Ayooba Baloch’s death

Ayooba Baloch’s death is a sudden act of sacrifice in the retreat through wartime East Pakistan: while he comforts Saleem in a mud-walled hut, a sniper’s bullet kills him instead of Saleem. His death saves Saleem, and changes the small group’s passage through the war by leaving them to endure the attack’s aftermath without him.

The shot and its cost

Saleem has been overcome by memories of humiliation and injustice, but his name still eludes him. Ayooba, perhaps remembering his own breakdown in the Sundarbans, moves from his corner, squats in front of Saleem, and puts his one good arm around him. Saleem accepts the comfort and cries into Ayooba’s shirt. In that moment, a shot comes through the hut’s open, glassless window and strikes Ayooba in the neck. The bullet would have hit Saleem in the head had Ayooba not been between him and the shot; Ayooba dies saving his life.

The survivors in the hut

After Ayooba falls, Saleem crawls out from beneath him. Farooq Rashid and Shaheed Dar are also inside the hut, and the three survivors take cover in separate positions: Saleem on the floor, Farooq crouched in a corner, and Shaheed against the wall. No second shot follows. They remain there for a night and a day, waiting until Ayooba’s body makes it necessary to act. Before leaving, they find pickaxes and bury him.

An absent fighter

The group’s later passage makes Ayooba’s absence tangible. When the Indian Army arrives, he is no longer there to greet it with his argument for the superiority of meat over vegetables or to charge into action with his familiar battle cries. The contrast between his imagined, exuberant combat and his death by a sniper’s shot underscores the war’s abrupt reversal: the man who had seemed ready to meet battle head-on is lost while offering comfort, and Saleem survives because of that gesture.