A dead man speaking

….When I saw the gunmen had started shooting toward us, I could just crouch and wait for one of the bullets, which were aggressively passing around me; sooner or later sit somewhere on my head or my body. At that moment, I felt so passive and desperate, but strangely had no feeling of fear. There was no shelter around me, to fulfill my instinctual sense of self-protection…

So, I remember that I just closed my eyes, liked to give up to the destiny that was with no mercy showing the ever-suppressed reality of death, and without going through the Kubler-Ross’s five stages of dying. Amidst the perfect chaos made by the rain of gunshots and unrecognizable screams of other people, I realized that I was watching my entire life like a movie, but in reversed sequences from the end to the beginning and in a relatively fast forward motion. Yes… It was me, present in my visual biography in which a sample piece from each stage of my life was picked by an unknown life-reviewer. For a moment it looked like I didn’t understand or care about the danger of the situation, only allured by the contents of this out-of-nowhere short movie. Careless to my frightening surroundings , I was zooming my focus on each image which was selectively picked from the happiest moments of my life; “… a scene from the moment that I was allowed to hold my new-born ‘Kian’ in my arms, for the first time, feeling the unbearable but shining lightness of life,…then the image from our wedding when ‘Leila’ was friskily chasing me in the backyard with her long white dress and the moment that she reached me and released her lavished and joyous laugh in her pretty blushed cheek. We never had a wedding picture from this scene.

Then it was me in my lousily-put on gown (as usual non-conformist) sitting in the ceremony hall of Shiraz University, Joking with “Hamid” and cajole the formality of the graduation ceremony… and here I go with my parents; my dad, despite of his old arthritis trying to keep up with the teasing mood of my mom, who was sitting beside the chimney in our old house in that small city of Caspian sea’s margin…. orchards …orange orchards in spring and odors of love spreading in drizzle, mixed with “Bahare narenj” from our neighbor’s tree… of my adolescent love of our neighbor‘s girl “Mojgan”. Yes… I used to peep her that way!…. and it is the younger me… on my old rusty, but very big bike, whose little owner was stubbornly trying to learn how to ride and cruise it with his little scratched legs…

My siblings running around the big blue “houz” (pond) in our big old yard when each of us owned a piece of a small garden…. I could see my hand was reaching

to grab Shida …my six year old hand, which was innocently used to brush away the wild long hair from my face….I could bizarrely feel each emotion involved in each scene, and I never wanted to give up those feelings.... never…!

…A bullet hit my face around the cheek (I realized that I wasn’t crouching at that moment anymore, but I had fully exposed myself to the bullets) it jolts my head back hardly. I could vaguely sense the heat of the bullet deep in my skull,… and another one sat on my right shoulder with a rush of a paralyzing pain. But the first one was enough to cease the clear perception of the latter pain: A relatively fast death…a dark death….spreading dark…. dark….and…dark like no dark in the world has ever been like this…dark like the black ink which had spilled on the white paper when you were practicing calligraphy at the age of eight at that old “Iran Zamin” school.

All of a sudden, I saw a white flash of light, was glimmering through a mysterious meta-physical event combined with an ambiguity with no attempt of answering this question: “am I still alive”? It really doesn’t matter! The white flash now was a piece of paper which had filled my vision, with a calligraphically written poem from an archetypal figure whom sings the poem with an archaic/spiritual voice:

”Payane sokhan sheno ke mara che resid”

“Az khak baramadimo bar bad shodim…”

…Then I think I really died.

This was a flashback of the process that led to my death….

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- You died? So, who the hell are you, if have really died?

- Have you ever heard “dead man walking”?! Well, this is dead man speaking…

(Names, persons and places are fictional)

December, 2007