What we are witnessing at present owes its background to the killing of a young boy. I read the news about this young kid, Tufail Mattoo, who died just a few weeks ago and it just made me feel really upset. I shook me up.

My mother tells me that it’s good to cry when you feel someone’s pain, even if you’ve never met them before. I love my mother so much and I think that, maybe, she means that love can only grow in a heart that’s shed tears. I mean only when you’ve really felt this agony inside of you and wept as Jesus did for Lazarus, only then can you know the pain of falling in love with a woman of you’re dreams.

 It’s strange. Death occurs thousands of miles away, in another place and another time, and you read it on the computer screen and it affects you. I don’t know what you’re really supposed to do in those moments. Finish the cup of tea and get back to work? is it right to do that? I don’t remember exactly what I did when I read the tragic news of this young boy. Yes, I thought of him in my prayers, but the way he died just seemed totally unacceptable. It’s just not fair that you’re in the “wrong place at the wrong time” and that it, it’s the end. I can’t accept that. I know we believe that Allaha  decides the roads our lives follow, even though we are actually walking them, and that our time in this world is already known before we’re born.

I never knew this boy, Tufail Mattoo, but seeing his lifeless face on a computer screen, thousands of miles away here in Cleveland in the States, made me feel I like I wish I did know him and I wish he did achieve all these things. Every Kashmiri has some kind of sad story to tell, and so do I. But now, here I am, sitting on a chair in front my desk near the window in my room in Cleveland Ohio just down the street from NASA where I work. My elbows are on the table top and my hands are resting my face as I look into the computer screen. I’ve seen this boy’s face, Tufail Mattoo, lifeless, and I don’t know what to do, I don’t. So I’m listening to the David Bowie song, “Heroes”. The lyrics go like, “or we can be heroes, just for one day...” and my mind is dreaming away inside of me and creating another reality just to ease my guilt of not being able to do anything for this poor kid. And, you know what? Do you want to know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that I wish I was there and I wish I could have been a hero just for one day and told this kid just to take another way home. I can see him walking to what will be his death and I’m shouting at the top of my voice trying to tell him this.

My lips move, forming words, but without any sound. I can’t do anything to save him and it’s killing me. It really is. Please God, please, I don’t want him to die. I beg you, let me save him. Dear God, tell him, he’ll listen to you, I know he will, just tell him to take another way home!

 The song comes to an end and the dreaming stops. We are all too late. Tufail is dead…. But do you what keeps me going? It’s that I can feel he is in a timeless place with Allah and is looking at me and saying, “don’t give up Zamir!!”. He is in heaven. I know he is, because I saw him in a dream, I really did and he was covered in light. I think in the dream he smiled and I woke up, suddenly, as you do when someone creeps up behind you, and then says something, and you jump a little. My eyes open momentarily, and I smile as I remember this vision of seeing Tufail Mattoo. I smile because I know he’s okay and he’s not angry with us. My eyes close and I go back to sleep.

(Dr. Zamir Afsar is a young British-Kashmiri Applied Mathematician. He is currently a research fellow in theoretical Fluid Mechanics at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland Ohio, USA. He has a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering from Cambridge University and last year was a visiting faculty member at Kashmir University, Srinagar)

Lastupdate on : Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:30:00 Mecca time
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