SIKANDARI, a petite middle-aged woman, may appear dwarfed by the large crowd of medical and media personnel at the Edhi morgue but her grief towers above the mayhem that surrounds her. She looks at her two sons staring at her from the announcement wall of the icy mortuary. Sikandari has travelled all the way from the remote recesses of Sindh to look for her boys, hoping to forbid them from party politics and take them back. “I have no one else and they never thought of that. Their father left us and now they have left me. They came because they were promised food and two hundred rupees. How will Benazir return my sons?” rants the inconsolable mother. She wails for hours by the door, waiting for their turn to be buried. “I don’t have anyone here and there is no one to bury them or to pay for their funeral. My brother will say that I have brought such a burden upon him,” she cries, torn between impulse and circumstance.

This is just one of the scores of lives that were plunged into darkness with the twin blasts that rocked Karachi on October 18. Aliuddin, 54, is another one of the frantic hundreds that throng the Edhi building. “My wife, son and brother have died. I can’t believe I have lost everything. Why did she come to kill us? How can I live now?” he howls. He says that his family was not participating in the rally but stepped out on the spur of the moment to witness the homecoming that crippled the city. “She was being shown like a goddess so many people came out to see the show, not to support her.”

Reportedly, a whopping 30,000 people from various areas of the country had volunteered to become Bhutto’s human shield, with a few hundred opting as guards. Approximately 50 of the leader’s sentries were killed; 40 of them belonged to Lyari. “Maybe this is what it will take for these people to wake up,” says Rashid, who runs a small pan shop in the locality. “After forty funerals, they will be able to understand that no one does anything for us. Nothing has improved here.”

However, the blasts were not the only culprits on the darkest day of Karachi’s history. Twelve-year old Erum is in an Intensive Care Unit due to delays caused by the lack of staff at hospitals. “We had to wait for a long time and that is why her condition worsened. She has been suffering from hepatitis and complained of stomach pain. The staff has not come in because of the rally and this is the third hospital we have come to. There is no sense of duty,” explains her young mother, Alia.

But as Sikandari begins a lonely journey home, there are fears that the loss of her sons and hundreds of others may already have begun to blur into statistics. A week of blame games, FIR issues, demands for foreign intervention, DIG Investigations Manzoor Mughal, accused by Bhutto of torturing Zardari, has bowed out and DIG Saood Mirza is at the helm. However, crucial evidence has already been lost and police has cited traffic jams on Sharae Faisal as the primary reason for a rushed clean-up. On the other hand, the chief security mastermind of Bhutto’s rally, ASP Chattha, was overlooked as a prime witness and his statement has not been recorded.

The string of consolation that connects these disconsolate families is one of sacrifice and not loss. A greater loss would be if that sacrifice begins to ring hollow for them; when no envelopes or promises are able to assuage the scars left by lives that fell by the wayside.

— reema.abbasi@dawn.com