THE FOG
PART ONE
Section 11
There was a hoary old one clutching a hubble
bubble
And an eighteen year old, yet to grow a
stubble.
With his hubble bubble the old man the girl
poked.
The boy slapped her, while on tears she
choked.
Said he, ”I will drink anything, so long as it is liquor,”
With one stocky leg made as if to viciously
kick her.
They brought the curly haired one to
his knees with whips,
Mouthing invectives, sneers playing on
bulbous lips.
They clambered into a monolithic waiting truck.
The boy squirmed on the ground,
thunderstruck.
Into the back of the truck the girl they
bundled,
Switched off the headlights and onward it
trundled.
Then someone pulled out a gun and aimed at the boy,
Heartlessly erasing those moments of
unvarnished joy.
I stood transfixed in the shadow of the
trees.
My knees started shaking, stronger grew the
breeze.
A chill passed up my spine, and I violently
shuddered.
Was I witness to a boy just being brutally
murdered?
I shook my head, absolutely traumatized and
frazzled
When I was by a sudden luminosity dazzled.
Fog Over the River -- Yevgeniy Burmakin
“Hubble bubble” is one of the terms that have several, unrelated, meanings: hubbub, a bubbling sound, or, in astronomy, a departure of the local value of the Hubble constant (the rate at which the universe expands) from its globally averaged value’ (Edwin Hubble’s work made clear the expansion of the universe.) But Santosh most likely refers to a simple type of hookah, a pipe in which the smoke is drawn through water, causing a bubbling sound. “Hookah” is derived from the Hindi-Urdu “huqqa.” In Persian it is known as a galvan. Its earliest appearance was in a quatrain by Ahli Shirazi, a Persian poet who died in 1535. Hakim Abu’l-Fath Gilani migrated from northern Persia to Hamarastan and became a physician in the Mughal court. When Asad Beg, the ambassador of the Bijapur sultanate, encouraged Akbar I to take up smoking, Gilani introduced the galvan to India. Its use soon became a status symbol for the Indian aristocracy and gentry. Since tobacco was not introduced to the region until the 17th century, the hookah was probably used to “purify” marijuana. (Actually, hookah use does not filter out various toxins.) William Hickey, shortly after arriving in Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1775, was told “you might as well be out of the world as out of the fashion. Here everybody uses a hookah, and it is impossible to get on without ...[I] have frequently heard men declare they would much rather be deprived of their dinner than their hookah." From Persia the “argyleh” was also introduced to Egypt, where it was perfected. In the 18th century the most fashionable pipes in Egypt were known as Karim Khan after the Persian ruler Mohammad Karim Khan-e Zand; this name was also used in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. In 1831 “The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction,” the first long-running cheap periodical in the UK (a twopenny weekly), reported, “In India, the lower orders use a hookah or hubble bubble, which is made of a cocoa-nut shell well cleaned out, having a hole through the soft eye of the shell, and another on the opposite side, a little lower down, the first of which is used for the chauffoir, and the other to suck or draw the smoke from.”
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