No One Has Seen the Aftermath

I had one of those evenings where the day catches up with you slowly.

Nothing dramatic. A long meeting. A conversation that didn't go the way it should have. A piece of news on the way home that I half-listened to and then couldn't stop thinking about. The kettle on. A cup of tea I forgot to drink. The kind of evening that ends with you in a quieter room than usual, doing nothing in particular, and realising your mind has been somewhere else for the last hour.

What it had been doing, I worked out eventually, was a kind of accounting.

A small ledger of unfair things. The honest colleague who got passed over again. The friend who keeps doing the right thing and keeps paying for it. The man on the news who built a fortune by lying about everything, smiling at a camera. The officer who refused a bribe and was punished, while the one who took it kept his promotion.

These were not new. I have been collecting them, the way every adult does, since I was old enough to notice. What was different tonight was that I let the ledger stay open. I let myself look at the totals.

The world is random. There are no rules. There is no method.

A gentleman suffers more than a cunning man. The honest one struggles for money while the fraudulent one prospers. The bad cop climbs faster than the good one. The lawyer who fakes cases keeps a busier diary than the one who refuses. You lie, you cheat, you end up at a podium with a flag behind you. You spend your life helping people, and the room where decisions are made stays closed to you.

There are no rules. Or maybe that is the rule.

Good people are not rewarded. Bad people are not punished.

I sat with that for a while. The tea went cold. The room got darker. And the next thought followed, the way it always does, when you let yourself sit with the first one long enough.

If we cannot manage each other honestly, if the rules of the human world are this broken, what is the case for the divine ones? What is the contract? Where is the guarantee?

This is not a question I have permission to ask, in the place I come from. So I will say it here, where the only judge is whoever happens to be reading this:

Have you seen the aftermath?

No one has.

And perhaps no one ever will.

I do not know what to do with that. So I will keep it in the room with me, instead of pretending it isn't there. I will go to bed soon. The question will be here tomorrow. So will I.

— Hassan