The winter sun

I struggled a lot writing this piece.

It was 11:30am winter morning approaching noon. I was sitting with my little cousins and my brother under the sun. I was teaching them. The sun was pretty warm and who doesn’t like the winter sun. Suddenly we heard people shouting and crying. I and my brother rushed to the other side of our house terrace veranda. As we opened the door we saw few people standing and howling a bit trying to hold a man to his senses. The man seems unconscious drenched in dust – red brick and cement dust. He couldn’t move at all. He was made to sit somehow by two people and they were trying to remove the jacket off him as it was stuck. After much trial eventually they had to cut it into two halves and got it removed. A little boy was crying calling ‘papa papa’. Supposedly he has to be the man’s son. He was cautiously picked up by four men holding both the hands and legs and was taken to a house nearby. He was rushed to the hospital. But after a while we got the news he was dead. He couldn’t make it on the way to the hospital. That poor fellow fell victim to the unlawful demolition of his previous house. He was there to collect a door so that he could use it in the new house he was building somewhere else from his savings. The irresponsibility of the labor trying to put down the house wall and the people who were in account of the demolition was the reason they didn’t inform him properly. Otherwise he would have been alive, the sole earner of the family.

We don’t know when is our time. People say this is how it was meant to be, it’s not in our hands. Agreed. Death is beyond our reach. But what if the labor could have been careful, extra cautious. I cannot forget the helpless deceased.