Father Francis

Throughout the rainy July nightfall, consequences of seventy-five days of rainy days, it had become a wild forest fire: the buzz, the tale, nobody knows what it was.

Something wrong had happened with Miss Virgin and the culprit was none other than the Father of the Church.

 Molested, hurt, scared: nobody of them, assembled in the church on that Sunday Mass morning where the air condition enthused, devoid of ventilation and freshness, the polluted air, distributing back upon those, in persistent flow of decayed perfumes and creams, their individual rotten pant and smell, have any idea exactly what had taken place. They were a fundamentally enslaved section of humanity.

"But it was the Father of the Church," a devotee said. He was a young man; a fat, fair-skinned man with an aggressive face, who had the Bible in his hand. 

"I know Father Francis. He is a decent man.  And…I know very well Miss Virgin, too."

"What do you know about her?" a second devotee asked curiously.

"What you know?" another devotee retorted. "Only a young girl or something hidden?"

"No," the devotee retorted. "She's about thirty-five, I guess and still she is unmarried. So nobody will believe her…"

"Trust, hell!" a bulky old man shouted in dirty stinking gown roared.

 "Won't you believe a nun's word or before a molester's?"

"I don't trust Father of the Church did it," the devotee uttered. "I know Father Francis."

"Maybe you know who molested her. Maybe will get him out of the city, damn molester-lover."

"Now it is presumed nobody did anything. People believed nothing happened. It is shocking to see people don't believe an unmarried lady of thirty-five who renounced everything don't have the idea that a Church Father…"

"People are a hell of Christian Father," the devotee said. He removed his gown. The man had bounced on his feet.

"Nothing happened?" he shouted. "Do you presume a nun is lying?"

The devotee held the Bible in his hand. He did not gaze more or less.

"The environment in the church is very cool." another said.  "It's sufficient to warm up a loner, a father. He can do anything. Even to a nun..."

Nobody commented. The devotee said in his gentle, but obstinate pitch: "I am not blaming the church or the Father. I just understand and you people know how a man that never..."

"You sick molester -lover!" a casual passerby said.

"Shut up, Tom," another shouted. "First get the facts than blame the father or the church."

"Who will do? Who's getting the facts?" the passerby said. "Facts, stupid!"

"You're an honest Christian man," the devotee asked. "Isn't?"

In his ugly beard, he looked like a wild cat of the circus. "You tell them, Jim," he said to the passerby. "If there ain't any true Christian man in this town, you can tot up on me, even if I am only a passerby."

"That's right, devotees," the devotee said. "First, get the reality. I know Father Francis."

"Well, by Jesus!" the passerby shouted. "You think that a Christian nun in this church..."

"Shut up, Tom," another devotee said. "We got ample facts."

The devotee got up. He questioned the speaker. "Do you mean that anything excuses a father molesting a nun?  Do you mean to tell me that you are a Christian and you will stand for a Christian? You better shun Christianity and re-embrace Hinduism where you came from. The Christians don't want coward like you."

"Hindu what?" the devotee asked. "I was born and raised as a Christian."

"You tell them, Jack," the drummer said. "By God, if they..."

"Well, by Jesus!" the devotee murmured. He stared around with a nervous, perplexed gaze as if he was trying to recollect what he required to say or to do. He rubbed his handkerchief across his sweating face. "Shame if I'm going to agree to a Christian nun..."                  

The gate of the Assembly Hall crashed open. A rough and tough man stood in front of all. His throat was open as his black shirt was Un-buttoned at the throat; he wore a dirty felt hat.

His angry, valiant look swept all. His was Stephen. He was a football player and decorated for his excellent game.  "Well," he said, "are you going to wait there till a rogue father rape a holy nun on the streets of Lahore?"

Tom pounced. "I also have been telling them!"

"It really did not take place," a third devotee muttered. "This is not new with her, there was a man on the roof of the nunnery, watching her undress, about six months back."

"What?" the visitor sprung. "What's that?"

The devotee had been leisurely forcing him reverse into the chair; he stopped himself lie back, his head lifted, the devotee still forcing him down.

Stephen shouted at the third narrator. "Happen? What the hell, does it make any difference? Are you going to get free the pervert father with it until one actually does it?"

