"It was 21st of Ramazan when a dreadful incident occurred in my life,” the young man says. He was attending a religious meeting in Lahore when the first bomb went off. He remembers seeing body parts ‘hovering in the air’ and then the sounds of screams coming through thick smoke. A suicide bomber triggered the second explosion as rescuers were loading the wounded into ambulances and he was forced to watch helplessly as one of his friends succumbed to his wounds. He does not remember hearing the third bomb, another suicide blast.

By the end of the day, 31 people were said to be dead and at least 170 had been wounded, although the full toll of suffering will probably never be known. As an angry mob set fire to a local police station in protest, the prime minister condemned the attacks as “cowardly acts of terrorism” and promised that those “playing with the lives of innocent people would not escape the law of the land.”

More than two years have passed since that day, but the man remains haunted by what he witnessed. “I started hating terrorists and held responsible government for that awful occurrence,” he says. “There is no assurance of one’s life in Pakistan. Why are thousands of innocents being killed every year? We need good governance and rule of law in our country.”

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 19th, 2014