The Encounter

It was a simple plan, but somehow, as he and his men followed the shackled man through the hills, Khawar wondered if it should have been simpler still. If they had been able to shoot him close to the police station earlier in the day, a story about a thwarted escape might have played out quite nicely. But his skinny constable, Javed, had noted that at that hour, there were too many day laborers passing by who knew the man, which could have created “complications.” Now he wasn’t sure why they had come here—to the mines, of all places. Who had decided that? Only he could have given the order, but he couldn’t recall it; he was even having trouble remembering the drive over. The adrenaline was disorienting him, which he didn’t like to admit but was perhaps natural, given that this was his first encounter.The prisoner, Usmaan, a man in his mid-40s who looked a decade older, was handcuffed. Ankles bound in bar fetters, he shuffled through the grass. He was tall, and his head hung down, his eyes on the ground as he tried not to trip, and Khawar was struck by the man’s caution, his care. Then he sniffed, and Khawar wondered if he might be crying. For God’s sake, how would that help now? Then again, Usmaan wasn’t the usual fit for an encounter, a protocol reserved for the worst of criminals—rapists, dacoits, or gangsters of renown. Sometimes it was the only option the police had for delivering justice to men who were either impossible to jail or capable of easily buying their way out of it. An encounter was an act on behalf of the decent in the face of an indecent world, really; that’s what he’d been telling himself these past few days. Only here, they were trailing an anonymous, shabby-looking man with little to his name, a man whom they could all hear murmuring—prayers, insults?—under his breath.Up ahead were the abandoned barracks, glum and battered, behind a wire fence. The uranium mines had once brought the army, with its engineers and trucks, here. Khawar hadn’t come o