Abu Shamkhi

In the 1950s there was a clothes-ironer named Abu Shamkhi. He had a shop adjunct to Al-Assaf Mosque where, as in the Oedipus story, three roads met, one to Adhamiya, the other to Raghba Khattoon and the other to the street where lived Abdul-Kareem Al-Jidda, Abdul- Rahman Al-Bazzaz and my uncle Akram. Abu Shamkhi was a renowned sodomite. Rumour spread about him that, while with boys, Abu Shamkhi was as piercing as the blade of the Arab who courts Portia in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, but with females, he was as placid as a blade of grass. One day, the folks around him relished a practical joke on him. They arranged with a woman prostitute to turn up at a certain address. On the other hand, they told Abu Shamlki that they had procured for him a boy more beautiful than the Queen Sheba. Abu Shamkhi, pressing his iron so firmly on the trousers he was pressing that the iron-board squeaked, nodded a big Yes, bigger than Mrs Bloom's Yes in Joyce's ULYSSES. The folks waiting at the fixed address and the woman prostiute hiding in the bedroom, Abu Shamkhi arrived with a smile as braod as the sky. To tease him, the folks delayed introducing him to the intended boy. Finally, they left the place. Like Marlow in many a Joseph Conrad novel taking up the narration, the prostitute took up the narration and she later
told the folks what happened after they had left her with Abu Shamkhi. Abu Shamkhi entered the bedroom with a Nietzschesque will to power , but when he found that it was not a boy but a woman, he felt so disappointed that he left without doing a thing, without saying good bye, but
with a broken heart, mumbling repeatedly, "I have been fooled, I have been fooled."
Postscript:
Post-Modernism means leaving no stone unturned, everything is acceptable and nothing is impossible. In early 1970s answering with yes a question put to him in a television talk show whether or not he was homosexual, 10 c Williams made the American nation from coast to coast give him a standing ovation for his veracity and courage. Homosexuality has become an acadmic subject for which students get the PhD from Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Yale and what-not. Before me right now, a page of Exeter University staff research interests, and I read: Dr Margaretta Jolly, Lesbian and Gay Writing. The other day, I translated a report on human rights of minorities in the USA, and one clause of the report cautions both the state and the public against discriminations against Jews, Moslems, disabled persons and gays