Picture
by
Tipu Salman Makhdoom
It was ten. In the June of Lahore, ten is not morning. It’s scorching and the sun is at seventy degrees. Rising at five, sun is almost half way it’s daily journey already. Everything looks exhausted by this time. It was in that midday kind of slumber that I saw that picture; on Facebook. Some newspaper had published it at the top of a story. It was a tropical type of a river bed. A man was lying facing down. From the neck of his wet T-Shirt had grown another head; quite small. The caption of the story was meant to convey that father and son were hugging while they were trying to illegally cross the Mexican-US border through the river, and they were still hugging after the death of their dreams and their bodies. It was a touching picture.
