SOHAILA ABDULALI

My grandfather was a wild man. He was murdered when my father was just 17, so I never met him, but my clan still talks about him: Najam took a camel up the stairs of the mosque; Najam built up a business empire in Japan and india; Najam had a ferocious, red-wattled temper, and didn’t take any guff from anyone. Najam was shot on the train between the Old Delhi and New Delhi railway stations, on his way to sign some papers that would have made the family rich for generations.

This is a true story. There was a young man named Ratan Chand, who was full of hope and promise in 1945. He was engaged to a lovely girl, there was freedom in the air as it looked like Britannia would not rule the waves for much longer, and one day, on a lark, he went to a fortune-teller.

You will die in six months, the fortune-teller told him. Ratan Chand laughed nervously. Of course he didn’t really believe in this mumbo-jumbo. That evening he had dinner with the girl he was to marry, and her brother. Laughing, he told the brother – he would never speak directly to the girl – about his encounter with the fortune-teller.

The brother was horrified. This was terrible news! Widows in India have pitiful lives, and it was his duty to save his sister. His family broke her engagement to the doomed man.

Ratan Chand went wild with rage and fear. Maybe the fortune-teller was right. Already his life was going to hell. In the time-honored tradition of those who don’t wish to go alone, he decided to take as many people as he could to the hereafter with him. He bought a gun and became a railway bandit. He terrorized the Bombay-Delhi train and held up first-class passengers.

One day someone glanced at him on the platform, just as the breeze blew his long tunic up to expose his gun. He was arrested (this was British India – Indians couldn’t just go around carrying guns) and immediately told his captors his whole story. He had frightened and robbed many people, he said, but there was one mad Muslim who seemed incapable of fear.

“Arre, I pointed my gun right at him, and said, ‘Give me your money or I’ll kill you!’” he recalled. “Everyone else would tremble when they saw the gun and give me everything, but not this man. He just shouted at me.” My grandfather wasn’t about to be threatened by anyone. “What rubbish!” he said. “Who do you think you are? I’ll see how you kill me.” So Ratan Chand killed him.

I have spent my life listening to this story, and trying to decide whether my grandfather was a hero or a fool. It’s important for me to know, because I was once in a similar situation, and I took the other way out: capitulated, and lived to tell my tale.

Exactly six months after he went to the fortune-teller, Ratan Chand was hanged for his crimes.

SOHAILA ABDULALI lives on the Lower East Side. She has published a novel and three children's books, as well as short stories and articles in publications all over the world. She has just finished a memoir of life with an aboriginal woman.