SOMETIMES it takes a face to rescue poetry from the quotidian existence of a verse so familiar that it has lost its edge. A friend you haven’t seen a long time has been unwell. When you call, he answers from his sickbed, saying: “Khak ho jain gay hum tum ko khabar honay tak [By the time you care to inquire, I will be nothing but dust).”

You have heard that one before, seen it scribbled on rickshaws and trucks — words reduced to hollow squiggles, robbed of meaning by repetition. Till one day, this old, fragile friend uses it to describe his state. His voice on the phone is drowned by the echoes of your regret — even when he is, mercifully, still there — that comes from having neglected a friend, from a verse understood in its tragic context.

For decades, now, you have been familiar with the suffering of the children of Afghanistan. Their plight, much like Ghalib’s couplet, has lost its resonance from all the repetition, compassion blunted to fatigue. And then one day, a friend tags you on images on Facebook, these children as seen through the lens of a photographer who sees them as sketches of pain — tiny vessels for poisoned hopes and shattered futures, personifying all that has gone wrong with humanity.

Empty eyes staring out of faces grown old before their time. Their unsmiling, old-young faces remind you of your selfish fear back when Bush said: You are either with us or against us. Because you had worked with the refugees, seen the features of seraph-faced children mangled by leishmaniasis, the wheezing old men wasted by tuberculosis and choked by dust storms in Balochistan as they waited to be let in through closed borders. The fear that gnawed at your anxious heart was: if the US attacked Pakistan, your children too could become refugees.

And they did, when the conflict came to borderlands. And fell victim to butchers in a gory enactment of Beslan, here in Peshawar.

But this is not about our children. This is about those of Steve McCurry: the children the world forgot.

This is about the children of Afghanistan, and the crushing, crippling tragedy of their hopeless, nameless faces.

One, you know. The stony-eyed girl from a 1985 National Geographic magazine cover, the nameless girl lost in the Nasirbagh refugee camp who — feted as the Mona Lisa that depicted the inconsequential, anonymous existence of refugees the world over — was found as Sharbat Gula in Peshawar. When discovered, she still lived in limbo, epitomising a refugee’s life hinged uncertainly to the fluid notions of legal status and identity.

What about other children that McCurry photographed during that trip to Peshawar? Children who had no names, who perhaps never grew up, never became so iconic as to warrant a search. Here they are, with their unspoken miseries, looking indifferently at an indifferent world.

Let’s look at the pictures and give them names. And if the names remind you of children who died at the Army Public School in Peshawar, and make you think that it is unfair to appropriate the names of our slaughtered children for Afghan children, then know that children — here or there — should not pay for wars that adults wage.

You don’t know their names and you don’t know their stories. But lest they turn to dust — or may already have — before you even care to inquire, let’s find in these pictures the broken verses of lives disrupted: children like poems unfinished, abandoned halfway.

He is about 10. He wears a turquoise Afghan shirt, collar embroidered in silver thread. He wears no pants, for he has no legs. He stands on prosthetics, pipes grotesquely protruding from under the hem of his shirt, ending in shoes. Like some mutant nightmare that has retained his innocence, he stands there and smiles. Amazingly, he smiles.

She is about five, standing with her hands raised in supplication. Praying for peace that never comes?

He is about seven, grimacing, with a toy gun held to his head, as if anticipating a bullet. His face is tear-stained and crumpled. You are glad the gun isn’t real, even though given that this was ‘jihad-era’ Afghanistan, it woul­dn’t have been difficult to find one.

The next boy is about three and he too has a gun. A real one, his father’s Kalashnikov, held to his tiny chest. The father’s grimy hands lie on his shoulders like a benediction — “Son, someday you too will go to jihad.”

She is about seven, wearing a white silk shirt with a ruffled pink skirt. An angel with a dirty face, she could be your child. And because in her you recognise your own, that breaks your heart even more.

And this one is about 10, perhaps. She has that blazing, melting stare, defiant and accusing. She is Sharbat Gula and she was found. The others in McCurry’s oeuvre were not — because we didn’t go out looking, didn’t care to inquire. Khak ho jain gay hum tum ko khabar honay tak. They may have turned to dust for all we know.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2017