There is something undeniable which happens when seasons change: a palpable shift in the quality of the light streaming into my window occurs, and there is a different feel, less vigorous, to the air as it caresses all things living and inanimate. I know this for a fact, for this is what I do year after year, season after season, as I stand at the window of my world and look out, scanning the horizon for that undeniable shift which took place while I slept, oblivious to the machinations of the universe.

This year, like others before it, the seasons were severe, and as summer slipped into autumn, and winter into spring, that gentle lifting of the light occurred again, and I was assured once again that all was as it should be, that the earth had turned a certain degree, the sky had held it in its palm and God was in His Heaven, somewhere a million miles away. I wanted to believe that the terrible anguish suffered by His creatures, across the lands He has created, was just part of the Infinite Plan that He had for us:

helpless humans pitted against destinies which were drawn while we slept, dreaming of lives we could have lived, should have lived, would have lived, had the earth turned a certain degree a little later, or perhaps a bit earlier than it actually did.

I wanted to believe that the terrible violence unleashed upon us is just something that will pass, like the seasons; that the menace we face today is the evident result of historical imperatives unfolding before us — cause and effect, action and reaction, life and death. Often, when the agony of watching the suffering is unbearable I have made half-hearted attempts to contextualise human anguish into the “larger picture”, one where individual lives are insignificant, they are not even separate strokes marking the canvas where human frailty is painted in pigments made of blood and clay.

Almost 20 years ago I wrote a script for a film which I directed with a cast made up of professional actors and the residents of the neighbourhood where I shot the story. The film would become an “underground” product after a fatwa was pronounced against me for characterising the imam of a mosque as an abuser of the young boys in his care. That the same character wishes to stone to death an infant he finds placed at the doorstep of the mosque where he preaches was not something which disturbed the ‘moral mullah mafia’ at the time. That the child was actually his illegitimate daughter’s baby, born, once again, of sin, was a point totally lost on the ‘corrective clergy’ who were offended only at the expose of the aberrant sexual mores of one of their own.

That the child was a symbol for the country I lived in was something I was acutely aware of when I crafted the story, knowing in my bones that something terrible was unfolding in the quiet lanes and hushed streets of my city. That in less than 20 years I would not be able to screen the film without risking my life was not something I was aware of at that time. That the counting of bodies brutalised and mangled beyond recognition would become almost daily fare for the brave men and women who received the dead and the injured after a devastating bomb is detonated in a crowded marketplace or a school, was not something I had imagined even in my wildest nightmares.

And yet, today, as the light changes and the air lifts, as the season changes, I know that all this, all the blood, the clay pigmented permanently with the life force of so many who have become a part of our violent history, I stand at my window and want to believe that this, too, shall pass, that another season shall elide with this one, that the blood of Aitezaz Hasan and Mohammad Aslam and countless, nameless others, shall nurture many brave young men, the sons of this soil, the ones who stand tall and confront evil, the ones who make us proud, the ones who ensure that the struggle is to win, not to be vanquished by a force unleashed upon us when Emperor Aurangzeb banished music and art and all things beautiful to the dark, airless vaults of obscurantism.

Tomorrow, with first light, I shall be on my way to Ibrahimzai to embrace the mother of the hero of Hangu, to hold her close to my heart, to feel her sorrow, to heal her with mute, perhaps meaningless offerings of solace, to be as one with the people who knew him, that lovely young boy with the fearless heart, that lion amongst the cowards who rule us.