I didn’t see it coming. It was that spur-of-the-moment thing. It wasn’t death, something more scary. The last thing I remember of February, the second, 2014 was falling hard on the concrete. It all went black after that.
It was still dark when I opened my eyes. The place smelled of urine and phosphorus combined. Of sound, there was none. The darkness I was used to, but the silence killed me, rather the idea of someone observing me did the job. I wasn’t tied to a chair, neither was I handcuffed or chained to the ceiling, was free to move around, but couldn’t. I tried to recall what really happened to me. Nothing clicked. In fact the latest memory I had was that of me planning to go to Turkey for doing my Masters in Mass Communication. I remembered saying goodbye to my mother on the porch and my father driving me to the airport. He waved at me from the lounge. Taking off, landing, all of it was vivid as hell. My room in Ankara was the last thing I remembered that vividly.
The stories of people banged up abroad were a commonplace in my daily readings. But those were mere words, nothing more. I didn’t fall for them hard. And who cared? Getting on with life was all everybody ever cared about. And frankly till 2nd –Feb-2014, all I cared about was getting on with it. Now I care for much more. That day something happened to me for a change.
The moment I realized that I was brought in for ransom, I literally had chills. My mind was still working on an escape plan when an armed person, wearing black mask that covered his whole face, came in with a lantern. I couldn’t see what color he was wearing, but he was carrying a Glock in his left hand and a satellite phone in his right. It was the version that the military used in special warfare. I couldn’t guess where the hell did he get if from or why was he carrying it. He said in Arabic “Speak” and put the phone to my ear. For the first time that day I realized that I couldn’t speak. I went numb and fell to the floor. The dark surrounded me all over again.
Sometimes I think that I might have been able to recover from the trauma if I had woken up on a hospital bed that night, but that didn’t happen. I was nowhere near a hospital. The dark was all I could see and the silence was all I could hear. What frightened me more was not me playing death, but the idea of not seeing my parents again, ever. There was only one silver lining I was left with: remembering God.
Rabindarnath Tagore says,
“Faith is bird that feels light when the dawn is still dark”
I have no idea what makes me alive today. I should have been dead, buried under the excavated sand in some nonexistent cemetery, with a marble plate on my grave-head saying
Roses are red, violets are blue
Sugar is sweet and so were you
But all of that has nothing to do with faith. Death doesn’t spare even the faithful ones. Why I’m alive today is not because of faith because death does spare even the unfaithful ones, but I’m sure as hell that it is faith that makes me a better person today. Without faith it is like a day without the sun or a person without a soul. Faith is not what you own when you see death, it is what you have even in the happiest of the moments and the brightest of the days. What we need to know is that God is everything without us, but we are nothing without Him.