The Firearm Fatality

I only recently discovered that my vision wasn’t 20/20 like I had deluded myself into believing it was. Sure I had been having trouble making out some of the words on the board during class for a while now, but I figured that as I was more often than not seated way back in the lecture hall, it was only normal that I couldn’t make out what was written in the brightly yellow-coloured box of some random Pharmacology flowchart.  It was about three weeks back, during a particularly fascinating lecture that my friend insisted I stop making goo goo eyes at the teacher. Now here I was barely twenty feet away from the board and I obviously couldn’t see properly. (And for the record the Pharma guy is certainly no looker either so no, I was not winking). So to finally put a stop to the squinting I got meself a pair of kickass glasses. I think I look like intellect personified. A friend says I look like Martin Scorsese, minus the bushy eyebrows of course. As if that makes me feel better. Humph!!

Another dead body arrived at the mortuary today. This time around it was a man with three gunshot wounds, two of them in his arms and one to the lower abdomen. The police-walas were being their usual crabby selves, not letting us enter in the beginning. But I suppose they had a reason to keep it all hush-hush since the man had died during a police encounter. Or maybe it had something to do with this cameraman filming the entire scene outside the morgue gate. Whatever it was, just as I was about to enter, the gate was very politely slammed in my face (I sincerely hope they don’t show that part in the evening news). It was only after the cameraman had left that the gates were reopened. But no luck watching the autopsy  today either. With the police breathing down the Forensic dude’s neck, he barely showed us the gunshot wounds, told us to take note of their general appearance and figure out whether it was an entry wound or an exit wound. I had scarcely gotten an eyeful when we were ushered out and that was that.

A short while later in college, with a bunch of us cracking up on the most inane of jokes, I suddenly realized that I had felt none of the horror or dismay that I had experienced upon seeing that first body.  I had just seen a dead man with blood splattered clothes, his body stiff with rigor mortis and  here I was almost completely unaffected. And it wasn’t just me. None of us were as horrified by the death of this person, this human being the way we had been the previous time. Sure there had been the initial tut-tutting over the death of a man, with a friend of mine severely critical of the police for directly shooting him to death and me pointing out that we could never possibly know the circumstances which eventually led to this shooting. But after that first discussion, it was life as normal. Was it because we had subconciously pigeonholed this man into the “bad guy” category, someone who had it coming to him? Or  have we already lost the capacity to become shocked because frankly, after a decapitation and limb amputations, a gunshot death seems mild by comparison.