Sheikh Chilli Is Dead

For weeks after that, Sheikh Chilli kept checking his feet. He wore two pairs of socks. He sat close to the cooking fire. Every morning, before he even opened his eyes, he wiggled his toes to make sure they were warm.

Then winter came, and one cold morning Sheikh Chilli went to the river to fetch water. The water was icy. He waded in up to his knees to fill the pot, and when he came out, his feet were as cold as two blocks of stone.

He stared at them in horror. “They are cold,” he said. “My feet are cold. The holy man said so. That means I am dead.”

So he did what he thought a dead man ought to do. He lay down carefully in the middle of the road, closed his eyes, folded his hands on his chest, and stayed perfectly still.

Before long, four men came along the road and found him there. “Poor fellow,” they said. “It's Sheikh Chilli. He must have died of the cold.” They lifted him up on their shoulders to carry him to the burial ground on the other side of town.

They reached a place where the road split in two. “We go left,” said the first man.

“No, right is shorter,” said the second.

“Left goes past the well,” said the third. “Right goes past the market.”

“I am telling you, it's left,” said the fourth.

They stood there arguing, with Sheikh Chilli lying on their shoulders, for a long, long time. Sheikh Chilli listened politely. He waited. He waited some more. At last he could not bear it any longer. He opened one eye and lifted his head.

“Excuse me,” he said. “When I was alive, I always took the road on the right. It's much quicker.”

The four men screamed. They dropped him in the road and ran in four different directions, and nobody in town spoke about anything else for a month.

Sheikh Chilli sat up, rubbed his head, and looked at his feet. They were warm again from all that excitement. “Well,” he said happily, “it seems I have come back to life,” and he went home for his dinner.