Short story: The Art of Fiction (in the Year of the Pandemic)

He had been shot in the eye and there was no denying it for the police, for there was a medical report that said it, and so there had to be an 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 devastation that was his face, but there was no statement that said so clearly and there had been no medical examination of the injury for ascertaining the distance, and given that both these things could not be produced now (quite a few months had passed since the event), it was found to be proper by the FIR-writer to exclude 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-kilometer away from his house.

Before he had been shot in the eye from an indeterminable distance when he was about half-a-kilometer 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 didn’t 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-kilometer away from his house there was really no need for there to be dozens of men 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 about half-a-kilometer away from his house.

He had lost consciousness after receiving the bullet in his left eye, 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.

A few minutes after he had received a bullet in his left eye, he had regained consciousness and, finding no one around to help him and fearing that being shot in the eye meant certain death, had asked his god to not let him die on the street, to not let him die like a stray dog, to let him at least reach his doorstep, and his prayers were seemingly heard, for he managed to stand up on his feet and walk the fifty or so meters home, but since the distance was already mentioned as half-a-kilometre, and since a half-a-kilometer is a big distance for a man with a leaking skull 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 family scampered for means to take him to the hospital till a rickshaw puller of indeterminate faith was found, who then carried him and two family members to the hospital, though not before being nearly intercepted on two occasions by the “Jai Jai!” mob, whom he managed to rush past on each occasion with such extraordinary speed that it was later surmised by the family members, especially because they couldn’t remember his face, that the rickshaw-puller might have belonged to a different world, but since the FIR had placed the complainant half-a-kilometer away from his residence and 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 – that all the injured 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 he would live, 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 police station to lodge a complaint, but he found that a complaint was not an easy thing to lodge, for on the first few occasions the police didn’t find it worth their time, then the pandemic swooped in with lockdown in tow, imposing a moratorium on things as the police busied themselves raining laathis on the virus, and then lakhs of workers were locked up in the city, and while all this happened, as injunctions led to suffering, other people’s problems of hunger and homesickness began coalescing with his own, so much so that his suffering began to take on the form of an injunction, until the lockdown was lifted at last and there was new hope and he could land up at the police station again to narrate the story of how was shot in the eye.

After the lockdown was over, he went to the police station, where 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 beat 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 was taken to the hospital in a rickshaw – which he then gave to the policeman ; 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).

More than four months after he had received a bullet in his left eye and nearly a month after having his statement receipted at the police station, a young policeman visited him to deliver a copy of the FIR which, given how it rendered the story, dumbfounded the man at every turn of the page and finally prompted him to ask the policeman, who was still wearing his mask, “Where does this come from, bhai?”, at which the policeman took the papers from the man’s hands and found a mention of a particular date which he tapped at 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, thus a day when he had been in hospital, unconscious, when he could not have possibly 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 had visited him – no police, no media, no well-wishers – and so he shook his head firmly and folded his hands and said, “No no no,” 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, 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.

shouting their slogans, members from one community gathered on the XYZ road…
the complainant, who lives only half-a-kilometer away from this road, was a part of the group…
the group began marching towards a mohalla…
the members of that mohalla congregated in defence…
there was unprovoked firing in the air from the first group…
the firing was retaliated to by the second group…
a stray bullet, which may have originated from either group, hit the complainant in his left eye…
the complainant was, like all others injured on the XYZ Road that day, brought to the SPG hospital…
the statement was recorded as soon as the complainant was in a lucid state…

This series of articles on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on publishing is curated by Kanishka Gupta.