WHEN a well-known writer is attacked by two gunmen on a murky evening in Lahore, the immediate wish and prayer is for it to be the result of old enmity. That’s the welcome relief a channel reporting on the crime seeks to provide to the ‘needy’.

The channel reporter, seemingly an intuitive expert on the subject of finding old enmities with the able assistance of Lahore policemen, insists the motive once again has to be ‘personal’. His is an inherently true line, consistent with the explanations given after some recent murders in the city — a city that strives as it has done in recent time to isolate itself from the dreaded trends current elsewhere in Pakistan.

The police here are mindful that their role as keepers of peace requires them to not spread panic. They are in the habit of ‘not ruling out any possibility’.

People with certain surnames have been targeted in Lahore in recent days, but each time the same routine has been repeated. The policemen have been eager to play down these acts and when they are in this containing mood and there’s craving among people for the truth the police dish out, the media is happy to behave.

No crime can be fought without the police getting the help of a desperately believing public and of the institutions, not least opinion-shapers. Just like in a war and during an insurgency, the fine details of crime that the police are fighting have to be blurred if not concealed from public view. This is essential to creating the desirable impression without which the people will be simply too frightened to live.

But suppose this cover is blown away? We are fortunate to always have a replacement safety net in case the old one is too tattered to shield us anymore. Ok, there are some nosy scribes around who must destruct our first line of defence and argue that the famous writer fired upon the previous evening was unable to think of any personal enmity angle to his story. There is, of course, this second option of seeing it as a sectarian attack — emphatically, an attack on a ‘minority’ sect and luckily not an attack on ‘us’, the majority. We’d be scared to death if we didn’t have this security around us. The aloofness, indifference, is the elixir we have perfected and which keeps us going in all situations — disconnected from dangerous lives in the vicinity that exist as a parallel to our own little cocoon.

A gap has to be maintained with these dangerous other lives, often invented where physical proximity is difficult to avoid. It has to be maintained in the streets, in the workplace, and before that, at home.

It was to serve this basic need that architects came up with the dirty kitchen as a hidden attachment to the modern households with a claim on civilisation. A foreign concept or local evolution, it serves our designs well. It keeps the sub-human busy aiding the system without being seen.

Behind the screen the disconnected, foul-smelling dirty kitchen is a dirty place with painful concoctions that are not good for the conscience of those served out of here. The dirty place reeks of parallel lives -- underfed, under-rewarded and mired in social and physical disease.

Occasionally, the God-fearing inhabitants beyond the wall allow themselves an interaction with these lesser people living subordinate lives, who should ideally have a police clearance before they are employed as the household help. That’s when a dole-out is made — cash, fully financed admission in a government school, treatment at a public-sector hospital — before the door is forced closed for fear of the master being exploited by the servant.

Apart from these moments when the two worlds threaten to meet, by and large, mutual suspicion defines the relationship. Money and valuables frequently go missing, and accusations and intimidation, even violence, are routinely resorted to. Rarely does the noise generated by these disputes rise above the dirty kitchens to create a bang in the more affluent neighbourhoods. But then occasionally death brings these two lives face to face.

Fiza Batool, the teenager who died at a Lahore hospital a few days ago, was the third ‘maid’ in the space of a few weeks to have sneaked under the closed door posthumously for some belated exposure in the world she served. She drifted away after fighting for her life for many days, her body bruised and battered and a few rights activists seeking to use her case as a stepping stone for a much-needed law.

Fiza weighed heavily on everyone’s conscience as she lay in her hospital bed. The painful rituals that must accompany such instance were kept on hold all that while, delaying the re-disappearance of the affluent behind the wall.

It may be a brief interlude but the pain is always so unbearable for those who have seen good life and know its value; in contrast to the dazed, almost emotionless faces of Fiza’s relatives photographed as they carried her body away to their hometown, or when they sat listening to the promises made by a very intense chief minister of Punjab.

These painful moments spawn the condemnation of killers, but just as they do not encourage admissions and confessions and voluntary reforms, they cannot suppress the old urge to disconnect with reality. The exploiters must be set apart from the good, always God-fearing, employers of house servants. Islamia College? Is he a fundamentalist? Taught English literature? Could well be a liberal fascist. Not one of us.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.