ncert books class 11 english snapshots chapter 1 · Section 3

The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse horses the way my cousin Mourad and I were, it wasn’t stealing. It wouldn’t become stealing until we offered to sell the horse, which of course, I knew we would never do. Let me put on some clothes, I said. All right, he said, but hurry. I leaped into my clothes. I jumped down to the yard from the window and leaped up onto the horse behind my cousin Mourad. That year we lived at the edge of town, on Walnut Avenue. Behind our house was the country: vineyards, orchards, irrigation ditches, and country roads. In less than three minutes we were on Olive Avenue, and then the horse began to trot. The air was new and lovely to breathe. The feel of the horse running was wonderful. My cousin Mourad who was considered one of the craziest members of our family began to sing. I mean, he began to roar. Every family has a crazy streak in it somewhere, and my cousin Mourad was considered the natural descendant of the crazy streak in our tribe. Before him was our uncle Khosrove, an enormous man with a powerful head of black hair and the largest moustache in the San Joaquin Valley2, a man so furious in temper, so irritable, so impatient that he stopped anyone from talking by roaring, It is no harm; pay no attention to it. That was all, no matter what anybody happened to be talking about. Once it was his own son Arak running eight blocks to the barber’s shop where his father was having his moustache trimmed to tell him their house was on fire. This man Khosrove sat up in the chair and roared, It is no harm; pay no attention to it. The barber said, But the boy says your house is on fire. So Khosrove roared, Enough, it is no harm, I say. My cousin Mourad was considered the natural descendant of this man, although Mourad’s father was Zorab, who was practical and nothing else. That’s how it was in our tribe. A man could be the father of his son’s flesh, but that did not mean that he was also the father of his spirit. The distribution of the various kinds of spirit of our tribe had been from the beginning capricious and vagrant. We rode and my cousin Mourad sang. For all anybody knew we were still in the old country where, at least according to one of the long interior valleys of California -