Moth Smoke Read Online Free PDF Page A

something to fill you.’
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘I’m sure you’ll find something.’
    I light a cigarette.
    ‘May I have one?’ she asks.
    ‘I’m sorry. Of course.’
    I light it for her.
    A bird passes overhead, invisible, the sound of agitated air.
    ‘Did you ever study with Professor Julius Superb?’ she asks me.
    I grin. ‘Do you know where his name comes from?’
    She laughs. ‘No, but it’s fabulous.’
    ‘His great-grandfather was the batman of a Scottish officer who tried for years to get him to convert. When the Indian Mutiny broke out, the old Scot wound up with a knife in his chest. Julius’s great-grandfather came to him on his deathbed and said he’d decided to become a Christian. And the last thing the Scot could croak before he died was: Superb. Julius is the fourth generation of the line.’
    Mumtaz is laughing so hard she has to hold her sides. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she gasps.
    ‘It’s true,’ I say. ‘Professor S. told us himself.’
    ‘No.’ She’s smiling at me and shaking her head.
    ‘Seriously.’ I smile back. ‘But how do you know him?’
    ‘I came across an article of his today. It’s called “The Phoenix and the Flame.” Have you read it?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Let me read a piece of it to you.’
    ‘You have it with you?’
    ‘Just one page that I tore out. Do you think that’s odd?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘It is odd, isn’t it? Whenever I read something interesting, I tear out a piece and keep it as a talisman until I find something new to replace it with. It’s a sort of superstition. I did it once and it helped me break out of writer’s block, so I’ve done it ever since. Librarians must hate me.’
    I look at her, surprised. ‘What do you write?’
    ‘I can’t tell you.’
    I shake my head. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I’m teasing. I used to write for some magazines in New York.’
    ‘That must have been fantastic.’
    ‘Not really. I wrote boring stuff.’
    ‘And now?’
    ‘Now I’ll read you this article.’ She opens a little bag and takes out a folded piece of paper. ‘Could you keep your lighter lit so I can read this? Thanks. Here’s what it says: “My father liked to wonder aloud whether the phoenix was re-created by the fire of its funeral pyre or transformed so that what emerged was a soulless shadow of its former being, identical in appearance but without the joy in life its predecessor had had. He wondered alternatively whether the fire might be purificatory, a redemptive, rejuvenating blaze that destroyed the withered shell of the old phoenix and allowed the creature’s essence to emerge stronger than it was before in a young, new body. Or, he would ask, wasthe fire a manifestation of entropy, slowly sapping the life-energy of the phoenix over the eons, a little death in a life that could know no beginning and no end but which could nonetheless be subject to an ever-decreasing magnitude? He asked me once if I thought the fires in our lives, the traumas, increased our fulfillment by setting up contrasts that illuminated more clearly our everyday joys; or perhaps I viewed them instead as tests that made us stronger by teaching us to endure; or did I believe, rather, that they simply amplified what we already were, in the end making the strong stronger, the weak weaker, and the dangerous deadly?” That’s it.’
    The gas coming from my lighter hisses, suddenly audible, until I relax my thumb and extinguish the flame. Back in my pocket, the metal radiates heat into the skin below my hipbone.
    ‘That’s vintage Superb,’ I tell her, a little wistfully. ‘He teaches economics, but basically he’s a freelance thinker.’
    ‘I like the image his article brought to my mind, of this old Punjab University fuddy-duddy hard at work in his office.’
    ‘He’s a comrade.’
    ‘Comrade?’
    ‘Communist.’
    ‘Are there many?’
    ‘Not anymore. The unshaven boys are the new populists. But they leave Professor S. alone. I think they’ve decided