CHRISTINE is our neighbour and, upon our return last week from a trip abroad, we noticed a brand new car parked in her driveway.

Returning home from an Eid lunch a few days later, we saw her getting into her car and stopped to congratulate her on her new acquisition. She informed us that the car wasn’t hers. It was a rental.

“During the London riots I was carjacked,” she explained. Her eyes began to well up, as she recalled her horror. Christine said she’d gone to her daughter’s South London house to drop her off. Perhaps spooked by the sight of usually busy roads totally deserted, she says she lost her way as she was returning home and drove into a Council Estate (public housing development) cul-de-sac.

“As I realised my mistake and tried to turn around, three masked, hooded men yanked open my car doors, shouted at me to get out if I didn’t want to get hurt. But gratefully they allowed me to take my puppy from the back seat before speeding off.”

Christine said it took her several minutes to get through to the police because of the pressure on the emergency number due to the rioting and another five minutes before a police car finally arrived to find her sobbing in the middle of the street.

She said though her car was being replaced as it was insured, the compensation would be limited to her material loss because “it was easily the biggest horror of my life. I am still in shock”.

As she drove off I recalled that as the news of London riots was breaking, Twitter came alive with many citizens of my hometown, Karachi, rather hurriedly comparing London with their own city and finding every imaginable similarity.

Thankfully, it was a couple of more realistic Karachiites themselves who cautioned others against such comparisons for there were none and pointed out that the murder and mayhem going on in Karachi for months, even years, has few parallels in any 21st century metropolis.

On Eid I was watching ARY World as it is the only Pakistani channel available at no extra cost on my cable provider’s basic package. Waseem Badami is a young current affairs (read talk show) presenter on this channel. When he’s irritating, he can have few rivals.

But on Eid day the young presenter excelled himself. He did a powerful programme. There was no politics. No sermons. No sneers. The anchor didn’t attempt a long monologue. He went out of the studio and let real people talk with no interruption and appeared sensitive and compassionate.

Long conflicts often reduce real people, the victims, to a mere statistic, where someone with a name, a family, loved ones, hopes and aspirations is mentioned solely as part of the death toll; one among the 25 or 30 or 50 faceless people killed on the day.

Badami visited the homes of three families who have recently suffered a loss of a dear one in the on-going mayhem. In doing so, he at least temporarily gave back a few victims their identities and placed them in the midst of those who loved them dearly.The TV screen came alive with the pain of some of those grappling with their loss. The physically sturdy Pakhtun whose brother, a bus conductor, had been slaughtered couldn’t hold back his tears and broke down as he described how he found his brother’s broken, tortured body after having to look at several among the corpses packing the morgue.

Surviving members of a family, which lost three members in an arson attack on a bus, spoke of their pain and helplessness. Their dear ones died trapped in the bus as flames enveloped it after the attack.

Then there was the woman whose only son, a strapping 23-year-old, borrowed his uncle’s motorcycle so he could quickly go and get some groceries and went missing. They found him in the morgue. “His hand and feet had been tied, he was blindfolded and gagged and shot through the head, face and leg.”

“My son was a lovely boy. I can’t understand why someone would want to kill him like that. He was my only hope for my old age. What am I going to do now? I have been ruined.”

All those who had been left bereft at their loss didn’t know who to blame and couldn’t understand why they’d been targeted but there was a common refrain: their government had failed them at various levels.

To them the biggest failure was that the government couldn’t ensure safe streets so they could at least go securely and earn their daily wage. These families said that those who purportedly champion their cause on TV have not even offered them condolences.

Having followed every twist and turn in the Zulfikar Mirza-Rehman Malik controversy I am still unable to come out clearly on one side or the other but I will say the interior minister’s persona does not fill me with confidence.

Mirza may have been over the top mostly but also said things that have never been said on the political stage in Karachi. As a result, he has had to lose his job and probably his friendship with the president whose commitment to ‘reconciliation’ would brook no such statements.

But this commitment would have been laudable had it afforded a bit of stability to the city, to the country, rather than merely keep his party’s government in the saddle.

Would you ask the murdered bus conductor’s brother, the 23-year old man’s mother or the young daughter of the woman who died in the bus arson and literally hundreds of others whether in Liaquatabad, Lyari or Banaras Colony what this reconciliation has brought them? I wouldn’t.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com