There was red and yellow everywhere. A chaotic buzz. There were people gushing to and fro and trying to carry crying men and women. Some were on their mobile phones contacting a local authority, or a hospital, or the first person on their phonebook. The crowd seemed to increase by the second. There were frantic voices, screaming, perhaps exercising their lungs to the fullest, to decrease the crowd. There was red and yellow everywhere. She stood there incognizant of the unwanted. She wasn’t personally involved in that situation—an accident, if you like. She just happened to pass by while coming back from the grocery market. The last time she checked in the mirror, she was dressed in a red skirt that ended just below her knees, a plain white top with little fake diamonds around the neckline and a white scarf. She looked at the collapsed train. A passer-by waited for a gasp from her, fearing that she would die otherwise. She didn’t know what the gasp was for but she gasped and cursed the public transport system in Maseru. In the mirror she had checked before, she also remembered how her face was well made up and smiling. Right now, you could say that she was extremely pale and her hair didn’t know where to belong just like the half dead bodies being lifted by humane strangers, not knowing where they belonged, just like her, not knowing where she belonged. She stood there to watch. She had never, never in the history of her 23 year old life seen a terrible accident like this. She suddenly realized that her grocery bag was not in her hands. She looked away from the scene for the first time to divert her attention to the grocery bag. Now, it depends what you define as scene. The scene of the dead bodies was inescapable. The scene of the mayhem was omnipresent. The scene was something in her mind that we would not know. Her grocery bags were between her feet, a trick she learned at the airport to take care of her luggage while working on something else. She wondered what made her hand so heavy. It was the wrist watch with a leather belt. It showed quarter past eight. The seconds hand ticked as if to reiterate that her time was passing. She stood still, watching the hand go to one and then five seconds later, to two. Then somebody bumped into her—said something in a foreign tongue—and left. She had two choices, she decided. Either she could carry on with her own life that waited for her—which included many files and papers or two, she could help the semi-dead people to get to where they belonged. A tough decision to make. She didn’t have to make her decision. A white man approached her and asked her if he could have her scarf to use to cover a wound of a man. She was confused a little because of the heavy British accent. After comprehending the sign of his finger pointing at her scarf, she took off her scarf instantaneously and gave it to him. When she thought about how expensive that scarf was, she cursed herself to have such frivolous thoughts when thousands were waiting for her to save their lives. So she decided to leave her paperwork for the time-being as much as she will have to face the dire consequences. Her job, her morals told her was to help the severely injured, thrashed in blood all over their bodies. Since she was there, she was doing what she was doing. If she was at home and watched this on a news channel, she would have shrugged and decided to continue her work. Perhaps, after she completed her research in Maseru and her PhD, she would donate some money to the victims of this accident. She asked the white man in her broken English what the cause of the accident was. The British man was sweating and his sleeves were rolled up. His shirt had a patch of blood on his chest. He was breathing fast and amidst his breaths, he told her it was a bomb blast instigated by a radical political party. She nodded and tried to keep up with the man’s pace. She could hear men and women screaming and children crying. There was red and yellow everywhere. She spotted a little child being consoled by a crying father who was covered in blood and had a woman on his lap, asleep. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to scream at the thought of being forced into entering the scene. If the white man hadn’t asked for her scarf, she could have gone off to do her job, her life. She rationalised that if she screamed, it wouldn’t help. She would be just another one in the crowd. Nothing extraordinary. She thought about what she would have done when she went home, prepared herself and the food she bought for the special somebody who was going to visit her, all the way from a different continent; she would decorate her apartment—a small apartment with air-conditioning and yellow lamps. Yellow lamps. She saw the yellow lamps lit on the street. Red and yellow. Her neck turned from side to side. She was going crazy. The lamps on the street appeared like a line in front of her eyes. She gained control of herself. She stopped. She looked below and saw a sight she didn’t want to see. She screamed and spat. The crowd seemed to ignore her. She had lost the white man. She carried a little crying baby covered in red liquid to the ambulance. She wiped his tears. There was a momentary silence in her mind. In her scene. She engulfed herself in the havoc again and stopped to look at a woman who was screaming with pain—almost paroxysmal. She held her kicking legs, and a fat, old man threw his hat away and held the raging woman’s hands. They both carried the screaming woman to the ambulance and the fat old man left without acknowledging her. Perhaps he left to get other such woman to where they belonged. There was a sense of urgency emerging at the rate of almost one million urgency unit per nanosecond. Our protagonist was lost in the scene once more. Her head spun from the pandemonium. She spotted white skin. Her feet rushed towards it and she stood there staring. The white man and a black man were carrying a still body on the stretcher. Their faces and hands were both red. Red and yellow. The body on the stretcher was wearing a white shirt with red distorted flowers—flowers that were skewed. Perhaps an imitation of roses. She could see skin under the torn black cloth of his pants. She looked at the body and she froze. Tears rolled down her face and she screamed. The white man carrying the body put the stretcher down. She knelt to look closely at the body. She started crying loudly. She was crying like the father consoling the little child. No. She was crying like the child who had nowhere to go. She felt as though she had just been kicked in the stomach. She looked at the dead body closely. She stopped for a second. Her right hand touched the face of the body and she began to cry again. The white man asked her something in his strong British accent. She just noticed the inflection in his voice that told her it was a question. The crowd had increased and the dead body could wait. The other semi-dead bodies perhaps didn’t need the white man anymore. Perhaps, she did. In her scene. She touched the dead body’s heart, tried to listen to it. Nothing. She touched the wrist and—nothing. She kissed the lips of the dead body and screamed something in the dead man’s ear. What she said, is unknown to us. She said something in a language only he understood. The dead man. He was alone. She was alone. She had always been alone. She would never be able to know why this dead man decided to come early, without her knowledge. Her special somebody. Perhaps he had told their story to someone on the train. A stranger. She would never know. Perhaps he had written her a letter and it hadn’t reached yet. She would wait. The thought of yellow lamps and air-conditioning disgusted her. The white man knelt down next to her and put his hand on her shoulder. What would she have done if the white man hadn’t taken her scarf? She would have waited, waited for yellow lamps.