"I am also telling them the same!"  Tom shouted. He cursed, lengthy and sturdy, stupid.

"Here, here," a devotee pointed. "Not so strident. Don't talk so piercing."

"Sure," Stephen shouted; "no unnecessary discussion at all. I have listened enough. Who's is joining me?" He rubbed his balls in his trousers.  All laughed at him. However, immediately silent, seen his nomadic his gaze.

The devotee gripped the arm of the passerby down, the bible in his hand. "Find out the details and truth first, friends. I know Father Francis. He cannot do such act. Let's go the pastor and do the thing right."       

 Stephen twisted his fuming, unbending face. The devotees could not concentrate on the prayers.  They appeared to men of diverse religions. The other devotees had also stopped above their Holy Book.  "You imply to advise me," Stephen said, "that you'd take a molester's word before a Christian nun? 

The third devotee got up and gripped Stephen's shoulder; he too had been a footballer. 

"Now, now. Let's go to the pastor to figure this matter out. But nobody knows anything about this matter honestly?"

Why you idiots demon-loving..."

"Figure out what? Hell!" Stephen jolted his hands violently. "All those are with me get up from here. The ones those ain't...shut your eyes and mouth permanently."

He stared his looks, dragging his hand across his face.

Five men got up. All the devotees left the chairs.  "Here," they said, jerking at their hands and arms in the air; "get the fear out off us.

I support him. I do not belong Lahore but our mothers, wives and sisters do not visit churches to get..." He left the Holy book on the table and jumped on the floor.  Stephen stood paced out the door and abused the others, those did not join him. Another got up and jumped toward him. The rest sat but have a sense of shame, hiding their eyes from one another, and then mutely one by one they also got up and moved with him. 

One of the devotees picked the Holy Bible. He closed it neatly. "Members, don't beat him. Father Francis can never do it. I am sure."

"Come on," Stephen commanded. He fumed. From his hip pocket pulled out the butt of a heavy knife.  They walked out. The main gate banged behind them, breaking the silence in the dead air.

"What will he do?" a devotee whispered. The second simply murmured "Jesus, Jesus "in a hushed tone. "I cannot still believe…father Frances, if he gets Stephen infuriated."

"Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ," other whispered.

"You surmise he truly done it to her?" the first rued.

II

He was forty-eight or forty-nine. He lived in a tiny structure quarter with his invalid father who was his mother's unwed partner and a skeletal; pale, but the corrupt unflagging mother, where each evening between five and eight he would sit on the balcony stylish hat, swinging in the balcony swing until midnight. After dinner, he rested behind for some time, until the night became chilly. In the day one of the three or four new jeans and jackets that he had for each winter, he would go city centre to spend the afternoon in the stores with the other friends, where they would hold the goods and quibble over the prices in winter, abrupt voices, without any intention of buying.

He was friendly people not the best in Lahore, but popular enough and he was still on the good side of average looking, with an intelligent, faintly slow conduct and clothing. When he was young he had had a slim, tense body and a sort of rigidity which had made him for a time to trip upon the top of the town's public life as shown by the graduate party and church mass period of his equals while still children adequate to be un-class-conscious.

It was very painful to him to realize that he was greying fast; that those among whom he had been a little smarter and possessive than any other were beginning to understand the snobbery of females and chasing males. That was when his face embarked on to wear that artificial, worn-down look. He still moved to parties and club on obscure areas and winter nights, like wearing a mask or hijab, with that confusion of fuming negation of reality in his eyes. One evening at a party, he heard a young girl talking with two boys, all schoolmates, calling him uncle. He stopped attending the parties. 

He saw the boys with whom he had grown up as they married and got families and children, but no girl ever called on him seriously, until the children of the other friends had been calling him "uncle" and for many years, while their fathers told them in high tones about how popular Uncle Francis had been as a boy.

Then the city saw him driving on weekends and Sundays evenings with the air hostess in an airline.  She was a widow of thirty, a fair-coloured woman, using foreign perfumes always smelling sharply in the car. She owned the foreign made car, driving fast, a red roundabout; Francis had the rare opportunity to sit with the woman without a veil, the city rarely saw. Then the city started to laugh "Uncle Francis." "But she is mature enough to take care of herself," others said.

