The Innocent and The Beautiful (short story)

The Innocent and the Beautiful

(click above for short story)

Zafar Shah encounters both the CIA and jihadis in this story. The murder of nearly two million children through UN sanctions in Iraq may be ignored by collaborators, but not by the resistance. Even the beautiful has been corrupted, and the innocents killed.

Excerpt:

On this fateful day, I spotted her on road 9A, waiting for her usual trishaw. There was traffic on the road, but I stayed focused. She was in a red-and-black shalwar-kameez, her arms bare, revealing teasingly her white shoulders and armpits. Then our eyes met: fortunately I looked away, and watched with horror a man, pillion-riding on a motorcycle, raise a knife towards Maryam.

"Marayam, get down!" I screamed, and ran towards the bike. The knife missed, as she ducked. The bike wove between the vehicles, and disappeared.

"That was close, Maryam," I said, panting, as I reached her crouching figure. She was weeping.

"They tried to kill me!" she repeated. It was as if she couldn't believe that they would try to kill her.

watching Mars together

the most romantic evening
of my life
occurred
last month
with my wife
and I watching
Mars
above
the Khagrachari hilltops
from the dusk
of the rear
verandah
of our hotel room


such expansion
of ourselves
happen
rarely, rarely
as it did
on two evenings
in twenty years

Three Poems

http://www.theshinejournal.com/sayeediftekhar.htm

(click above for the poems)

Badminton is very popular in this country - it can only be played in winter because at other times it is too windy. So, it's a winter sport. Winter is a metaphor for life's end, but here it becomes the opposite: a metaphor of vitality, strength and youth. sunset at khagrachari was written in the south-eastern hills...it is a place of breathtaking beauty, and the details were there right before my eyes: however, the day was ending and the rising smoke seemed to embody the death of the day...Time was clearly motivated by love ... and the end of love in death. But the focus is not on death, but on the present.

Flash flood in Khagrachari

Khagrachari is a small town in the district of the same name. Nestled in a valley ringed ‎with blue, magnificent hills, it is a jewel in the crown of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of ‎Bangladesh. ‎

Next to the town runs the rivulet known as the Chengi, which pours its meagre stream ‎into the artificial lake of Kaptai. ‎

Meagre stream? Most of the time: meagre, but lovely, especially when its meanders are ‎viewed from the hills. ‎

However, on the night of the 16th of October, 2007, the Chengi changed beyond ‎recognition. It had rained all night, and by dawn, the river was a surge of rapid waters ‎carrying flotsam from the hills. It was a magnificent sight!‎

A brief trip into the city, and the devastation wrought by the usually docile Chengi was ‎heartbreaking. People had woken up with their houses flooded, their crops destroyed, ‎their belongings ruined….‎

And what was worse was that this was the second flash flood in a month. But the ‎previous overflow of the monsoon had been mild. The city people recalled that the last ‎time such a terrible flood had occurred was in 1984. They are a hardy lot, and every year ‎during monsoon – which lasts from June/July to September/October – they are visited by ‎at least one such calamity. ‎

The Chengi reminded me of that famous line uttered by Mrs. Moore in E. M. Forster's "A ‎Passage to India": "What a terrible river…what a beautiful river!" ‎

The story of the flash flood is told in pictures below (copy and paste in browser to view). ‎

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=7343&l=8ad2c&id=737674415