EYEWITNESS 

            When the first bullet struck me, I felt like my whole body was skewered on a blazing hot poker.  Then the second bullet hit me.  It was like my whole existence was wrapped tightly in a sheet of pain.  I had no idea where the third bullet hit me, when it hit me and if there were any other bullets hitting me after that.  The world was spinning around me like a whirlpool and I was drowning further and further in it.

            Once you faint, you have no concept of pain – but the pain is still there.  The blood was trickling out of the holes in my body like air slowly seeping out of a puncture hole in a tire and breathing in the life-sustaining air was very arduous.  I felt the life seeping out of me slowly and was futilely trying to escape the pain by twitching and turning.

            Finally, I reached my final destination – peace and silence.

            My house is beside a main road and the road is wide enough for two-way traffic.  Dividing the road is a man-made rivulet that the city had covered in places to help control the odor emitting from the rivulet.  This covered area was also beneficial to pedestrians.          

            One of the windows in my room faces the street outside my house and I often look out it – especially when someone has hit the brakes loudly or there is some sort of commotion out on the road.  I also look out the window when something my wife has said has disturbed or upset me and I try to escape by letting the outside world distract me.  But that was when fear wasn’t swimming through my veins like some fatal disease.  I am not afraid of death.  Death is inevitable but I’m afraid for those innocent and oblivious people who are still under the illusion that the road of life is a straight road and I’m afraid that they will be trampled by death’s devastation.

            It has become the norm in the city for four or five people to be killed daily.  Before, there would be only petty crimes in the wind.  Then the weather changed and brought with it bank robberies and kidnappings.  Next, killing wayfarers came like a tornado.  But since mosques’ floors and walls have been painted with blood,  imam badas have become slaughterhouses and people holding conversations in their houses have been murdered, since then, fear has started running through my blood.

            If I hear a tire blow out on the street or an electric transformer blow up with a  bang, then the person inside me that is living in fear starts shaking and my heart starts beating so fast that I think it will stop.

            When I heard the sound of gunfire, I was at the window and fear was wrapped around me like a cloak.  That’s why I am an eyewitness to my own murder.

            I was on holiday from work on that day.  On holidays, either there is a ton of things to do, or nothing at all.  I kept reading the newspaper until I was tired and fed up and was thinking, how could I stop these murders?   In all of this, is the only role that I am to play that of a silent observer?  Where are the people who are able to stop this reign of fear and terrorism?  What could be more important than stopping all of this?       

            I threw the newspaper to the side and picked up the burden of my thoughts and went to look out the window.  A white car drove up to the window and stopped beneath it.  I couldn’t see how many people were sitting in the car.  Yes, once they started shooting, I could tell that there were four passengers, and a fifth person who was driving.

            The people who murdered me were not my enemies – I had no enemies – and hence, could not recognize who they were.

            Right next to my house, there is a multi-story building under construction.  Due to a disagreement between the corporation and contractor construction had stopped and the building was incomplete.  But there were people living on the first and second floors of the building and according to tradition, there were stores on the ground floor of the building – but merely constructing stores is not enough, you must also provide for other business aspects, such as parking and marketing, which they had ignored.  The disagreement between the contractor and the corporation was also reported in the news and as a result, the market did not flourish.  A restaurant opened by combining four or five stores and the remaining stores were devoted to car repairs.  The restaurant did business because of the other remaining stores.  Next to the restaurant was a cigarette and pan stall.  Old cars, new cars and the music playing in the restaurant kept the area lively; and then adding to the noise and atmosphere were the pedestrians and the noise from the two-way traffic.

            In the beginning when I built my house in the area, I was irritated by the noise coming from outside, but because of the rising prices of houses in the city and the knowledge that even by selling this house I would not be able to afford a house in another neighborhood, I accustomed myself to the noise.  I also began to realize that I was safer in this area than I may have been in others.  When my children are coming home from school, one of the shopkeepers will help them cross the road safely.  When my wife haggles over the price of vegetables with the vegetable seller, a mechanic will come with his wrench in hand and threaten the vegetable seller until he agrees to a lower price.  Every time I walk by the stores, the shopkeepers greet me with respect. 

            When the white car stood in front of my window I thought that it was there to get work done at one of the mechanic’s shops.  At first, I had no suspicions about the car but then when no one came out of the car and I had been standing at my window watching it for a while, then it became a puzzle for me.  Why was it standing there?  Did they have to go to a house nearby?  If they were here to see a mechanic, then why hadn’t a mechanic come out to check the car?  Were the passengers in the car waiting for someone they had an appointment with here?  How many people were in the car, anyway?

