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 café 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 café 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