Before I could ask any questions she was speaking to the next student. The next person I met was the secretary at the admissions office, who brusquely gave me a huge pile of papers, brochures and forms to fill out and return the next day, ‘Don’t lose them’, she admonished, and topped it all with a map with a big red X showing me where my ‘digs’ were. I needn’t have bothered he just seemed to like the sound of his own voice, and it didn’t seem to matter whether I responded or not. Was he even speaking English? I tried replying to him making noncommittal noises, but ended up desperately staring at my phone, trying to give him a clear hint that I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. There was the border guard, who asked a few questions (very impolitely), and the taxi driver, who I couldn’t get to stop talking, even though I couldn’t understand a word he said. When I finally made it to the city of Wilming, I had only spoken to two other people. These memories were now the essence of his life, and it was one reason he liked this area of pastureland so much it provided the perfect gateway to those precious childhood memories. Every night, Akram enjoyed making different shapes out of them: As a child, one of his favourite pastimes had been to sit outside at night with his grandfather, where together they enjoyed describing the different shapes that each constellation made. He was counting the stars, which looked like diamonds twinkling in the darkness. Shepherd in the City – A short storyĪkram was sitting under a tree in the pasture near to the camps. One might almost have said that a breeze of love was blowing through the city, and the sight of the young women whom I saw in the streets in their morning toilets, in the depths of whose eyes there lurked a hidden tenderness, and who walked with languid grace, filled my heart with agitation. Everybody I met seemed to be smiling an air of happiness appeared to pervade everything in the warm light of returning spring. The canaries hanging in the windows were singing loudly, and so were the servants on every floor a cheerful noise rose up from the streets, and I went out, my spirits as bright as the day, to go-I did not exactly know where. One morning on waking I saw from my window the blue sky glowing in the sun above the neighbouring houses. The previous winter having been unusually severe, this spring feeling was like a form of intoxication in May, as if there were an overabundant supply of sap. With the first day of spring, when the awakening earth puts on its garment of green, and the warm, fragrant air fans our faces and fills our lungs and appears even to penetrate to our hearts, we experience a vague, undefined longing for freedom, for happiness, a desire to run, to wander aimlessly, to breathe in the spring. One day the villagers were very excited, and when they asked what was happening they told them, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today!” In The Spring – A Short Story Once upon a time, in a village far away, there lived six blind men.
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