappearing goat, till he very nearly fell out into the street himself, onto the very spot where the goat had for two months been kept tethered to a post.

Looking around, he cried, “You—Abdullah! What’re you staring at my face for? Get after that goat!”

Abdullah immediately threw down a stack of crispy tandoori rotis, the hand towel on his shoulder, and the pencil behind his ear, and sped out of the restaurant, receiving for no good reason a cuff on the side of the head from Reza Ali as he departed. He saw at a distance the bobbing posterior of the goat, cleaving the throng of daytime pedestrians into two with its galloping progress. Clenching his teeth and his fists, he set off at a fast clip after the truant animal.

It was actually a relief to be able to chase the goat. Abdullah’s cares, which had been hanging about him all day like black clouds, were swiftly blown away by the gust of his goatward progress, and his mind, which had seemed to him full of shards of broken glass, now became instead an arrow trained at his target. Everything else in the world became a blur. There was just him and the goat.