I have been having these dreams ever since I saw a man burn himself to death for nothing.

Who was he? I don’t know. I mean I don’t know his name. I know that he was a political worker, a PPP activist. He set himself on fire to prevent Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging. He could not. He died and so did Bhutto.

He burned like a log.

First the skin caught fire, then the fat in his body, which burned like oil, then his flesh and then the bones.Throughout the ordeal he kept shouting for help but nobody came to rescue him. Pieces of his flesh littered the ground. A watery substance dripped out of his body as he ran around like a blind man.

When it touched the ground, the substance burned for seconds and then was gone, leaving black patches here and there. The fire did not burn his bones. It only blackened them.

When I saw him burning, I thought I would never see him again. I was wrong. I saw him again and again. Often, I found myself on a hill from where I could see the place where the man, whose name I do not remember, burned himself to death. My journeys to the hill always began while I was asleep. Yet I remember them vividly. Some nights were dark, pitch dark. Others lit by the moon — but not the normal moon of this world. The moon that kept me company during those trips was pale, like the face of a dead man.

I saw people sleeping in the streets, tossing and turning in their beds — struggling with whatever nightmares they had to suffer. They scratched their torsos, talked to themselves in their sleep but never noticed me. Sometimes the neighborhood dogs barked as they saw me. So did the owl that I always saw sitting on the wall of a deserted Hindu temple as I came out of my street. He moved his big, round eyes in his sockets and hooted. I could not tell whether he was warning or welcoming me.

I went past the local graveyard and its ancient banyan tree where the dead people meet. The dead looked at me with their hollowed eyes and laughed. It was a strange, nasal laughter, audible only to those who had heard them before.Near the hills the jackals howled. One or two of them gave a short, sharp howl that was picked up by hundreds of others and soon the whole valley was ringing with their shrieking laughter. The owl took off from the wall and hooted: “Stay awake, stay awake! Your time will also come.” The dead people laughed and the living remained ignorant. I moved on.

I soon reached the top of the camel-shaped hill where the spirits of the living and the dead mingle. I looked at the city. Everything seemed so different at night. The trees were not trees any more. They looked like bearded giants who moved in the night air and whispered to each other. And when the wind blew, it lifted their whisper and spread it all over the valley.

The wind also picked me up and carried me over to my corner on the hill. From here the city looked like a surrealistic painting, a huge frozen frame hanging from the sky. The houses, the trees and the streetlights, all looked very mysterious. It seemed as if they were alive and could move about and change places. I felt that when I returned to the living, everything would have changed. My house would be in another street and my street in another neighborhood.

But one thing did not change, even from this distance: It was the Qabaristan, the graveyard, the city of the dead. Even from the camel-hill I could see the banyan tree and the dead people perched neatly on its branches or hanging from its roots.

They looked at us, the living-dead, who had gathered on the hill and hoped to return to our bodies before the dawn, and laughed. It chilled my spine. Their eyes were burning like lamps and their red bright tongues stuck out. Then they started howling, like the jackals, and called those still living to come and join them. I turned my face and looked away from them. But they came closer, although always maintaining a distance.

By then my night companions had also joined me. Sheeda, the tailor, Gama, the milkman, Raju, the grocer, Pehelwan, the fruit merchant, Rahman, the school teacher, Shah, the priest and Babu, the railway clerk, had all come. Even half a dozen heroin addicts, who lived under a railway bridge near my house, were there. We had all come to share our dreams and our anxieties.

We, the half-awake, had collective dreams. We saw huge blue lakes, green valleys and beautiful beaches. We also saw that our country had become big, prosperous and clean like those of the white men. But these were rare dreams. Most of our dreams were ordinary, like us; they were about our immediate concerns such as jobs, marriages, homes and education.

But the man who burned himself alive always spoiled our dreams. Before we could embark upon this journey to the dreamland, he would appear on the hill, half dead and half alive, and demand our attention. He looked exactly as I saw him first in the old part of the city: half-burned. His hair burning like dry grass. Flames moving both up and down on his burning body. Face, half-burned and distorted with pain, fear and anger. Hands stretching out for support. He ran around in a circle, shouting “Bachao, bachao.”

The dream that I had night after night was so powerful that now I have difficulty in linking it with the real event that I saw. Dream and reality mingle with each other, as I used to see the living mingling with the dead on the hill. I don’t know what I saw and what I dreamed.

All I remember is that I saw a man burning himself to death. Was it a dream? Did I actually see it? If it was a dream, how did it get into the pages of the local newspapers? If I saw it, why don’t I remember anything? I have no answer.

The newspapers claimed that the burning happened — and not in a remote village. It happened in Rawalpindi, a city near Islamabad where I lived. Why did he burn himself? According to the newspapers he wanted to prevent Bhutto’s hanging through this act of extreme defiance.

Later, his relatives claimed that his comrades who arranged the self-immolation had assured him that they would put the fire out before it did any real harm to him. “If nobody else does, the police definitely will, they will not let a man die like this,” he was assured.

But as events unfolded, it seemed as if his party needed a martyr, so they let him die. The policemen did not interfere because the government wanted to show that such acts would not prevent it from hanging Bhutto, who was finally executed on April 4, 1979.

And the spectators were not allowed anywhere near the burning man. The press — dozens of journalists were also watching him — remained … neutral.

I remember going back to my office to write the story. As a junior reporter my job was to provide basic information such as names, addresses and group affiliations. Others were writing the real story. I sat in a corner with my typewriter for hours but just could not begin. Every time I tried to remember his name, the victim’s face came before me. When I tried to recall the party slogans his comrades were shouting, I only recalled his desperate appeals for help that nobody answered.

That night when I went home I had my first dream about my soul leaving my body and going to the camel-hill with the souls of other living-dead. And the man who had burned himself also appeared, half dead and half alive. He kept coming back for months. In the beginning it was always the hill. Then he would appear at all sorts of places. On the hill, in the old bazaar, near the bus stop, outside my office and even in my bedroom. It was not so much the dream but his face that scared me. I had never seen so much fear, so much anger and so much sadness on any other face.

I remember asking him: “You are dead, why do you keep coming back to us? Go to the Qabaristan, the city of the dead.”

“I did, but they don’t accept me,” he said.

“Why?” I asked again.

“They say I don’t belong there. I am not dead yet. I have been cheated out of my life. They sent me back to the living,” he said.

“But you are not alive either. Go away,” I said.

He did not answer. Just drew back a little and kept staring at the living with his intensely sad eyes.

At dawn, when we heard the call for the morning prayers from a nearby mosque, we the half-living left the hill and drifted back to our abodes. He followed us, always maintaining a little distance. He came as far up as the first house of the first street and then withdrew slowly to the city of the dead where he had to sit on the wall and watch the real dead until it was time to come and visit the half-living.