That was when he began to request his old friends that their children call him "cousin "Instead of "uncle." It was fifteen years back since he had been condemned into adultery in the public opinion, and ten years since the air hostess had gone to a Karachi, returning for few days on every Christmas, which she spent with her family and friend at a family house. In the ears, the people would see the visit over, and after the Christmas day visiting they would tell him about her visit, about how beautiful she looked, and how they heard that she was growing in the city, seeing with bright, covert eyes his faded, dazzling face. Usually, by the early hours of the morning, there would be the smell of whisky on his breath. It was supplied him by a man, a clerk at the church: "Sure; I buy it for the old man. I suppose he's open to a little fun."

His father maintained his room very tidy; the bony invalid mother ran the house. In that environment, Francis's new jeans and jackets, his inactive and unfilled days, had a quality of angry emptiness. He went out in the evenings only with men now, friends, to the pictures and markets. Each evening, he dressed in one of the new clothes and went city centre alone, where his young "cousins" were already loitering in the late evenings. They had tender, soft heads and strong, muscular arms and alert hips, hissing to one another or screaming and chuckling with young girls in that conservative city. When he passed and went on long lines of storefronts, on the gates of which the sitting and lounging girls did not even follow him with their eyes anymore.

III

As he dressed for dinner on that Sunday evening, his own body felt tired and fever. His body shudders and his face had a tired look, and his hair spanned hard and crackling under the comb. While he was still dressing the friends called for him and sat while he put on sexy inner wears and stockings and a new cotton dress.

His mother walked into the room just as he was about to apply her new lipstick. She was startled. He was startled. "What are you doing with my lipstick? It's new...I haven't used it so far. Couldn't you have waited?" He smiled and handed it back to her. "I forgot to tell you...I am playing Draupadi in our college production... rehearsals start this evening."

 "Do you feel energetic enough to go out?" they asked, their eyes dazzling too, with a dark twinkle. "When you have had time to get over the distress, you must tell us what taken place. What he said and did; the whole thing."

In the still darkness, as they walked toward the mall, he began to breathe uneasily, something like a runner training to dash, until he ceased wavering, the five of them walking leisurely because of the intense cold and out of care for him. But as they neared the mall he began to shiver again, walking with his head down, his hands clenched tightly by the friends, their tones about his low sound, also with that excited, glitzy quality of their eyes.

They entered the mall, he in the centre of the group, delicate in his tight dress. He was wavering badly. He walked slower and slower, as people eat popcorn, his head down and her eyes bright in the faded sign of his face, passing the hotel and the topless musicians in chairs along the round around at him: "That's the best: see?

The one in green in the corner is the hottest."

"Is that he? They were clenching each other hands tightly. Is he?"

"Sure. He's the hottest."

"Oh, is he?"

"Sure. He went on a little trip." Then they searched the drug store, where even the young men loafing in the entrance angled their skullcaps and followed with their eyes the suggestion of his hips and legs when he passed.

They moved on, crossing the lifted caps of the naughty boys, the suddenly mysterious voices, deferent, caring. "Do you see?" the friends said. Their voices sounded like long, floating sighs of boos excitement.

"There's not a nun on the mall. Not one."

They reached the movie show. It was like a tiny fairyland with its dim lights hall and coloured pictures of life caught in its attractive and beautiful transformation. His lips began to shiver. In the dark, when the movie began, it was all right; he could hold back the laughing so he would not tired so quick and so soon. Therefore, he quickly saw all the turning faces, the suggestions of low amazement, and they took their adapted places where he could see the couples against the dim glare and the young men and girls coming in pairs-two and two and some were man and man and girl and girl. 

The lights dimmed away; the screen flushed silver, and soon new life began to unfurled, beautiful, passionate and glamorous. Still, the young men and girls entered, fragranced and crouching in the half dark, their paired backs in attractive, transparent and lustrous, their slim, nippy self-conscious bodies, divinely gay spirit, while beyond them the new world order stood, inexorably on and on. He began to chuckle. In trying to curb it, it made more clamour than ever; heads began to turn.

