Picture-Flash Fiction

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. 

My eyes glued to the picture. Heart, as if aching. I started thinking about it. About the picture.

The touch of the picture was not in death. People die in large numbers everyday. Neither was it in the odd couple’s failure in crossing the border into the first world. Into the land of the American dream. It is also an everyday news. The touch was in child. Squarely in the child. Remove the child from the picture, and the picture loses its touch. With the child, it was heartbreaking. 

Although the child was dead, but had he survived and was seen crying over the dead body of his father, the picture would still had been very powerful. Hugging dead child, crying alive child. Was the charm of the picture, I mean the charm in a negative way, in the painful way, would still be there if the child would have been sitting beside his father’s dead body just like that? Not crying. Just sitting. I tried to imagine this kind of a picture. Yes! It would still have been very gloomy. It would have depicted the innocence of the child of this horrible thing. His unawareness of the destruction of his future. 

I tried to imagine another picture. Both father and child alive, child sitting indifferently in father’s lap, and father crying bitterly, trying to protect his child. From water, crocodile or the US border security personnel, it doesn’t matter. It was still a forceful scene. Then I imagined the same picture with child crying too. Thud was still there.

Why was tragedy sticking to the child alone?

I imagined my father’s funeral. No problem. I could see him in a white shroud lying dead. Then I tried to imagine my child dead. It was unimaginable. He refused to die in my mind. Every time I imagined him dead, he would open his eyes with a flash and said “Bhoo!” I got irritated. I lit a cigarette, closed my eyes and focused hard to imagine him dead for at least full five seconds. This time again, just after a second, he opened up his eyes but before he could say “Bhoo!”, phone started ringing.