My Mother — Page 21
Moral Training 21 spectators, one of whom gibed, ‘Ladies, you might as well proceed laughing. ’ They heard and endured their taunts in silence and arrived at the house of mourning in a mood of suppressed grief, where also no wailing was indulged in. The type of mourning rites then cur- rent among rural families were soon after swept away into obliv- ion by a severe outbreak of bubonic plague, which epidemic rav- aged town and country for a number of years at the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. continued to be guided in her training in moral and spiritual values through her dreams, in most of which she saw my grandfather. On one occasion in 1903, she asked him in her dream to change a defective rupee that she had. He took the rupee and gave her one in exchange saying, ‘This is the only one I have, take good care of it as it is stamped with the Credo’; that is to say, La ilaha illallah, Muhammadun Rasulullah (‘There is no one worthy of worship save Allah, Muhammad is His Messenger’). She realised that her dream meant that she would be bestowed another son, but that her third son, Hamdullah Khan—who was somewhat weak and enjoyed indifferent health—would die; and so it came about. A few months later Asadullah Khan was born, and shortly after Hamdullah Khan died of measles. The bereaved parents bore the loss with exemplary steadfastness.