If Truth Be Told

 If truth be told, the man had to lose something and in his case it was his left eye because we already know that anything can happen when two political parties are warring in the same locality over who owns the vote bank now that a cow had been miraculously rescued in the nick of time, which is to say before it was slaughtered by the butcher, and not because of the solitary hand pump in the lane which used to be more important, and where the water was not rising earlier from the ground but is rising again as someone had repaired it, but the tragedy was that they said the man had it coming, and coming meaning losing one eye for two reasons. One, he was in the university library reading when he should have been at home helping his wife draw water from the hand pump where the water was rising again, and two, he should not have ignored the prediction discreetly passed on to him that morning by his neighbour about a solid chance of a lathi charge at the university, for the university was next to the place where the cow had been saved, and if there was a lathi charge anywhere within the university, he was likely to get caught in the middle, and chances were the policemen would specifically call him out for the way he looks and for the cap he wore on his head, and he would be questioned at first politely but eventually the lathi could find him, and he would lose something.

So, he lost his eye in the library, not directly of the lathi charge showered on him because though it wasn’t directed at him and it was not for him, he was dragged into the furore by default when someone in the lathi charge gang who was not wearing a police uniform and so was obviously not a policeman even if he acted like one, had instigated the real policemen to go into the university library to catch the person who had planned to slaughter the cow, and unfortunately where the educated man happened to be reading with both his eyes. He was spotted and identified not as a reading man but as the man who lived in the lane very close to the butcher’s shop where the cow was tied, and the instigator insisted that the man was lying and pretending to be educated and was flaunting an imaginary PhD out of sheer fear and that he must have known the fate of the cow as he lived in that lane where the cow was tied, and since there were no other witnesses to what had happened before the cow was tied near the butcher’s shop, the instigator and the policemen jointly decided that this reading man with his imaginary PhD, for the cap on his head, and his proximity of residence to the cow, should be taken away for questioning. When the man was suddenly manhandled, he raised his hand in self-defence, but his left eye was struck accidentally by a lathi that was not meant for him anyway but for the others who were by then fleeing, and someone among them could have very well been the one to have known of the upcoming fate of the cow in the man’s lane, but instead the man with the PhD who wasn’t even aware earlier of the entire cow incident nor of the rising water from the hand pump had to pay the price of not knowing two things by losing something, even if it was only a healthy reading eye.