Still laughing, his friends lifted him and took him out, and he stood at the turn, smiling on a high, nonstop note until the cab came and they escorted him in.

They removed his clothes, the hidden inner wears, and the socks, helped him to bed, gave him heat on his back and hips, and searched for the doctor. He was difficult to find out, so they administered to him with soft ejaculations, renewing the warmth of heat and body. 

While the heat he stopped sighing and lay still for a time, moaning only a little. Soon the laughing welled yet again and his voice rose screaming.

"Shhhhhhhhhhh! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" they said, giving more heat, smoothing his head and face, groping it for depressing;" "poor man!" Then to one another: "Do you suppose anything really happened?" their eyes mysteriously aglitter, secret and obsessive.

"Shhhhhhhhhh! Poor man! Poor Francis!"

IV

The devotees rushed swiftly up the roads where the dim lights, insect-filled, fierce, stiff and aggressive suspension in the dull air. The day had passed in a fade of dust; above the gloomy plaza, shrouded by the tired dust, the sky was as cloudy as the inside of a dying furnace. Below the east was a word of the shy moon.

When he overtook them, Stephen and four others were getting into a van parked in a lane. Stephen curved his solid head, peering out below the top, "Changed your mind, did you?" he asked. "Great good news; by Jesus, tomorrow when this city listened about how you talked tonight"

"Now, now," the other devotee said.  "Charles all right. Come on, Charles; leap in."

"Father Francis has never done it, friends," the devotee retorted back. "If anybody has done it. Why, you all know it very well, as I do there is not any city where they got better father than us. And you know how a lady of that kind will instigate men when there is not any reason to and Miss Virgin anyway..."

"Sure, sure," the unknown visitor said. "We're just going to talk to him simply; that's all."

"Talk hell!" Tom said. "When we're all through with the..."

"Shut up, for Jesus' sake!" the visitor said. "Do you want everybody in the city..."

"Tell them, by Jesus!" Stephen said. "Tell one and all that'll let a Christian nun..."

"Let's go; let's go: here's the other van." The second van moved howling out of a cloud of dirt at the lane entrance.

Stephen started his van and drove fast. Dust lay like dark clouds in the lanes. The streetlights dangled as in drain. They drove out of the city. They were crossing one lane after another. Uneven, furrowed, potholed, bumpy...Lahore is famous for. Dust flew above them. The dark bulk of the chapel, where father Francis lived with orphan boys, rose.

Father Francis laid down to rest there and slept in the same curtained bed with a young devotee. Their heads with golden hair were side by side and they were looking two pigeons in one next folding in each other's wings. They were looking like two roses on one branch. The moon and stars from outside peeped inside to look at the two lovers. The cold breeze sang a song for lulling them to sleep. Thus laying cheek to cheek and heart to heart with each other, they were sleeping in their nest like bed until a thunderous voice broke their slumber.

 "Better wait for him here, hadn't we?" a visitor advised.

Stephen did not react. He hurled the van up and banged near the gate, the headlights dazzling on the red gate. 

"Listen here, boys," the devotee said; "if he's here, don't beat him? If it was him, he would try to hide. Don't you see he would?"

The second van also reached and stopped. Stephen got out of the van; Tom also got down with him. "Listen, friends," the devotee said.

"Switch the lights off!" Stephen said. The darkness was engulfing the city. There was no sound in it except their breathing as they puffed air in the dry dust in which they have been living for a decade; slow moment Stephen's and Tom's steps, and a second later Stephens voice: "Father!... Father!"

Down behind the mountains, the moon rose. There was no sound of night bird or insect, no sound except their breathing and a soft ticking of toning metal about the wristwatches. Where their bodies touched one another, they seemed to sweat tensely, in that falling dew and moisture around. 

"God!" a devotee said; "let's get out of this hell."

However, they didn't move until blurred sounds began to raise out of the night ahead; then they all came down and waited tensely in the winded dark. There was another sound: bluster, a heckling ejection of breath and Stephen cursing in law tone. They waited a moment, and then they ran forward. They ran in a faltering mass, as though they were fleeing something. "Kill him, kill the rascal," a voice whispered.

Stephen pushed them back. "Not now," he said. "Pull him into the van."

