Free The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar

watchful around us, the tension growing with every step, Rao’s rum-inspired courage began to give way.
    ‘Let’s get back to civilization, man, this is creeping me out,’ he whispered.
    ‘Come on, yaar, we can’t go back now, just when things are getting interesting.’
    ‘Two more streets and I’m out of here.’
    ‘Fine.’
    That was when we heard the scream, faint and muffled, but quite clearly that of a human being in distress. Grabbing Rao’s arm I headed in the direction of the sound. We went down street after empty street but found nothing. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly where the noise had come from and it didn’t help that the screams had stopped.
    ‘Poor bugger’s probably dead,’ Rao said to me in a voice in which excitement and fear vied for supremacy.
    We wandered down a few more streets, and just as we were about to give up and go home, I stumbled over something on the pavement. I hadn’t been looking down but around, trying to figure out where we were, and in the dim light I hadn’t noticed what seemed to be a pile of rubbish. But now, as my eyes adjusted to the light cast by a single street light about thirty feet away, I saw something that was to burn brightly in the nightmares I suffered in the aftermath of the riots.
    He was a presentable young man, you could tell that from the lower half of his face, but something had gone terribly wrong with the rest of his features. The left eyeball had been gouged out of its socket, and the right eyeball had been slashed by a knife, and was cloudy and occluded by blood. These injuries hadn’t killed him; below the chin, there was a surgically clean cut that had finally extinguished his life. In the few seconds that had passed since we had come upon the dead body, Rao finally found his voice.
    ‘Ah fuck, oh fuck, let’s get out of here, man, is he still living, let’s call the cops, come on let’s get out.’
    We ran from there, and then slowed down when we realized we had no idea where we were going.
    The very next street we turned down, we came upon what we had been searching for and were now desperate to avoid. Beside an old four-storey building propped up by scaffolding we saw fifteen or twenty men pounding away at something that lay at their feet. Off to one side, there was another figure lying in the street, legs curled up towards his chest, arms splayed out. I didn’t feel fear so much as a heightened clarity of vision and perception. The dead man’s kurta had been torn from his body and he had been sliced open, the flesh neatly peeled back from his stomach and the internal organs visible as if in a urology lab demonstration. Perhaps because of the position in which he was lying, nothing had spilled out, except a rope of blood that secured him to the dusty pavement.
    It’s hard for me to describe with absolute precision what happened next, although I learned from the counsellor I saw in the aftermath of the killings that this is a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder—victims almost always blank out the most extreme aspects of the violence they are witnessing in order to protect themselves.
    The mob beating the man suddenly stopped as though they were reacting to some unspoken command. One of them picked him up with something of an effort as his body was limp—he may well have been already dead—and his arms and legs flopped all over the place. Another man approached the pair; then, as if they had practised the manoeuvre, the first attacker crouched down into a semi-recumbent position, acting as a support to keep the victim upright, while reaching up and pulling the victim’s head back by the hair. The second man took up a comfortable stance and raised the weapon he was holding, a four-foot-long-sword. The first man let go of the head and, in the same instant, the swordsman whipped his weapon down and across with blinding speed, cleanly severing the victim’s head from his body. It is here that my actual witnessing of