            I lit a cigarette and thought about all the questions running in my head and flicked the burnt match out the window which landed on the roof of the car.  A match is practically weightless so there was no noise when it fell and even if there was a noise, the people in the car didn’t hear it.  Maybe they were busy talking to each other.  Even if there was a noise, the noise from the traffic would have drowned it out.

            I was caught in my web of thoughts.  I smoked two cigarettes while standing by the window.  I was pressed up against the grill on the window trying to get a glimpse of the people in the car.    

            Another car came to a stop across the street.  A young man got out of the car.  The car standing beneath my window started and the young man bent to talk to his companions in the car he had come out of.  Then he straitened and waved the car off.  When the car had left he waited for a break in traffic to cross the street.  He ran across the street and reached the median and stood on top of one of the coverings over the rivulet.  At the same time, the car beneath my window began to move and then bullets began to fly from the car.  When the first bullet hit the young man that was standing on the median on top of one of the rivulet coverings, I realized that the young man was me!

            I had never seen anyone being murdered in my life.  And now that I had witnessed a murder, it was my own.  After letting loose a burst of gunfire, the car weaved its way through traffic and drove off.  No one could stop the car – there wasn’t even time for anyone to note down the license plate number.  People were in such a state that no one even thought to take the dying man lying in the middle of two roads to the hospital.  The stores were quickly closed, the restaurant closed its doors, pedestrians ran into small alleys to hide and the two-way traffic, after hearing the sound of gunfire, were prompted into driving in a haphazard manner.  Cars collided on both sides of the road.  There was a traffic jam and I, I was in the midst of it all. 

            When the people all around were reassured that the car that the bullets were coming from was indeed gone, the drivers that were involved in accidents began emerging from their cars and were trying to pin the blame of the accident on the other party.  I was still lying in between the two roads.  Then, from somewhere, there or four young men came running towards me.  The stores reopened, the restaurant once again opened its doors for business and a crowd of people began to gather around me. 

            I was just a body lying in the middle of two roads and my clothes were soaked in blood and dirt to such an extent that it looked like I had just rolled around in mud; I couldn’t move and the only thing that I could see was the sky above me, but I could hear the voices all around me and the consensus seemed to be that I was dead.  My time on earth was done and that’s why I had no inkling of how long I lay there, when the ambulance arrived, when the police arrived and what witnesses told the police they saw and how the investigation progressed.

            When I regained consciousness, I was in a hospital.  My wife was sitting close by and also present in the room was my wife’s older brother reading a newspaper.  On the bedside table there were a few vials of medication.         

            After thanking God that I was okay, my wife informed me, “You’ve regained consciousness after a full twenty-four hours.”

            “Really?  Then wasn’t I hit by the bullets?”

            My wife laughed and said, “You were standing at your window.”

            “There was a war between the police and gang members outside your house.  One gang member was killed.  All the details are printed in today’s newspaper.  Here, take a look,” and saying this, my brother-in-law placed the newspaper in front of me.

            “But…”

            “You didn’t see anything; and even if you had seen something, forget it,” my brother-in-law advised me.

            “But there weren’t police there and that white car had five people in it and…”

            “I told you, forget everything.”  My brother-in-law once again advised me.

            “But I even remember the license plate number.  It was…”

            My wife cut me off and said, “Why are you thinking about it?”

            My brother-in-law turned to my wife and told her, “Explain it to him, otherwise he’ll be in the middle of the police and the gang members.”

            After listening to what her brother had to say, my wife picked up one of the vials, shook out a pill, poured a glass of water and handing me both said, “Here, take this pill, you’ll feel better.”

            I shoved her hand away.  “They weren’t gang members nor were they the police.  I got shot three times.  The first hit my chest, the second hit me in my shoulder and the third…”

            My wife turned to her brother and said, “Brother, go call the doctor.”

            I began to twitch and shake as if I had once again been hit by bullets.  To keep me still, my wife threw her weight on top of me.

            A nurse and doctor entered the room and seeing the state I was in, hurriedly filled a syringe with some sort of liquid and administered it to my shoulder. 

They injected an anesthetic to a dead man to render him unconscious so that he wouldn’t be able to give an eyewitness testimony to his own death.