LAHORE, March 12: Eight-year-old Haider Ali is among the children who live in the area along Temple Road, from Regal to Safanwala intersections, and have yet to overcome the trauma they suffered a day earlier on Tuesday morning.
“The break in our school had hardly begun and we were planning to go out to play when the windowpanes broke up with a bang and the earth trembled. Everyone was confused. Many of my class fellows started crying but I did not,” Ali told this reporter while standing outside 3/1 Temple Road that was badly damaged in the blast.
After a while, teachers asked all the children who lived nearby to go home. Ali reached home and hugged his younger brother who could not attend school because of fever. His two elder sisters also reached home meanwhile and the siblings hugged each other.
“None of us uttered a single word. No tears. We used to play a lot of games with each other, with our friends living in the neighbourhood on vacation but now we know not what to do. We have lost interest in all the games we used to play,” said an expressionless Ali.
Many age-mates of Ali had seen crows and kites taking away fingers, ears, noses and other parts of human flesh from the rooftops of the nearby houses.
Sixth class student Kashif saw a policeman carrying a human hand in a polythene bag.
Shoaib, Usman Ali and Taimoor Sohail had seen upper part of a body on the bank of an open drain behind their streets that was later taken away by plainclothesmen.
Life was far from normal in the immediate surroundings of the FIA headquarters where residents and businessmen in the worst-hit stretch of Temple Road between Safanwala Chowk and Regal Cinema spent the whole of Wednesday striving to restore some sanity to life, carrying out emergency repairs wherever possible, leaving the rest for some other time.
In the words of Nawazish Ali, who has his home at 5 Temple Road just a hundred metres away from the site of the attack, “Normalcy will take time to return. For the moment, we must thank God that we survived the explosion.”
Usman, a youth who has his home close by, told Dawn that many people in the area temporarily shifted to some other place overnight. Of those who stayed on, most spent the night quivering under the impact of the blast. The sunrise brought them face to face with the task at hand. The carpenter was the much sought after man in the neighbourhood, chased by a crowd of the needy wherever he took his tools to. It will be some days before the last door is repaired and the last windowpane fixed.
The whole area presented the look of a shipyard, the heavy sound of the hammer against metal and wood reverberating through the air – more so in the adjoining street, 3 Temple Road, which is located just next to the FIA office and now gave a look of a quake-hit zone.
The street is lined up with badly damaged cars whose owners have more pressing issues to attend to than tending to their vehicles; like overcoming the emotional trauma and building homes on the debris that the houses have been reduced to.
The roofs of many of the houses in the street were badly damaged and their replacement cannot be constructed in a hurry. Many of the houses are modern-day conversions of structures dating back to the times before partition. The nearby schools have been closed for a few days for security reasons, the worst hit among them require a professional inspection to rule out a future disaster. They need millions to put these houses in order, and the people Dawn talked to were not putting too much faith in the official pledges of compensation.
The impact of the Tuesday fiasco was felt less as one left the residential parts in the most-affected stretch for the more worldly commercial area. The bazaars cannot afford to be as sentimental about the issue as the shaken inhabitants of homes sometimes are and the `shop must go on’ seemed to be the motto of the business on all sides of the red zone.
The Safanwala chowk was bustling with usual activity, the passers-by mumbling something as they cast curious glances at the site of the carnage. The Mall and adjoining roads were bustling too, even if a bit tentatively.
To summarise the philosophy enunciated by a shop-runner on The Mall, the businesses are not merely a source to feed mouths, they are also tasked with helping the city recover from the latest shock and provide the workers involved in these businesses a diversion and an escape from personal traumas.