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There is a particular cruelty in a name being spoken twice by death. Once when it is buried. And once when it is dug up again, because the truth could not rest with it. Mir Raza, the son of Mir Hassan Ali Khan, and Wafflix business owner, was laid into the earth of Rehorania Masjid graveyard on the 29th of July. Eleven days later, a board of doctors, a police surgeon, a magistrate, and a family that refused to let silence be the final word stood over that same soil and opened it again.
I have read the report. I do not think I will ever be able to unread it.
It is written in the flat, careful language that medicine keeps for what it cannot otherwise bear to say. Somewhere inside that distance is a twenty-five-year-old man who once had a face his mother could recognise without being told his name. What the doctors found confirmed what the family had feared all along, that Mir Raza did not simply die. He was taken from them. And when asked, plainly, whether his wounds came before death, someone circled a single word on the page: Yes.
That word has not left me since.
