It was cold, icy with snow flurries, people wrapped up warm and doing last minute shopping for Spring Festival tomorrow. I had unwisely decided to go to shops and stock up on pizzas and chocolate for the holidays so that I needn’t leave the house. I had already had an unsuccessful trip to the German bakery – it had closed for the holidays – and I was worrying that I wouldn’t be able to find any cheese, which would be a real disaster.
I decided to try Metro – surely it would be open today (fingers crossed). But it’s not an easy journey, I had to take bus 65 and change to 27 and then walk. We stopped at GuangHuaMen bus stop and as normal people got off and on but the bus didn’t move off. People were looking out of the window onto the bus stop. I couldn’t resist and leaned over to the window to see why the bus was not moving.
There on the pavement was a man lying on the ground with half a dozen people around him gazing down at him in silence. The man was old – I would say in his 80’s and was lying on his back, with his eyes closed and his mouth open. I could tell within a few seconds that he was dead. There’s no mistaking death when you see it. There was no life in his body. Maybe he had had a heart attack. It certainly looked like it.
One man had the man’s bus pass and ID in his hand reading it and another was, I assume, ringing the police. I was relieved to find nobody videoing him or taking pictures on their mobiles just like the last time I saw a dead man lying on the street.
If he had not been dead I would have got off the bus and attended to him. As it was, I could see that apart from putting something over his face to save his dignity, there was nothing I could do for him. Nobody was attending to him though. Nobody was kneeling down next to him. They were all just standing and looking at him.
Some family somewhere in Nanjing are going to have a terribly sad Spring Festival.