After he had made an unsuccessful attempt to enter the Roman Catholic
Church and the Presbyterian fold at the same time (the Missionaries
found him out and called him names, but they did not understand his
trouble), he discovered Lalun on the City wall and became the most
constant of her few admirers. He possessed a head that English artists
at home would rave over and paint amid impossible surroundings--a face
that female novelists would use with delight through nine hundred pages.
In reality he was only a clean-bred young Muhammadan, with pencilled
eye-brows, small-cut nostrils, little feet and hands, and a very tired
look in his eyes. By virtue of his twenty-two years he had grown a neat
black beard which he stroked with pride and kept delicately scented.
His life seemed to be divided between borrowing books from me and making
love to Lalun in the window-seat. He composed songs about her, and some
of the songs are sung to this day in the City from the Street of the
Mutton-Butchers to the Copper-Smiths' ward.
One song, the prettiest of all, says that the beauty of Lalun was so
great that it troubled the hearts of the British Government and caused
them to lose their peace of mind. That is the way the song is sung in
the streets; but, if you examine it carefully and know the key to the
explanation, you will find that there are three puns in it--on 'beauty,'
'heart,' and 'peace of mind,'--so that it runs: 'By the subtlety of
Lalun the administration of the Government was troubled and it lost such
and such a man.' When Wali Dad sings that song his eyes glow like hot
coals, and Lalun leans back among the cushions and throws bunches of
jasmine-buds at Wali Dad.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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