The Laughing Crowd. I tried to save a dying kitten on a… | by Hamza Sarfraz | Nov, 2025

It started with a sudden, impossible stop.

I was on my bike with my wife, heading to a shoe store on a busy Lahore road — a completely normal day. The bike right in front of me slammed its brakes for just a second, then accelerated fast and was gone.

And then I saw it.

In the middle of the lane, a tiny kitten, maybe only four or six weeks old, was brutally shaking. Its body, its legs, its head — all convulsing. The rider who hit him didn’t even look back.

I know, at 60 KMPH, you can’t just make a full stop in a middle lane. But he just… ran away.

I don’t know how I did it. I swerved my bike, missing the kitten by inches, and slammed the brakes a few feet away. My wife jumped off. I threw the kickstand down and ran.

The road was chaos. Cars and bikes were still speeding by. A truck barrelled towards him. My heart stopped — but by some miracle, the kitten was in the small space between the truck’s tires, and it passed right over him.

I thanked God and ran into the lane, waving my hands like a madman, finally managing to stop a car that was also about to run him over.

I scooped him up and got him to the sidewalk. I laid him down gently, my mind racing, about to ask someone from the nearby clothing stores for help, for water, for… something.

Before I could even think, the kitten shook one last time, a violent jump, and his breaths caught cold. He stopped moving. His little face was full of blood.

I just stood there, my eyes burning. I couldn’t believe what I had just witnessed.

First, the rider who had the cowardice to flee.

But second, and far more shocking, were the other humans. The people from the nearby shops, the bystanders.

They were laughing.

They were laughing at me for stopping. They were laughing at the entire scene. As this tiny creature took its last, agonizing breaths, they watched it like it was entertainment.

No one came to help. No one showed a flicker of sadness. No one, for even a second, thought they could do anything but laugh.

It wasn’t the feeling of them laughing at me that hurt. It was the fact they were laughing at a living being that had just lost its life in front of them. They were laughing at its pain.

My wife was just… shocked. She couldn’t talk all night.

I found a small patch of dirt nearby and buried him. It was the last, only thing I could do.

We are human, but we don’t have humanity. We are lost.

After what I saw yesterday, I feel like my entire past life — my belief in people, in goodness, in… humanity — was a lie.