Lahore nights pt II

In another house in Lahore that night, a boy was trying to sleep. He was a little nervous. He had had an altercation with someone else that day. Usually he didn’t care. None of them mattered. Well - most of them did not matter. But this person was also the son of a huge landowner. And as a zameendaar, he had the same resources and guards and security that this boy did. So the boy was having trouble falling asleep. What if the other one sent some guards to his house to create problems. He had told the guards at home to watch out. They were gundaas, through and through. Big mustaches. Fat stomachs. The men themselves came in all shapes and sizes. The only things that remained consistent were the mustaches and that all of them had bulging stomachs. And. And the eyes lined with dark kohl, like mud beneath the eyes of soldiers in camouflage.

His guards were thus on high alert. He would be fine. As the night dredged on, he closed his eyes and fell into a light sleep. Soon, he fell further into the throes of sleep.

The horn didn’t wake him up. But once he was awake, his brain had processed and stored that the horn came first. The horn was the catalyst. Then came the bullets. Sprays of bullets from the powerful machine guns that his father had finagled somehow. They weren’t legal. But legal wasn’t a hard and fast rule in this country. Money moved laws. Money also bent them before changing them. Powerful machine guns. In the hands of half a dozen guards. Who had been on high alert. The sounds of bullets biting into metal, some screams. Woke him up. He didn’t dare go to the porch for fear that the assailants coming into his home might attack him. But wait. Something was wrong. He was terrified. No. Wait. There weren’t that many. It was just the sound of approximately his people firing. Why didn’t the others shoot back. He stepped out slowly, tentatively, slinking in the shadows on his porch and saw a car with kids sliding out, blood pooling around. The shooting had stopped. These were the people who their maalik had warned them about. With a growing horror, he watched. Two kids were slowly crawling painfully across the road to the other side. Cars were loud and obnoxious, swerving around them. No one cared about the shooting. Not yet. Soon people would gather around to watch the results of the spectacle. Not yet. The two boys were slowly crossing the road, in pain, it seemed. No shit, Sherlock.

No one was watching him. But with a shrug, he went inside and tried to dispense of the sinking feeling in his stomach.

Before it was over, his father would send him to Dubai for a few months. Until things calmed down. He would hear about the parents of the slain six boys raising a ruckus. Slowly, they would be intimated into being silent. People trailing them. Gunshots in their backyard. Eventually it would die down. Then he would return home.