The Art of Fiction in the First Year of the Pandemic (short story)
"He had been shot in the eye and there was no way for the police to deny it..."
He had been shot in the eye and there was no way for the police to deny it, for there was a medical report that said as much, and so there had to be a First Information Report (FIR) that handled the fact that he had been shot in the eye.
He had been shot in the eye from point-blank range and you could tell this from the way that his face had been devastated, but the medical examination of the injury didn’t venture out to opine on the distance from which he had been shot, and given that quite a few months had passed since the event and no third-party opinion could now be produced, it was found to be proper to exclude from the FIR the fact that he had been shot in the eye from point-blank range.
When he had been shot in the eye from an indeterminable distance he was only a stone’s throw from his home, but since the scenario of being attacked so close to one’s home spoke too loudly about the courage of the attacker(s), this fact was omitted and the FIR found a way of saying that he had been shot in the eye at a location which was about half-a-kilometre away from his house.
Before he had been shot in the eye from an indeterminable range when he was about half-a-kilometre away from his house, he had been surrounded by nearly two dozen men, many of whom he could identify on account of being their neighbour and all of whom had shouted ‘Jai Jai!' as they punched and kicked him, but since the medical report did not mention any injury other than his eye and since there were no recordings of the ‘Jai Jai!’ slogan, these facts were omitted, whereas the reasoning that for him to be shot in the eye from an indeterminable range when he was about half-a-kilometre away from his house there was really no need for dozens of men to be in proximity was considered, and so the FIR didn’t mention any names and simply found a way of saying that he had been shot in the eye during cross-firing when he was about half-a-kilometre away from his house.
He had lost consciousness after being shot, and his attackers, at a mysterious and indeterminable distance from him, had left him for dead, but this fact had no particular relevance for anything and so the FIR didn’t mention it at all.
He had regained consciousness after a few minutes and, finding no one around to help him and fearing that being shot in the eye meant certain death, had asked Allah not to let him die on the street, to not let him die like a stray dog, so to speak, to let him at least reach his doorstep, and his prayers were seemingly heard, for he managed to stand up on his two feet and walk the fifty or so meters to home, but since the distance was already mentioned as half-a-kilometre, and since a half-kilometre is a big distance for a man with a leaking face to cover, the FIR made no mention of his homeward walk.
After he had received a bullet in his left eye from an indeterminable distance and somehow managed to reach his house, his terrified family members looked around and miraculously found a rickshaw-puller of indeterminate faith who then carried him and two others to the hospital, though not before being nearly intercepted on two occasions by the ‘Jai Jai!’ mob, whom the rickshaw-puller managed to rush past on both occasions with such extraordinary speed that it was later surmised by the family members, especially because they couldn’t remember the man’s face, that the rickshaw-puller might have been a farishta, but since the FIR had placed the complainant half-a-kilometre away from his residence and since there was no mention of a walk home, it could not have possibly included the story about the rickshaw-puller, a story that was anyway leaning on the supernatural, and since the police had maintained in the media—and also in some other FIRs about some other similar events—that all the injured people of this area had been taken to the hospital by them, the only thing that could be said in the FIR was that after he had received a bullet during cross-firing when he was about half-a-kilometer away from his house the complainant had been rushed to the hospital by the police.
After he had received the bullet in his left eye, after he had been rushed to the hospital (by the police), after the doctors had said that he would live, after he had survived and recovered, after the riots had ended and he had returned home—after the worst was over, so to speak—a burning desire for justice had taken root in his heart and he had gone to the nearby police station to lodge a complaint, but there he found that a complaint was not an easy thing to lodge, for on the first few occasions the police simply didn’t find whatever he had to say worth their time, and then the pandemic swooped in with the lockdown in tow, bringing in months during which the police were too busy raining laathis on the virus, and then the city became a prison with lakhs of workers and masons and barbers and cleaners and househelps and more locked up, with lakhs more walking past borders through farms and jungles and naalas and ravines, with thousands dying of sunstroke or dysentery, with hundreds being run over by vehicles, and as all this happened, as injunctions led to suffering all around him, in his mind other people’s problems of hunger and homesickness began coalescing with his own, which is to say that his suffering also began to take the form of an injunction, until the lockdown was lifted at last and he landed up at the police station to once again try to narrate the story of how he had been shot in the eye.
At the police station, just as earlier, the policeman who was supposed to take down his complaint showed no interest in how he had been shot in the eye and in fact threatened him with consequences if he ever spoke of it again, but luckily this threat was overheard by a lawyer who was for some reason present in the room, who then confronted the policeman on the man’s behalf and wrote down, there and then, the man’s story—a story with facts: that the man was only a stone’s throw from his home, that a crowd had surrounded him and beaten him, that he had been shot from point-blank range by neighbour A, and neighbours B, C, D, E, and F had also been in the crowd, that they had left him for dead, that he had walked back home, that he had been taken to the hospital in a rickshaw—which he then gave to the policeman with a stern look on his face; and yet, and yet, and yet, the FIR that came out at the end of it all said that the man had been shot in cross-firing, that he had received a bullet in his left eye from an indeterminable distance, and that he had been rushed to the hospital by the police.
Several months after he had been shot in the left eye, and nearly a month after having his statement receipted at the police station, a young policeman visited the man to deliver a copy of the FIR which, given how it rendered to story, dumbfounded the man at every turn of the page and finally prompted him to ask the masked policeman, ‘Where does this come from, bhai?’, at which the policeman took the papers from the man’s hands and tapped at the mention of a particular date as he said, ‘From the statement you gave at the hospital,’ and seeing this date shocked the man, for it was one day after he had been shot, the day when he had been unconscious in hospital, the day when he could not possibly have given any statement, and the truth was that he could not have given any statement throughout his time at the hospital, nobody other than his family—no policeman, no journalist, no well-wisher—had visited him there, and so he shook his head firmly and folded his hands and said, ‘No, this can’t be true,’ and attempted to explain the truth to the policeman, who then started talking abstractedly about the qualities of ‘literature’, about how good, credible literature was never about the actual and always about mixing the necessary with the probable, how, in fact, even the probable didn’t count for much and it was only the necessary that counted, it was and would always be the first object, and the probable need only serve the necessary, and so on, till his tone changed suddenly and he arrived at the matter of the FIR, saying that the document that the man had received today was not a document of actuality but of necessity, and all that was probable had been added to it only to buffet that necessity, and so, all things considered, his final advice to the man would be that he acknowledge the necessity, that he accept what was written as truth, that he forget about everything else, for if he failed to do so he could become a man who, one fine day when was a fair distance away from his home, might be shot in his right eye from an indeterminable distance.
The story was first published in Scroll.in in August 2020. I have edited it after that first publication. A version of it was translated into Hindi by Bharatbhooshan Tiwari and published on the Samalochan website in June 2021. Link to the Hindi story—कहानी लिखने की कला—here.
The context is the North East Delhi Riots of 2020.