Hijab row continues in India

 

Hijab row continues in India

The day of the incident had begun like any other in this city, but there was one thing — and it was a matter as simple as could be imagined. An unruly young man walked into an open restaurant in Khajar Bagh with more than enough patrons to satisfy their hunger. As he was waiting for his turn at the table in front, a woman called out him name over and over again asking him a series of questions while he waited nervously for the answer. He was so annoyed and took this as disrespect towards himself that he began making a nuisance of himself by throwing some things on the table. All these and many more things of which nobody knew happened during the five minutes he was sitting at the table. His wife had been sitting back quietly, eating her lunch, when suddenly the crowd turned into something bigger than he could have ever hoped. And what the crowd did and went was unbelievable. Before he even finished reading this story and the description of what ensued, he grabbed two knives lying beside us near the coffee table and started cutting up the chicken he just purchased from the cafeteria. This is how he made every patron of his sit down till he ran out of space! He cut away a part of the leg and held onto it like a stick that he was using for chopping vegetables, and then he tried pulling out the bone and holding that part till he would get stuck. When that failed and he got frustrated, he asked another waiter, who was seated next to me that night, if he felt the meat was fresh. No response came back from him but he kept pushing forward until the entire leg was gone leaving only a thin piece of blood on the floor in the process. Then he stopped cutting up the chicken. There he found a piece of wood that the knife cut through and he put the pieces together and sat down to enjoy his meal. At first there seemed no point in bothering to try to stop but after several tries he decided to pick the meat from the plate instead. After eating, he said goodbye to everyone and put his hands on his head to rest. But then there came a sound that surprised all of us. I thought I heard someone shout "Hasta" which means "Hurry". I looked around and saw everybody in a hurry, looking around for somebody to help them. It was hard to tell on a dark night like this whether someone was shouting or not because it didn't seem like anyone was going to come to the rescue of the unfortunate patient. But the person who asked was busy and hurriedly looking around like he was trying to find someone on his side. There he saw a strange old lady carrying a huge box that she was opening. She smiled at him with eyes full of tears and asked where he was sitting. The old lady asked who he was and he answered him as well as some of the other guests sitting about four feet away from him. She spoke to him and told what she wanted. Everything seemed very clear till her mouth fell open and he felt a flash of electricity shoot through him and he dropped the blade. Now he lay down holding the piece at chest height with his left hand covering the part he had cut off and began biting pieces of the meat he had eaten earlier. If he was done and it hurt him, he had better finish and wait for them all to leave. But he continued chewing as he tried desperately to calm down. As he began to feel much worse he slowly rolled back the blade and began stabbing himself. Nobody except my wife was in the room till then, she had taken care of me and the poor guy. Some friends arrived later and helped me by putting bandages and dressings on the wound. The whole evening continued like this. They all came from different parts of the world, some knew each other from their villages in Pakistan and some didn't know their neighbours at all. For those who were living in Khajar Bagh we learned that even though the police did everything they could to save the patient, there were still hundreds of people who didn’t take their chances.