"Kill him, kill Christ's ugly son!" the voice mumbled. They bundled the Father in the van. The devotee had waited by the van. He was trembling and sweating and he knew he was going to have high blood pressure. 

"What is it, devotees?" the Father asked. "I ain't done anything wrong. Don't insult God. "

They tied the Father with a rope. They acted very fast with the father although he remained calm and quiet. He submitted to the rope, staring quickly and persistently from dim face to dim face. "Why have you tied me?" he asked, leaning to stare into the faces until they could feel his pant and smell his sweaty stench. He spoke a name or two. "What you all say I done, Mr Jack?"

Father Francis had tricks on his tongue. He had things up his gown. However, he is opposite of a stage magician. He gives the world illusions that had the appearance of truth. He gave them the truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. But today, he was completely helpless.

Stephen pushed the van door open. "Get in!" he shouted. The Father did not resist.  "Where will you all go? What will you do with me, Mr Jack? I ain't done anything wrong. Devotees, boss, I ain't done nothing: I swear in the name of Jesus." He pleaded. 

"Get in!" Stephen roared. He pushed the Father. The others released their breath in cold scoffs and hit him with quick blows and he flurried and abused them, and rubbed his tied hands across his face to protect himself and hit a devotee upon the mouth, and the devotee also showered the blows.

Father stopped struggling, got in, and sat silently as the others got in and seated beside. He sat between a devotee and an unknown visitor, shrinking his body in so as not to hurt them, his eyes glaring quickly and regularly from face to face. Tom stood on the board.

The car sped up. The devotee nursed his nose with his handkerchief.

"What's the matter, Bush?" the visitor asked.

"Nothing," the devotee replied. They speeded up the highway and turned away from the city. The second van left far behind in the dust. They went on, gaining speed; the last line of houses left far behind. 

"Oh Jesus, he smells horrible!" the visitor said.

"We'll teach him a lesson," the musician in front, seated next to Stephen said. On the moving board, Tom abused into the suffocating air. The devotee bent swiftly, forward and patted Stephen's shoulder.

"I want to get down, Stephen," he said.

"Jump out, you coward," Stephen said without seeing him. He drove speedily. Behind them, the aimless lights of the second van glared in the dust. Suddenly Stephen took a turn into a narrow-deserted road. It was potholed and abandoned. It led back to a discarded Church, a string of dirt heaps and wild plants, mud mountains and used condoms. It had been used garbage store and un-wed lovers to shed their inhabitations. Although he searched carefully in the dirt with a long stick, he could not even find the floor. 

"Stephen," the devotee said.

"Jump out, then," Stephen, said, throwing the van along the pothole. Beside the devotee, the Father said "Oh God!"

The devotee steps forward. The narrow subway of the lane had moved up and reached the dead end. Their movement was like a wiped out boiler blast: cooler, but horribly dead. The van jumped from pothole to pothole.

"Oh God!" the Father again pleaded.

The devotee began to jerk dangerously at the door. "Look out, there!" the visitor said, but the devotee had already booted the door open and swayed onto the running plank. The visitor leaned across the Father to grasp at him, but he had already jumped out of the van. The van moved on without worrying about the speed. 

The force threw him rolling through mud-covered weeds, into the drain. Mud covered about him, and in a thin, nasty crackling of sapless shoot, she laid choking and vomiting until the second van crossed him and after some time died away. Then he mounted and limped on until he reached the main road and moved toward the city, wiping at his clothes with his hands.

The stars were higher, twinkling high and clear of the dust at last, and after a while, the city began to frown below the dust.

He walked on, limping. Now he heard the horns and lights of cars, the flush of them grew in the dust behind him, and he left the road and crouched again in the weeds until they passed.

Stephen's van came last now. There was one man less in it and Tom was not on the running board. They went on; the dust swallowed them; the glare and the sound died away. The dark clouds and fog hid them for a while, but soon the eternal dark absorbed it again. The devotee mounted back onto the road and limped on toward city.

Next day, there was no information about Father Francis. Perhaps, the silence of deserted church devoured him and wrapped him in eternal silence. Life is an exam where the syllabus is unknown and question papers are not set.