The funeral of desire

Published February 23, 2014

Night falls, a tattered veil falling limply across the wounded body of this nation. I cannot sleep — much as I try to hide from my fears in the darkness. So many nights like this have begun to haunt me, my eyes wide open to the anguish of widowed women and grieving mothers who bury their men too soon, their lacerated bodies wrapped yet bleeding, their blood scarring the earth where they fell, fighting a war where desire is the cause and the casualty, desire for a life of dignity, desire for peace, for justice.

Two years after Mohammad Hanif Hairan wrote these lines, lamenting the absence of dignity, peace and justice in his homeland, Afghanistan, 23 personnel of the Frontier Corps were abducted from the Shinkorai checkpost of Mohmand Agency on June 13, 2010. I was getting ready to leave for New York to attend the launch of the American edition of my novel, No Space for Further Burials, written as the diary of an American medical technician serving at Bagram airbase who wanders off and finds himself incarcerated in an abandoned asylum for the mentally ill. I did not know then that four years later the 23 young men held by the Pakistani Taliban would be executed after negotiations with security forces failed to get their imprisoned commanders released. I did not know that in the space of four years, thousands of Pakistani soldiers, officers, and civilians would be murdered by the same forces who threaten the fabric of society and the security of the state.

Today, as I write these lines, my heart stops as I look at the photograph of the young Major killed in Bazargai, Frontier Region, in a terrorist assault. How many more funerals shall be held in order for desire to be fulfilled? Their desire, our desire, for “dignity, peace, and justice”? How many graves shall be dug before the killing shall stop — ours, theirs? What are the stories of the dead, of those they leave behind to grieve for them? Who shall account for the tears of Lal Zarin’s mother in Karrak, for the grief of Major Jahanzaib’s family in Multan? Who, ultimately, is responsible for bringing us to this collective Funeral of Desire?

In the past six months, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone, 211 incidents involving suicide bombings, IED’s, physical assaults, mortar attacks, rocket attacks, grenade attacks, target killings and kidnapping took the lives of countless people. In the Federally Administered Tribal Areas 132 attacks took the lives of more men, including those who had committed themselves to restoring peace and justice. Everyday, our people live in fear, not knowing if they shall come home to their families by the time night falls. In Balochistan the decomposed corpses of unknown men are dug out of mass graves. In Chilas, men and young boys are pulled off from buses stopped at the side of the Karakoram Highway, identity cards are checked, and those who conform to the measures used to decide the fates of the passengers are allowed to board the buses again. The others stand alongside each other, dead men waiting for the collective execution which shall shatter the still air of Diamer, automatic gunfire tearing the silence of the valleys, piercing the hearts of the ones who were not deemed fit enough to be worthy of life. In Taftan, pilgrims breathe the air with fear as their vehicles make their way through a desert where death lurks like a predator waiting to feed its ravenous appetite. In Quetta, Hazara women weep as the bodies of their sons are prepared for their last journeys. In Karachi policemen and civilians prepare themselves for another day of uncertainty, waiting for the moment when breath passes and then stops, betraying them, betraying desire.

I shall stay awake this night, like others, almost as if I am keeping a vigil for 49,000 souls killed in a decade. When I wrote my last novel, the 23 days of that process were spent in a state of frenzied madness, almost as if the words were wounds themselves, and the anguish of writing them unbearable. I knew then that I had to write — for it was the only way to console my grieving heart.

It was the only way to record the truth as I see it unfolding, it was the only song I could hear above the dirge which fills the empty spaces between one funeral of desire and the next one.

“I stoned him with the stones of light tears/ Then I hung my sorrow on the gallows like Mansour” (Khairkhwa, 22 June 2008)

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