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likewise.
    Before breakfast, Huma saw the servants, under her father’s direction, constructing a great heap of books in the garden and setting fire to it. The only volume left untouched was the Qur’an, which Hashim wrapped in a silken cloth and placed on a table in the hall. Heordered each member of his family to read passages from this book for at least two hours per day. Visits to the cinema were forbidden. And if Atta invited male friends to the house, Huma was to retire to her room.
    By now, the family had entered a state of shock and dismay; but there was worse to come.
    That afternoon, a trembling debtor arrived at the house to confess his inability to pay the latest instalment of interest owed, and made the mistake of reminding Hashim, in somewhat blustering fashion, of the Qur’an’s strictures against usury. The moneylender flew into a rage and attacked the fellow with one of his large collection of bullwhips.
    By mischance, later the same day a second defaulter came to plead for time, and was seen fleeing Hashim’s study with a great gash in his arm, because Huma’s father had called him a thief of other men’s money and had tried to cut off the wretch’s right hand with one of the thirty-eight kukri knives hanging on the study walls.
    These breaches of the family’s unwritten laws of decorum alarmed Atta and Huma, and when, that evening, their mother attempted to calm Hashim down, he struck her on the face with an open hand. Atta leapt to his mother’s defence and he, too, was sent flying.
    ‘From now on,’ Hashim bellowed, ‘there’s going to be some discipline around here!’
    The moneylender’s wife began a fit of hysterics which continued throughout that night and the following day, and which so provoked her husband that he threatened her with divorce, at which she fled to her room, locked the door and subsided into a raga of sniffling. Huma now lost her composure, challenged her father openly, and announced (with that same independence of spirit which he had encouraged in her) that she would wear no cloth over her face; apart from anything else, it was bad for the eyes.
    On hearing this, her father disowned her on the spot and gave her one week in which to pack her bags and go.
    By the fourth day, the fear in the air of the house had become so thick that it was difficult to walk around. Atta told his shock-numbed sister: ‘We are descending to gutter-level – but I know what must be done.’
    That afternoon, Hashim left home accompanied by two hired thugs to extract the unpaid dues from his two insolvent clients. Atta went immediately to his father’s study. Being the son and heir, he possessed his own key to the moneylender’s safe. This he now used, andremoving the little vial from its hiding-place, he slipped it into his trouser pocket and re-locked the safe door.
    Now he told Huma the secret of what his father had fished out of Lake Dal, and exclaimed: ‘Maybe I’m crazy – maybe the awful things that are happening have made me cracked – but I am convinced there will be no peace in our house until this hair is out of it.’
    His sister at once agreed that the hair must be returned, and Atta set off in a hired shikara to Hazratbal mosque. Only when the boat had delivered him into the throng of the distraught faithful which was swirling around the desecrated shrine did Atta discover that the relic was no longer in his pocket. There was only a hole, which his mother, usually so attentive to household matters, must have overlooked under the stress of recent events.
    Atta’s initial surge of chagrin was quickly replaced by a feeling of profound relief.
    ‘Suppose’, he imagined, ‘that I had already announced to the mullahs that the hair was on my person! They would never have believed me now – and this mob would have lynched me! At any rate, it has gone, and that’s a load off my mind.’ Feeling more contented than he had for days, the young man returned home.

    Here he found