18
How would you feel if you lived in the country’s largest city (and not a remote, militant-infested hamlet near the border) but could not get out of your house because of fear for your life? How would you feel if you and your family had to do without water for days on end? How would you feel if you went without electricity for several days? How would you feel if you saw a couple of your neighbours get shot but couldn’t do anything to help them? How would you feel if you beseeched the authorities to come to your aid but were rebuffed each time?
Well, you would feel exactly the same way as did the people of Sector A in Qasba Colony on Sunday. You would be standing outside your house or loitering about in the neighbourhood simply because it was finally possible to do so. You would tell your neighbour where you were on Tuesday when the troubles began, when gunmen atop the infamous Kati Pahari began firing at your neighbourhood. You would discuss with your neighbours in detail how you and your family managed to keep life and limb together since then.
And if you looked up at the houses and makeshift bunkers on the hill, you would feel like going up to the people there and ask them why they made life impossible for you and your family these past few days. But then you would come to your senses because doing that would be unthinkable. Going to Muslimabad and trying to reason with the people there would be unthinkable because it looked like another province.
You would be dying to tell your story to the world because the hundreds of bullets that pierced through the KESC transformer in your neighbourhood on Tuesday night had made it impossible for you to watch television. And because your cellphone had died on you two days earlier and you had not ventured out of Qasba at all, you would be largely in the dark if at all the world knew of the impossible situation in Qasba Colony.
That’s why you would rush to any journalist who came to your neighbourhood and eagerly shake his hand. You would not waste time in complaining about the tardy response of the media but would busy yourself in showing to the guy each bullet hole in your neighbourhood. You would show him each rock, each boulder sent your way. And when the chap talked to other people, you would rack your brains to decide what to show him next.
You would ask one of your neighbours, who had collected some of the bullets that hit houses in your neighbourhood, to show the journalist his entire collection. You would call out to people who were affected more than you were.
“What’s the name of the tall man with the beard who was hit in the knee?” you would ask your neighbour. But then you would yourself blurt out when you recalled the name of your injured neighbour: “Jamal, where is he now — in the hospital or at home?”
You would bombard the journalist with so much information that asking questions would become almost redundant for him.
Overwhelmed by what he saw and heard, the newsman would simply immerse himself in taking notes, in recording each detail, each slight.After racking your brains, you would then think of showing the guy the biggest evidence you have of how difficult it had become at one point. “Let me show you ‘the corridor’ which we built to take out our women and children, in case surviving this war became impossible,” you would say.
Rather enjoying the look of amazement on the face of the journalist, you would explain that it was not a proper corridor that you had built for your womenfolk, but a series of holes in the boundary walls of the seven houses on your street.
A hole in the common wall between two houses made it possible for the two families there to go from one house to the other, you would explain. “Holes in all the boundary walls on the street made it possible for us to take the women from one house to the other at will. These holes were made because we could not go out onto the street in front of our houses. So we decided to link our houses sideways in case we needed to flee our own neighbourhood using the side street.”
You would then have the satisfaction of seeing the journalist ask his photographer to take several pictures of ‘the corridor’.
