[Neaz Subhan, Coming Back: An Escape From Suicide, Georgetown: Neaz Subhan, 2020. 221pp]
Without time to draw my gun, which was tucked in the backside of my waist, I impulsively and with all the strength I could muster, forced the door open. It swung inwards and my intention was to slam the intruder into the tiled concrete wall on the inside of the room. The door flew open, as if without resistance, causing me to stumble in. Instantly my face was doused with a liquid rendering me almost helpless.
In whatever time I had to think, I thought it was acid for the intense burning sensation felt, was immediate. Just as my eyes were about to be shut down, I saw the attacker about to light a match and I suddenly recognized what the scent was; gasoline.
Instinctively, I held on to the attacker’s hands to prevent the tip of the match from making contact with the strip of sulfur at the side of the box.
[…] I barely managed to prevent the attacker from igniting the match and in between the painful blinks of my burning eyes, I recognized who wanted to light me afire; the revelation was profoundly shocking.
This is one of the most riveting, gripping, suspense-filled passages in the book Coming Back: An Escape From Suicide by Neaz Subhan. The passage confronts the reader with the desperate, terror-filled narrative of an intensely tormented mind. It reads like a fast-moving, action-packed work of fiction and is characteristic of several sequences in the book; but this work is neither fictitious nor entertainment. It is a grim tale of an unhappy narrator in a prolonged struggle with overpowering thoughts of suicide, who candidly publishes his experience, and how he came back from the edge of a precipice, so that others will read it and hopefully overcome similar feelings.
