The death that should shame us all

Who are they and who are we?

—Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Nehm

In Pakistan today, in this holy month of Ramazan, the steadfast and the sinners, the holy men and the hungry worshippers, the praying population and the prayer bead holders, the pious and the pulpit fiefdom, should all be whispering only one human name. Irfan Masih. Over and over again. Irfan Masih, Irfan Masih, Irfan Masih.

Who is Irfan Masih, you ask? Why the ‘fuss’? On a hot June day, 30-year-old Irfan Masih, a sanitary worker in Umerkot, Sindh, was severely injured cleaning a manhole and fell unconscious. He was taken to the Umerkot civil hospital covered in sewage sludge. The doctor on duty refused to treat him because he was fasting and was reluctant to touch the patient. Masih died three hours later, untouched, on a hospital bed, surrounded by medical staff and doctors. The irony is that Umerokot is one of the few examples in Pakistan where a large part of the population comprises diverse ethnic and religious communities. One would think an organically diverse population would be a more accepting of others. But we are so wrong.

Irfan Masih is more than that. He is the example of where Pakistan stands today. He is our collective conscious. He is the result of our silence and complacency. He is our indifference to a beating heart. He is how far along we have stagnated and suffocated our souls. He is the white part of our flag that we do not acknowledge. He is how we divide people and set standards. He is what happens when politics is about money, power and selfish pursuits, never about people. He is our non-human approach to humans. He is them, the other, the different one.



Irfan Masih is the mere mortal that has left a stain so deep on our ever so pure collective conscious. That too in the holy month. In fact that stain has been splattered because of the holy month. Don’t they know it? We are superior and they are inferior. We are fasting, we are steadfast and we are going to heaven for it. Oh how dare one ask a professional whose job it is to serve humanity, a fasting pious professional at that, to treat an inferior, ordinary, non-fasting, non-Muslim gutter cleaner who is near death! And to ask this professional to save a life in the holy month, before the setting of the magnificent sun and the melodious call to prayer? Before the doctor takes God’s name and breaks his fast, how dare we? How dare we not know that there is a place for the fasting doctor and a place for the poor gutter cleaner? The ten-fold more blessings received during this month for doing a good deed, as the doctor’s actions imply, is only activated if he had saved a Muslim life.

Oh the wrenched of the earth, let us reiterate where you stand and where we stand. Can you not see the clear divide? Do not you know that all of us being human does not mean we are all equal. For some are more equal than others.

Aren’t we all mortals, mere mortals, you ask? You are right, we are. But orthodox wisdom has relayed to us that some are more mortal than others, easily disposable, dispensable, some deaths are not mourned, some lives not counted, some citizens, unknown. So instead of saving a life in the blessed month, we make choices that will take away a life.

Why don’t we question this obvious injustice, you ask? What injustice? Looking in my pocket, looking up at the sky, looking at you, you at me? We can only speak of injustice when we recognise it. Recognise and become angry. We lack both of these values. It has not sunken in as to how low we have actually sunk. A collective plunge into darkness and we do not even see it, do not feel it, do not question it. How will we then own it?

But it is not a written rule, so we do not read it to our children from a rulebook. It is an unwritten, well-versed norm and we breathe it to our children in our womb, in our words, through our own actions. Social reproduction of ideas. The idea that we must always hold on to who we are. We are superior and they are inferior. We are we, the majority and they are they, the vulnerable.

Instead with the rising of the sun and the setting of its magnificent light, twice a day, while we worship the all-powerful in the heavens, we are oblivious to what has happened amongst us on earth. For what has happened to Irfan Masih, has happened to us all. He is the stigma of our collective conscious and we do not even realise it. But do not worry. Time will blur all this. Time and capitalist pursuits will give us the false illusion that this has all vanished. The reality is that a small part of us has been buried with Irfan Masih.

Yet if we are still alive and the pulse is still ticking and the heart is still beating, whisper this mortal’s name. Irfan Masih. Over and over again.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 13^th, 2017.

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