A fiction by Mohsin Hamid but close to reality

( Forwarded by Nasik Elahi)

Caution; Some explicit sexual language

One cold, dewy morning, you are huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot. Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been thrown away, whose remote controls are out of batteries, whose scooter is busted, whose new sneakers have been stolen. This is all the more remarkable since, wealth-obsessed though you will come to be, you’ve never in your life seen any of these things.

The whites of your eyes are yellow, a consequence of spiking bilirubin levels in your blood. The virus afflicting you is called hepatitis E. Its typical mode of transmission is fecal-oral. Yum. It kills only about one in fifty, so you’re likely to recover. But right now you feel like you’re going to die.

Your mother has encountered this condition many times, or conditions like it, anyway. So maybe she doesn’t think you’re going to die. Then again, maybe she fears it. Everyone is going to die, and, when a mother sees in a third-born child like you pain that makes you whimper under her cot, maybe she feels your death push forward a few decades, take off its dark, dusty head scarf, and settle with open-haired familiarity and a lascivious smile into this, the single mud-walled room she shares with all her surviving offspring.

What she says is “Don’t leave us here.”

She is addressing your father, who has heard this request before.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2012/09/24/120924fi_fiction_hamid#ixzz273eEkKMh