Early in my youth, a slightly clubfooted man, whose parents had abandoned him – and not only for this defect – came to our locality. With a wooden crate slung over his shoulder, he entered Nawab House. He was invited there, in fact. The attention he attracted from onlookers, however, was not for his limp but for the strange attire he wore – an unwashed black caftan almost touching the ground, a densely-beaded chain with a pendant of obscure metal hanging from his neck and a dirty turban wound on his head like a woman's bun. He also wore a pair of black shoes that he himself had made years ago.
He was received with the least hospitality in Nawab House. For it was known that the long illness of an old man in that house, whose death was awaited by every person living under its roof, had made them ill-natured. But they never spoke of this matter to anybody, not even among themselves. They gave the clubfooted man a tattered mat, and he spread it in the yard, fringed by a tall, mossy wall, after the onlookers – of varied age and sex – carried out the old man, who lay spread-eagled on a charpoy, bringing him under the autumn sky for the first time since his illness began.
The old man was determined to live at least twelve more years. Gossipmongers said that the more he understood that his progeny, a brood of eight sons and daughters, wanted him to die soon, the more he ignored his incurable suffering and the threat of lurking death.
He now watched the stranger who carried a mysterious crate. He didn't believe in the fortune-teller and took the whole matter to be some sort of wicked conspiracy by his scions. He asked the stranger, resentfully, "What's your name?"