Piped Voices

By the time we reached the centre of the square, we must have covered around thirty bodies. We left the hands and legs and heads, but shut some eyes. After awhile, everything became very mechanical. I had just pulled the checked lungi across an exposed man’s lower body and was about to move on when some memory made me stop. In an instant, my heart began banging so hard against my chest that I clutched at my ribs with fear in case my heart burst through and dropped on to the body that lay at my feet. I counted up to five or six in my mind and found that I could not move at first. My body stood rooted like a tree. It was as though the soles of my feet, which were painted with the blood of other men, had got stuck to the gravelly market floor. I stood there for ever, too terrified to check out what I already knew. Then, with strength that I didn’t know I had, I bent down slowly, slowly and lifted the checked lungi. Anybody who didn’t know me would have thought I was trying to peer beneath it. But of course I had no intention of doing such a thing. What was there to see, after all, when the entire front of the body had been ripped open like an old suitcase, revealing all the clothes inside, terribly unpacked? It is not good to look into an unpacked suitcase, I can tell you. No, I was lifting the lungi to get a closer look at its pattern. I held it right up to my eyes until the blood-soaked checks seemed to become transparent spectacle frames that I could look through clearly. I knew that lungi.