Avantika Tewari
IT WAS night when the man died.
In the thick, humming night of a city that never truly sleeps — only flickers. Flickers between traffic signals and app pings, between delivery promises and the quiet violence of exhaustion.
He collapsed just beyond Gate Number Three in a residential colony in Delhi, somewhere between the parked dumpers and the weary under-construction site of the Metro.
He fell softly, without spectacle. The kind of death a city absorbs without noticing, like rain into dust.
In a few days, the Resident Welfare Association had drafted a statement — not out of grief, but out of inconvenience: “What if it had been one of us?”
The question hung in the air like a perfume of moral panic. A swift and bloodless message was delivered — the dumpers, it was agreed, would no longer be stationed near Gate Number Three.
The Metro was politely urged to post marshals during peak hours. Not to prevent further deaths, of course, but to ensure the smooth, uninterrupted flow of cars entering and exiting the colony without any “casualties.”
No one spoke his name.
His death — absurd, unassimilable — had to be translated, sutured, rendered safe.
Protocols were swiftly applied like bandages on a wound the city refused to see. His body became a “cautionary tale,” murmured over home security updates. A lesson for the service class: Be alert. Be careful. Be grateful.
But death is not didactic. It does not instruct. It interrupts.
And the night, for what it’s worth, did not end with him. The gig economy doesn’t pause for grief.
Orders resumed. Routes were rerouted. The platform adjusted the delivery zone.
Thus the fantasy was preserved: that the city is a covenant between responsible citizens and responsive infrastructure, that tragedy can be avoided if systems are fine-tuned, if everyone plays their part.
But beneath this fragile fantasy lies the excess that cannot be absorbed, the remainder that cannot be processed.
The man at Gate Number Three was such a remainder.
Across the world, in Gaza, children fall into the same crevasse — too raw to be cushioned by the soft-focus lens of humanitarianism, too real to be absorbed by press statements. They are converted into statistics, into universal sighs, into “what must never happen again” — even as it happens again and again.
In Bastar, Maoists vanish into the jungle and reappear in dossiers, red-circled and already condemned. Their lives erased, their deaths rehearsed. They, too, are turned into cautionary tales. Not to provoke rebellion, but to preempt it.
Everywhere, the bourgeois fantasy persists: that death can be managed, that suffering can be made ethical if properly distributed, if it arrives with paperwork.
The man at Gate Number Three — he did not die a martyr. He died a worker, delivering discrimination to closed gates.
And yet, in death, he did what he could not in life: he made the city stop — if only for a moment. For a single, stuttering breath, the machine paused. Not in mourning, but in recalibration.
Then the dumpers were moved.
The marshals returned.
The road cleared.
And the machine, ever obedient, began again.
C. Kafila Online
