Vivek Maddala

This morning, I awoke as one might awaken in a grave, not rested, but returned from the underworld, gasping for something that no longer exists. Water. Twelve days without a drop in our pipes. Twelve days of swollen tongues, of children crying not from pain but from a thirst so profound it becomes silence. Twelve days of watching my mother stare at the empty bucket as if it might, by pity, fill itself. The municipality cannot reach the valves. The soldiers have blocked the roads again. But what use is complaint when the laws of war have replaced the laws of God? I sat on the edge of my bed, jerrycans at my feet, and asked myself a question I never imagined I would have to ask: Do I save my patients today, or fetch water for my family? But the decision had already been made by my body. It gave no speeches. It simply refused. The same hands that once sutured wounds now trembled from hunger. The same legs that stood through surgeries now buckled from dehydration. So I became what I never wished to be: a man begging for his own life. I left home with two jerrycans and the vague hope that a water truck might still pass today. Fuel is gone. The trucks are vanishing. The black market sells a liter of gasoline for thirty-five dollars, a price for life that no one here can afford. When I reached the street, it was already full. A sea of the desperate. Mothers. Fathers. Children holding empty bottles as if they were rosaries. Everyone waiting. No one speaking. Then it came, the truck. A metallic promise of salvation. People ran. I ran. And then, a sound I cannot unhear. Not an explosion. Not a scream. Something worse. A human body collapsing against cement. A man, no older than twenty, had fallen beside his jerrycan. He should have been strong. Instead, he lay folded into the street like discarded clothing. He did not move. Neither did anyone else. They just kept walking. And I, I froze. Not from cruelty. From recognition. Because that man could have been me. Might still be me. What had we become, that the sight of a collapsed human being no longer halted our steps? When did we forget that life matters more than water? I knelt beside him. An old woman joined me. Together, we tried to stir the fragments of a soul back into motion. And he opened his eyes. But what looked back at us was not a man. It was what remains when a man is starved of food, of water, of dignity. The truck drove away. I never reached it. An hour later, my friend Khalil called. His brother had been injured while trying to collect aid. He was begging for help. And so I returned to the hospital. On the day my body had refused to function, I forced it into the house of the dying once more. The wounded lay on the floor like fallen wheat. There were no beds. No supplies. No space left for pain. The nurses had begun to turn people away. “Too many,” they whispered, as if agony could be counted. And now I sit here, writing these words in the margins of my own endurance. How did we come to this? How did we become a people the world no longer believes are fully human? Is it because our blood too cheap? Or is it because the world has learned to look, and then to look away? If so, then it is not we who have lost our humanity. It is you. #GazaGenocide