Short story: Mullah Nasruddin got upset with his father-in-law's pursuit of useless tasks.

Tweet

Mullah Nasruddin's father-in-law had moved in with the Mullah and his wife, more-or-less permanently now. He had been living with them for over 6 months now, and he would be hard to move on now. He was already a fixture in the house, in more ways than one. The Mullah's father-in-law used to like to clean things, but which never needed to be cleaned. He would clean the saucers underneath the Mullah's pot-plants, for example. And, he would brush the dirt there into the bin, and wash the saucer with a wet rag too. The Mullah was always needing to top up his pot-plants with more soil because of this. But, in contrast to this useless cleanliness, when he was eating, the father-in-law, was as dirty as could be. Food crumbs would always end up all over the table, and on the floor too. When he washed his dinner plate, stuck-on food invariably was left on some part of it, which the Mullah had to clean off again himself. Now, the Mullah had some white river pebbles that he had gathered himself, from the nearby river to his home, and he had placed them underneath his pot-plant collection, to stop them from sitting on the actual ground. The old man, with his rag in hand, would hand clean, individually, every, and every last stone here too. The dirt, clinging to the ground side of the stones, he would also brush off into the bin, then he would wash the stones in a sudsy water mix, before placing them back again, now spotlessly clean, to where they were before, on the ground. What also annoyed the Mullah was that the old guy would always over-water his precious prized orchids too. He had lost half of them already, and he was now very worried about the rest now too. He had told Abdullah, his father-in-law, not to water them at all, as the Mullah himself watered them as needed, about once a fortnight, or so, depending on the weather. The old guy, though, seemed to want to water them though whenever the thought come into his head to do so, and which was nearly every day, as he could not remember much more than a day ahead, and sometimes this was not even an hour ahead. He was losing his marbles, his memory, his faculties, that is if he ever had any of these to begin with, the Mullah mused sadly to himself. The Mullah did use this material, though, as noted down in his journal, for his next lecture, in the local mosque the next weekend. His father-in-law was at least providing him with preaching ideas, that he garnered from him. In his talk to the villagers on the next Saturday night, he said that: "Filling up idle time with useless tasks is the past-time of the ones without a real cause, or course, to their living." "These are the time fritterers, the fools of life, who never see the true value of time, nor of life too." "Anything to while away the time will do, for these types to occupy their time with." "But really they should realise that wasting time is akin to wasting life, every moment of which is precious and deserving of proper attachment of love too, rather than spending it instead, in useless mind robotics." Photo Credit: The photo used here belongs to me, the author, of this piece The Mullah took a lot of pride in his prize-winning orchids.