Dear Log,
«These were the stories I heard while I walked and drove about Isfahan,...:Zing!An eye specialist was asked by a middle-aged lady in a chador to examine the eyesight of a patient, a young man, who was in the local hospital. When the specialist was taken to the patient he saw that the boy was just "a piece of meat," mutilated [in the Iran-Iraq war] beyond rehabilitation, without hands, without feet. Every day the lady in the chador came to the eye specialist and took him to see this patient.
The specialist wondered whether there was any point in restoring the sight of a person who would never get well again or return to any sort of life. But he didn't want to would the lady in the chador. She was always in the hospital ward. There were two or three like her, not more.
The specialist made inquiries. He found out that the woman in the chador was not the boy's mother; she was only a neighbor. The boy's mother came to the hospital every day, but she didn't stay long. After some time the specialist won the confidence of the lady in the chador, and one day he asked why she wanted the mutilated boy, who was not her son, to see again.
The lady in the chador said, "My own boy, my own son, was executed because he belonged to an anti-revolutionary group. The person who reported him was this boy here, this neighbor's son. I am happy that my own son is dead. He was executed, and that was all. I want to keep this piece of meat alive to take revenge. I want his mother to grieve for him every day."»
-- from chapter II.9 of V.S. Naipaul's Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
