A Muslim Shopkeeper in Karachi Opened the Envelope and Decided It Was a Trap. I Would Have Read It as Evidence.

The envelope arrived at a grocery store on a narrow street in Qazafi Colony, in Baldia Town, on the western edge of Karachi. Inside was a page of the Quran, burnt. Also inside: photographs of a Catholic man named Azeem Javaid, who is forty and who lived across the road, and a photograph of his mother, and a copy of her national identity card.

The shopkeeper is Muslim. He looked at what was in his hands and he did not conclude that his neighbour had done something. He concluded that somebody wanted him to think his neighbour had done something. He called the police.

I want to be honest about what I would have done with that envelope, because I have done it with far less. A screenshot. A paraphrase of a paraphrase. A forwarded clip with the first eleven seconds cut off. I move from the thing in my hand to the verdict in my mouth without pausing anywhere in between, and the place I skip over is the place where a person's whole life is sitting.

He did not skip over it. And within hours the street filled up anyway, and ten Christian families were inside their houses listening to it happen.