THE Eid milan party at the Khan mansion is expected to be as resplendent as always, perhaps even more so to camouflage with opulence the dreary news in the world around it.

Hundreds are expected — bejewelled women, starched men, the very best of the set, who will titter with amusement at the peacocks that roam in the front lawn, and will covet the crystal goblets in which they sip their soda. Warriors are these, both hosts and guests, their commitment to merriment untouched by war or violence. As stalwart soldiers of celebration they will ensure that this Eid is just like all others in better, more peaceful times.

There is variety in their ranks, rich and poor united in shutting out the mayhem. Across the city in the Ahmeds’ second-storey flat, another raucous celebration is in progress. There are brothers and sons, daughters-in-law and cousins, comparing their mehndi and polishing off plates of biryani.

The clan pulses with the anticipation of the Eid holiday untrammelled by the heat, the smallness of the flat or the lost grains of rice that get caught between the toes of toddlers. A picnic is being planned for the day after Eid, the family’s annual pilgrimage to the faraway ocean whose breezes never quite seem to reach their inland abodes.

The Khans and the Ahmeds live in different worlds, their economic spheres as far apart as the pretensions of their guests. One boasts of vacations in France, the other of job leads in Bahrain. But for all their differences they agree on one thing: Eid and its celebration must remain impervious to all misery. These revellers will tell you that celebration in the face of war and violence and death is a testament to life’s continuation, that optimism allows the beleaguered to live through the death and destruction that surrounds them.

This is the narrative of contemporary Pakistan, where patriotism has become a dogged, irrational optimism beyond all odds.

Under its auspices, mirth untouched by mayhem is a testament of faith, one that transforms all self-deceptions necessary for such glee into courageous acts of resilience. Neither the Khans nor the Ahmeds are insulated against the ravages of a country teetering on the edge.

In the same upscale suburb where the Khan mansion stands suspended in yards of impossibly green lawns, the young scion of a wealthy feudal family was gunned down a few weeks ago, his killers never caught. Mrs Khan attended the funeral, inwardly preoccupied with deciding which of the mourners she would invite to her Eid bash, serious in wanting to limit her invitees to the truly important, the definitely significant.

On the seventh floor of the same building where the Ahmeds celebrate, an only son died last month after being hit by a bullet meant for an unknown someone else. Every Thursday until now all the women in the Ahmed family trooped upstairs to attend Quran khwanis for the boy, nodding with sympathy before his dying mother.

But that was last month, and one must live among the living and not the dead; look to the future not the past; hold on to hope instead of despair. These and other useful phrases will oil the celebrations absolving the lucky living against any embarrassment at their own joy. Grim anchors on television screens and weeping editorials in the papers must be forgotten to accommodate the holiday.

Unsurprisingly, such platitudes do little to assuage the grief-stricken, their losses lasting beyond the deliverance such totems to optimism can provide. Their grief must be taken into private realms, left out of the collective narrative of Eid in Pakistan, where the accrued entitlement of a month of fasting trumps all else.

Pakistan, then, is the land of dual Eids, a condition promulgated not simply by the disparate sightings of a single moon but also by the barriers between in bloody 2011 year are allotted some small crevices in the conscience of a nation either truly oblivious or intentionally uncaring.

As Eid embraces gather many in their grasp, the memory of a month of fasting and afternoon naps requires happy commemoration and the consciousness of another’s pain is a dreary burden that must be kept at bay.There have always been strong connections between war and hedonism. During the Second World War, while Europe rocked with death, Parisian cafés were bursting with those committed to having a good time; the evening air echoed with music, the restaurants with diners.

The proximity of war and misery did not deter them and they never pondered whether their joy mocked another’s pain.

In Pakistan, the pain of a few thousand, even a few hundred thousand, however undeserved and heartbreaking, is still not the collective pain of a nation. Unsurprisingly, then, there is no embarrassment in the public celebration of Eid or anything else, no moral discomfort in the continuation of rituals or acts of unabashed merriment even if they occur amid never-ending funerals.

These lines of separation, invisible and formidable, divide Pakistan, becoming a barrier against the avowal that things are truly bad enough and thousands of deaths unjust enough for the ordinary to interrupt their lives and their celebrations in some extraordinary way.

The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law. rafia.zakaria@gmail.com