RECENTLY, Karachi’s police surgeon wrote that in four years on the job, she had never felt this helpless. Her search for truth and justice had met obstacles before, she said. This time it was asphyxiating. “Tired. Too tired.” By 7:52 that evening the post was gone.
Dr Summaiya Tariq examines the dead for a living. Her job is to establish what was done to people who can no longer say it themselves. She had not been quiet. Days earlier, she had written to a senior police officer setting out 14 deficiencies in the first postmortem of Mir Raza, the 25-year-old man found in the bushes at Gulistan-i-Jauhar in Karachi. No X-ray. No swabs for gunshot residue. No DNA sample. The skull and neck not opened. Then she went on television and said the wounds described did not match one another, while stressing she had not examined the body herself. That is the sort of precision that tells you what kind of witness she is. It is also the reason the grave was opened.
This is not a story about a woman stopped from speaking. She was not stopped; she was answered. The police issued a statement about the harm her observations might do to the investigation. The medical board she convened was reconstituted in the early hours of a Friday, its members swapped out, outsiders brought in. That morning, the family stood at the graveyard and were sent home. By evening, she had written seven words about being tired and then taken them down herself. Notice what she withdrew. Not the objections. Not a word of the interview. Not the evidence. She withdrew the sentence about what it was costing her.
Nobody needs to be censored if the price of speaking is set high enough that they do it themselves.
In Karachi, it has become exhausting even to complain.
As I write this, I do not know how the media will be covering the country’s 79th birthday. Thirty years in this industry lets me hazard a few guesses. Everybody will have celebrated with “fervour”. The op-ed pages will have asked where it all went wrong. Leaders will have spoken at length about their sacrifices. Nobody will have counted a flag.
Two years ago, I wrote about fervour on these pages. And I have been reading some version of it every August since 1995. In fact, I used to set it as a classroom exercise: report the day without using the word ‘patriotism’ anywhere in the copy, and see what you are left with. My argument then was that habit is not fervour. A child who sings the anthem every morning has a routine, not necessarily a conviction.
I was arguing about an adjective. It was the smaller argument. The question was never whether the feeling in the papers is real. It is which feelings are permitted to stay up.
Because we have the word wrong in the other direction too. When we say this country is tired, we usually mean it has stopped caring. I don’t think Dr Summaiya meant that. Indifference is cheap. It costs nothing and asks nothing. I assume she wrote the opposite of indifference, and the reason it was unbearable is that she had not stopped. That is the condition I recognise, and I do not think I am alone in it. Not people who have given up. People who have not, and who find it costs more each time, and go back on Monday anyway, and cannot say so out loud.
Everyone I know is tired.
In Karachi, it has become exhausting even to complain, to keep listing the negligence, or rather the arrogance, with which we are governed. Say so and someone will accuse you of being prejudiced. Most of us have developed a permanent eye roll for political conversation, because it goes nowhere. We have schools with no children in them and hospitals with no doctors, and we have known this for so long that the knowledge has stopped meaning anything at all It goes nowhere with the opposition either. This is the part we do not say on anniversaries. The men and women who went to prison for a principle become, in office, the people who imprison. Every side takes its turn at vengeance. That is why what we feel is tiredness rather than anger. Anger requires believing the next turn will be different.
Chaos is everybody’s friend here. Which brings me to the news from Lahore this week, where the deputy prime minister and the interior minister announced that anyone, anywhere in the world, can now log on to a portal and send a degh to Data Darbar.
The state can build a system that will take your money from anywhere on earth in under a minute, route it, account for it, and livestream the result. It can do this. It has done it.
But it could not X-ray a body.
The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.
X: @ LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2026
