For each man kills the thing he loves, 
Yet each man does not die.
-The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde


Placing one leg over the other, Bashir crossed his newly-polished feet, trying his utmost to feign an aura of sophistication.  Donning his best - and only –suit, he fingered the flower resting in its lapel, twisting the stem in his fingers, too overwrought to let it lie. Glancing at his sides, he saw Ashfaq Saahib  
entering the courtroom, adorning a smile almost as bright and dazzling as his scarlet tie. Embracing his equally well-dressed contemporaries, the splenetic politician progressed to his seat, pausing only to nod conspicuously at his former driver. 

Pouring in gradually, an amalgamation of black-coated law students huddled in the back, whispering excitedly, a maelstrom of conversation in the room. They were followed by a wave of journalists, pencils carefully positioned behind their ears, each wearing an expression more enlivened than the other, armed with pens and an intense ambition to explicate the case in the most conspiratorial way possible. Amidst such professionals, all of whom carnivorous for success, Bashir soon grew conscious of his pedestrian disposition. He was after all, a servant. An individual whose presence, under normal circumstances, would not only be unnecessary, but complete immaterial in affairs of such magnitude.  Under current circumstances, however, Bashir was a figure of paramount importance. Acquitting his employers son, he was a man about to be prosecuted for a crime he did not commit. 

                                                                   *** 

Blooding seeping through his hands, Zaeem’s distressed expression was still fresh in Bashir’s mind. 
Clutching his fiancée’s lifeless hands, Ashraf Saahib’s one and only heir had wept uncontrollably as his father scrutinized his condition. From the moment the first bullet rung off, Zaeem had placed himself in the most critical of situations, the quagmires of alcoholism and a temperament almost as fierce as his patriarch’s. With the threat of this unfortunate happening staining his political career looming over the power-hungry Ashraf, he had declared his son to be non-compos mentis before the staff.  Which one of them, he had asked, would be willing to prevent his son from plundering his image? An image inherited an image built collectively by not only his own elders, but those of the entire village? Keeping the identity of the malefactor’s clandestine would not only preserve this image but reap great benefits for he who endeavored to do so. Waving thousand rupee notes in the most animated of manners, the influential zimidaar who had successfully influenced and bribed hundreds of voters, compelled another hapless individual to submit to his iniquitous mechanizations. 

                                                                    ***

Exhibiting no great sense of emergency, Justice Hamid ensconced himself in his bench as a haggard-looking bailiff took his position against the wall. The docket had alluded to a murder trial, but he had given it little thought, believing the matter to be dealt with by someone of a junior rank. The authority of those involved however, had demanded the presence of a judge over a lowly magistrate and Mr. Hamid had thus been aroused from a much-needed map. Aggravated, with no desire for an extensive proceeding, he addressed the defendant directly, “Mr.Bashir Ahmad, how you plead?” Determined to emancipate his employer’s son from trouble and engulfed by the fear of what would happen if he did not, the young man tightened the noose along his own neck as uttered the word “guilty”.