No Peshawar attack in 2015 please
The year that just ended. The year that stretched into an eternity, while feeling like a movie set on fast forward. The year that was indistinguishable in its ordinariness, yet punctuated with moments that were so extraordinary they became unforgettable. The year that was optimistic, cheerful, yet filled with such pain that it took one’s breath away. The year that changed much, affecting me with an intensity that altered me in some intangible way. For a long time, if not forever. The year that saw the world unleash acts of raw violence, turning the rules of darkness on their head. The year that was stark in all its realness, yet felt as ephemeral as the brilliant colours of that butterfly in your palm you caught for a moment, aged five, in your grandmother’s garden. Goodbye, 2014.
There’s the subliminal introspection as the year folds its chaotic, unwieldy wings, while you push the tiny voice in your mind absentmindedly to the side like a stray wisp of hair caressing your cheek. The short-lived damn-I wasted-another-year-planning-but doing-nothing-like-the-previous-year furrows your thoughts, but then the New Year’s resolutions soothe any disquiet you had over another year that rushed as you pushed the snooze button on your life. Dreams that shaped your plans. Plans that underpinned your rash steps. Steps that catapulted your mind into a blustery state. The state that coloured your cynicism darker, your demons scarier. Laughable is any long-lived concern over your life amounting to less than yesterday’s breaking news; your exaggerated sense of being is of a speck in the expansive canvas of the world. Face it.
But then the ordinary mortal wrestles with the existential dilemmas counting each joy as transitory, each day of grief as unlimited, while the world acts as a modifier. Your issues are put in perspective. While the measurement of the world is in reference to your feelings, perceptions, experiences, and range of responses, and you place your life higher than that of others (for most of us who are not made in the mould of Mother Teresa or Gandhiji), there’s, abruptly, that one event that jolts you out of your apathetic existence. You sit up, as the enormity of that one event settles, uncomfortably, into your consciousness. Pain in your life you felt gnawing on your insides last night before you found dreamless sleep wet your face when you watch the news in hourly bulletins the next day.
Broken bodies of four children on a deserted beach in Gaza haunted my thoughts, as my nights were possessed by that image. The Israeli bombs missed their foe, Hamas, while finding a way to children running to hide after the first bomb. Children playing hide-and-seek in fishermen’s shacks running for shelter, shouting for help, before being bombed to death that one sweltering July day.
While the ISIS kill-maim-rape anyone they can lay their hands/guns/swords/bombs/intentions on, the videos of slain activists and journalists, entrenched in the bloody narrative of the new barbarians-in-the-war-arena, horrify, while feeding into the morbid fascination for the violence-porn that keeps the bloody narrative flowing in red. Most of us after a ten-minute OMG/what’s-this-world-coming-toindulge in self-consolation: the horrific killings occurred in a land far away, and prolonged grief for distant incidents does not become us. We already have our bombs, and targeted killings, and suicide-vested teenagers, and militant-killing drones that kill women and children. ISIS is so far away they may as well be from Jupiter. TTP is closer. We just forgot they were there.
And many children died in Thar. There were no bombs, or drones or gun toting militants, spraying young bodies with bullets. These children died of malnutrition. In 2014, in our country, 172 children, children younger than our children, died because there was not enough food for them. Imagine that. A mud house of two tiny, scantily furnished rooms, barely lit with a broken, kerosene lamp, where a child goes silent because he’s too emaciated to even sob. Death overwhelms the silence soon, and the stony-faced parents take turns to rock the lifeless body of their child before turning to the younger one, who curled up like a foetus in a dark corner of their mudroom, and existence as immaterial as that of mud, stares at his dead brother. Mutely.
American drones killed many militants and displaced countless people in the FATA. Then the Pakistani military planes replaced them to raze militants’ hideouts, and countless more came under the androgynous listing: IDPs. Their homes destroyed, their livelihoods gone, their dreams shattered, they await the rehabilitation that will take years to complete, the return that may never be, and the winter to soften as they watch their bodies, hopes and souls freeze. Into one ignored-by-Pakistan day at a time.
As Peshawar buried its 148, Pakistan awakened like someone had hit it with an iron rod. In the gut. Someone in pain, somewhere, said: “The smallest coffins are the heaviest”. Never was it truer, as Pakistan hunched under the burden of 132 bodies of children, as their families took the bloodied, bullet-holed bodies to freshly dug graves. The world joined in this grief that had a few parallels in its execution of brutality, rawness of cruelty, of how low mere mortals could be. On this last night of 2014, all other moments of pain whimper into a corner when the wails of those 132 mothers melt into that one unified prayer that only those whose hearts break irreparably could even come close to make any sense of.
As I say a prayer for the families in Peshawar, looking at the serene face of my son, watching Annabele with his cousins, there’s a sharp intake of breath. Of love. Of gratitude. Of pain. May no mother, no father, ever have to bury a child. There’s no pain worse, there are no words to even comprehend the pain. Ergo, I pray. For all children, all over, to outlive their parents.
Let 2015 be different. I smile inwardly as I type these words past midnight on December 31, 2014. With very little notice, our lives are turned upside down, our dreams broken into smithereens, and while we find pieces of joy scattered all over, there are some shards of glass that remain embedded in our souls, closing chunks of our being to love, happiness, and a heart sans pain. But hey, what’s left unbroken remains joyous, persistent and hopeful. And that’s enough any given day. Here’s to wishing all of you a 2015 made up of all you wish for…and much more.
Smile; tomorrow is… just another day.
To my bebe. Always.