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Posted on April 23, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

Hamid was flat on his ass. His back propped up by the scarred and pitted wall. His nerveless legs stretched out in front of him like those of a child in the throes of a not-standing tantrum. The pistol in his hand was empty. Though his face was bloody it wasn’t his. The blood pumping out of his side was. Everything before him swam in and out of view. Not that there was much to see. There is rarely anything worth looking at in a bombed out tenement. There’s always something worth searching for though, like family jewels that hadn’t been pawned yet or, even rarer, some money. So he was staring at the cratered, damaged, shadowy skeletons of walls and remembering how he had come to be like this.

It all began when the white man visited. He came bearing gifts. He was a friend of his sister’s from when she had studied at the foreign university. She had returned more conservative than she had left. She had taken to wearing traditional clothing and praying regularly. At first it had pleased his mother. After a while it alarmed her. In a quaint twist of fate she had been relieved when a white man came to visit her daughter. It meant that she hadn’t been completely won over by the extreme views taught in their countries in the name of preserving the sanctity of their race and religion. Unbeknownst to his mother the white man, a fellow who had only introduced himself as Jim, was not so much a boyfriend as he was a supplier. He had sauntered around their neighbourhood for three days smiling an impossibly white, unnaturally even smile at every man who crossed his path. By the third day, several men smiled back and a few even patted him on the arm.

Jim had a personal view, a view he took care to keep from people like Hamid and his sister Sameena. He liked to say, when he was back home drinking with his mates, “why bother killing those sons of bitches when we can simply supply them the tools to kill themselves?” It wasn’t a particularly funny statement but it always drew guffaws from his companions. So Jim had walked around Hamid’s neighbourhood for three days imagining what the people he was smiling at would look like with their heads blown off (or arms, or legs…he wasn’t picky as long as they bought from him and hurt each other).

A fortnight after Jim left, Sameena went around telling anyone willing to listen that it was time to cull out the non-believers so that they could destroy the white man’s world view from a position of unity. Hamid happened to be within earshot. He let their mother know and she scolded Sameena upon her return home for as long as her voice held out. When she slid down to the floor, a blubbering mass of tears and coughing Sameena looked down upon her without any affection or pity. Sameena left home that very night packing little other than the suitcase Jim left behind.

The infighting began soon after. Radio shows were constantly being interrupted to bring news of conflict in various parts of the city, both old and new. Hamid cried the day he heard of the destruction of one of the city’s oldest and most famous monuments. It was decried as a talisman from a time when the country had been ruled by heathens and razed to the ground by an angry mob fuelled by sheer fury.

By the time the invaders arrived, the people were already used to gun fire, shelling and surprise attacks by men with RPGs. Few resisted. Fewer survived.

Hamid lasted three days. Until a shell ripped through the north wall of their residential complex and opened an entry point for soldiers that was impossible to guard. He stabbed two soldiers, one in the heart and another in the neck, before his luck ran out and a slug caught him in the gut. As the life bled out of him he wondered what the point of it all had been.

He died before the soldiers finished ransacking the rubble.

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