The Charmed Life

The Charmed Life
by Achmed Abdullah
1917

On the day when death will knock at thy
door, what wilt thou offer him?
Oh, I will set before my guest the full vessel
of my life--I will never let him go with empty
hands.
--Rarindranath Tagore

Contents
* Chapter I: The Meeting
* Chapter II: The Call
* Chapter III: A Fools Heart
* Chapter IV: Depths
* Chapter V: Nerves
* Chapter VI: Out and In
* Chapter VII: The Miracle
* Chapter VIII: Brahman Truth
Chapter I
The Meeting
Kiss happiness with lips
That seek beyond the lips.
--from the Love Song of Yar Ali
I met him in that careless, haphazard and thoroughly human way in which one meets people in Calcutta, in all parts of India for that matter. He and I laughed simultaneously at the same street scene. I don't remember if it was the sight of a portly, grey-bearded native dressed incongruously in a brown-and-grey striped camel's-hair dressing-gown, an extravagantly embroidered skull-cap, gorgeous open-work silk socks showing the bulging calves, and clothtopped patent leather shoes of an ultra-Viennese cut, or if it was perhaps the sight of Donald McIntyre, the Eurasian tobacco merchant in the Sealdah, abusing his Babu partner in a splendid linguistic mixture of his father's broad, twangy Glasgow Scots and of his mother's soft, gliding Behari.
At all events something struck me as funny. I laughed. So did the other man. And there you are.
Nice-looking chap he was--of good length of limbs and width of shoulders, clean-shaven, strong-jawed, and with close-cropped curly brown hair, and eyes the keenest, jolliest shade of blue imaginable. And--he was an American. You could tell by his clothes, chiefly by his neat shoes. They were of a vintage of perhaps two or three years before, but still they bore the national mark; they smacked, somehow, of ice water and clanking overhead trains and hustle and hat-check boys--and his nationality, too, was a point in his favor, since I had spent the preceding three years in New York and America had become home to me, in a way.
So we talked. I forgot who spoke first. It really doesn't matter--in India. Nor did we exchange cards nor names, that not being the custom of negligent India, but we conversed with that easy, we-might-as-well-be-friends familiarity with which strangers talk to each other aboard a transatlantic liner or in a Pullman car--west of Chicago. Presently we decided that we were obstructing the thoroughfare--at least a tiny, white bullock was trying his best to push us out of the way with his soft, ridiculous muzzle--we decided, furthermore, that we had several things to talk over. Quite important things they seemed at the time, and tremendously varied: the home policy of the ancient Peruvians, the truth of the Elohistic theory in the study of the Pentateuch, and the difference between Lahore and Lucknow chutney. In other words, we felt that strange human phenomenon: a sudden warm wave of friendship, of interest, of sympathy for each other.
So we adjourned to a native caf�� which was a mass of violet and gold--slightly fly-specked--of smells honey-sweet and gall-bitter, of carved and painted things supremely beautiful and supremely hideous--since the East goes to the extreme in both cases.
We sipped our coffee and smiled at each other and talked. We discovered that we had likings in common--better still, prejudices and mad theories in common, and presently, since with the bunching, splintering noon heat the shops and the bazaar were clearing of buyers and sellers and since the caf�� was filling with all sorts of strong scented low-castes, kunjris and sansis and what-not, chewing betel and expectorating vastly after the manner of their kind, he proposed that we should continue our conversation in his house.
I accepted, and leaving the tavern I turned automatically to the left fully expecting him to lead toward Park Street or perhaps, since he was so obviously an American, toward one of the big cosmopolitan hotels on the other side of the Howrah Bridge. But instead he led me to the right, straight toward Chitpore Road, straight into the heart of the ancestral tenements of the Ghoses and Raos and Kumars--the respectable native quarter, in other words.
That was my first surprise. My second came when we reached his home--a two storied house of typical extravagant bulbous Hindu architecture, surrounded by a flaunting garden, orange and vermilion with peach and pomegranate and peepul trees and with a thousand nodding flowers. For, as soon as he had ushered me into the great reception hall which stretched across the whole ground floor from front to back veranda, he excused himself. He did not wait to see me comfortably seated nor to offer me drink and tobacco, after the pleasant Anglo-Indian, and, for that matter, American habit. But he dropped hat and stick on the first handy chair, left the room with a hurried "be back in a jiffy, old man," and, a