—Photo Credit: Ali Khursheed

Boom! One word, one sound and a world lost. Bomb blast. Not many people survive a bomb blast without serious injuries and live to tell the story. I am extremely fortunate that not only myself, but my husband, three children, two maids and one cook walked out of a house which can only be described as a go-down of glass shrapnel, wooden splinters and rubble unharmed and alive.

You see it on television, the way it looked, but rarely do you actually realise what goes on inside. This is our story.
September 19, 2011, for us a black Monday, began as any ordinary day. We woke up to our alarm at 6am and I rang the bell for the cook to come inside and make breakfast. Usually I wake up only one of the two maids, but I don’t know what came over me, I insisted they both wake up because I needed them. We all sat for breakfast at the dining table at precisely 6.30am and were back upstairs at 7am to get ready for school. 7.25, ready and about to exit my dressing room … BOOM!

I heard glass breaking, something fell on my head. The glass shower stall burst while my husband was bathing. He yelled, “The kids! Nausheen the kids!”

That is when realisation struck me and a strange calm seized me. I got up, went into my bedroom. There was no window grill or glass, all lying strewn across the bed and floor. I saw my children outside my door screaming, crying. They were alive. All of them. I reached the door, which was shut, but how were my children visible? It sunk in finally; the blast had been strong enough for the closed door inside the house to tear, splinter and smash across the room. I tried to open the jammed lower part; finding it stuck I climbed over it.

—Photo Credit: Ali Khursheed

“Bomb blast. Stay calm. We are alive. Say astaghfirullah.”

“Mummy, you are bleeding.” Right, I knew something had hit my head.

“I know, we will take care of it later.”

And my three brave children aged five to nine years held hands, my eldest bare feet, we walked over glass, so much glass, and rubble, and started walking towards the staircase. My husband was clothed but with soap on his face and body, rushed and lifted a large metal grill on the stairs and made way for us to pass through. Reaching down slowly, I calmly told my husband that we would sit in our car and drive to my friend’s house at the end of the street.

“The cars won’t be there.”

—Photo Credit: Ali Khursheed

Reaching down after walking on a lot of glass, we saw only devastation. There was no front door. There was no house front at all. My second son started crying.

“My house is broken. I don’t have a house. My house is broken.”

I grabbed my children’s hands and we started climbing on over the glass, bricks, and pieces of wood as we exited the front we saw the cars. The side wall had collapsed on top of one car, I don’t think our gate existed or if it did it was ravaged. No exit. No escape. The house on our left was Chaudhry Aslam’s, also a war zone.

I spun around as my husband screamed for my second son. Lost inside the devastation we heard him crying but couldn’t see him. My husband ran inside to look and emerged in seconds with him. With his great presence of mind, my husband pointed to a small opening in one of the boundary walls where the wall had collapsed. We got out of the house through that.

Blood-soaked, bare feet, eight people walked out alive from a house ravaged by what I heard later was 300 kilograms of explosives. Survived. Only to see pieces of mangled, charred and mutilated bodies. The time of attack was synchronised with the arrival of our dear driver and his son. Anwer Bhai, who for 22 years had been an integral part of our family. The world knew him as the friendly, helpful, long-haired driver. Only his torso was there. His body ripped apart by the powerful explosives.  We didn’t even have time to mourn. We swallowed our tears and walked till the mid of the street, bare feet still, and then a kind neighbor dropped us at my friend’s house.

Trauma. We found out later the attack was supposedly on Chaudhry Aslam’s house. It was a suicide bomber. We revisited the site after a few hours. I have always known that the one who saves is greater than he who plans to kill, but this is the first time I have evidenced that God sends angels to carry us through. Walking out of that house, five out of the seven people who were bare feet suffered not even a scratch. My cook and I escaped with minor stitches. No physical harm. No irreparable damage to my immediate family. Our family unit was intact.

Material things come and go, but life cannot be replaced. The life of Anwer Bhai and his son Asif have been taken in a meaningless war of pride. What is it? A religious war? A political war? Personal vendetta? A war fought on the civilian front where innocent people pay the price with their irreplaceable lives. And this is what a suicide bomber takes – his life and the lives of all those around him. What heaven does he think he’ll go to I wonder.

Nausheen Manji Dadabhoy studied English and Economics at Tufts University. She is based in Karachi where she teaches.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

You might wonder if any of us feel even remotely saddened by the events unfolding in front of us these last few years. Yes, I feel sad, very sad when I see the images of fires on television, and charred bodies burnt to a crisp, decapitated torsos lying strewn on the dusty roads, and yes I feel pain for my wounded Pakistan. But I am ashamed to say, like most of the people I know and you know, the pain is quickly forgotten. The new day dawns and we justify to ourselves that we can’t stop living life as normal. It’s sad that amid the mounting attacks and widespread panic, we live in our little nuclear bunker, assuming we are safe.

Daily on the roads there is an increase in the number of wide-eyed, mud streaked faces of little children knocking aggressively on car windows. 40 per cent of urban and 45 per cent of the rural population is under 15 years of age. No wonder the roads are full of innocent, little children hungering for whatever can be given. I feel saintly giving money to one, leftover restaurant food to the other and advice to the third, but does this help them? Or am I merely giving them the French cake?

While the majority of our population hungers for food, we complain about the heat as the air-conditioners do not work to full-capacity due to KESC’s low voltage provision. While the majority’s young ones learn the words “food” and “water”, one of the first words my children learnt was generator. I guess I am to blame for that because as soon as the air conditioner stops running, I make frantic calls to the servant’s quarter to turn on the generator. I am completely dependent on it and I’m ashamed to admit that in case it has to be shut down, I make a trip somewhere or the other, only returning home when it’ll function again. Amidst sixteen hours of load shedding, isn’t that what we all do? Alas, turn on the generator and complain about no electricity. Those in greater distress have two generators and are usually distraught that one generator gets overloaded. The bubble is interesting; we look upon and feel saddened at the state of many deprived of electricity days on end and we share the pain of all our fellow countrymen, but through our air-conditioned glass house. We console ourselves in our nobility that those who do not have generators and live in small quarters with no ventilation in closely-packed dwellings are used to the heat and it does not affect them as much as it troubles us, alas, is anybody used to heat? And we begin again with “Let them have cake.”

Living in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, one thinks one will be treated with the greatest of respect here as Muslim men will behave well with Muslim women. But sadly, on one side we have those preaching religion and raising a fuss over a Shia-Sunni episode in the movie Bol, and on the other side the real “upholders” of our Islamic traditions are parading women naked in villages. First, Mukhtar Mai and now Shahnaz Bibi. We sigh and resume our life in the bubble.

I am not undermining the bubble, mind you. To be honest, I love my bubble, it allows me to function and gives me a security that my country has failed to provide me. But it was precisely this bubble which led to the bloody French Revolution, so dark and gory that till today tales about the guillotine and the excesses of the mob can raise anyone’s hair on end. And this is the only thing which robs me of my sleep at night, the thought that just round the corner, a large pin is waiting to burst my bubble, and it is the moment all of us fear the most, the moment of a social revolution.

When I think about the victims of  the terrorist attacks, the silent cries of those who suffer the injustices of the jirga, the hungry faces and distended bellies of the little ones on violence-plagued streets and the rage of those suffering in the heat with no one to care, I dread the revolution which is just around the corner. A revolution, I in my selfish loneliness, am powerless to stop.

Nausheen Manji Dadabhoy studied English and Economics at Tufts University. She is based in Karachi where she teaches.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.