Kausar told herself she would tell her children the news after a few days. What was the need, she wondered. The relatives were out searching and were going to find her husband in some hospital or the other.

Or, maybe he would be sitting behind his sewing machine if she went to drop off lunch at his tailor’s shop this afternoon, oblivious to her shocked expression, not even knowing that he had been gone eight long months.

Or, maybe, they would find his body in one of those mass graves the TV anchors kept talking about. Yes, then she would tell the kids. She would have to tell them then.

Eight months later, she still hasn’t told the kids.

How, after all, do you tell a child that someone very powerful thought her father had done terrible things to Pakistan and was taken away for that reason and now no one knew where he was?

How do you explain a universe that can just gulp down a parent without a trace?

There are other stories.

Three years after Naseer Khan’s son left their tent at an IDP camp near Islamabad and never returned (it sounds so simple, doesn’t it, but, of course, it’s anything but), his father still keeps his shoes.

Ehsan’s going to need them when he gets back.

The D-Chowk protest camp set up by relatives of hundreds of people who have disappeared into the illegal custody of Pakistan’s intelligence and law-enforcement agencies over the last decade is mustering with such stories.

There is a father’s raging anger at police ineptitude and crookedness. There is his fervent paternal anxiety. There is the superstitious clairvoyance of a mother and her belief that her five sons will return if she does all the right things: takes garlands to the pir’s mazaar every Sunday; prays through the night; feeds the drug addicts slumped along the roads near her house.

There is a turn to God for some. For others, there is a self-preserving denial that so often descends in calamity. For this mother from Sialkot, it is not about terrorism. For the uncle from Hangu, it is not about intricate plans to attack important buildings. For that brother from Rawalpindi, it is not about committing treason against the state.

It is just simply the remarkable alchemy of timing, of luck, of roads criss-crossing and a million other impalpables overlapping that made them pick up my son, my nephew, my brother instead of someone else’s.

There is an absence of answers. But there is also a search for everything but answers.

It’s convenient, yes. But I wonder if one can expect mortal intelligence from people in pain.

In this vortex of uncertainty, this absence without answers — is there any other way to deal with it all except through fiction? Through fabricating these real-life ghost stories in which those who remain behind are eternally haunted by the possible destinies of those who had left them?

No noisy protesters throng the Blue Area roads with colourful banners and piquant slogans. These demonstrators are quiet. They are almost dignified. There is a mystical energy to their silence. They draw no attention to themselves and they attract no notice. They just sit there quietly in one of the most politically sensitive areas in the country.

This is the physiology of pain — this camp, it lies somewhere on the frontier between the rugged regions of anguish inside and the busy, inattentive world of society and politics outside.

They all look like ordinary people from different parts of Pakistan. They are ordinary people, I remind myself. Ordinary people carrying around their invisible knapsacks of angst and fear — fear that had not yet fully become grief because most are unwilling to equate the disappeared with the dead. Not just yet.

In their solitary hours, they must wonder if their son or brother or husband was, in fact, a terrorist. The larger, less intimate, more official voices of organisations and of history — those may just be true.

But so is these protesters’ defenceless, disoriented look, which is the face of pain.

So are their stories, the most excessive gestures hyperbole can invent.

The man who was at once a chartered accountant and taking night classes to complete an MPhil and teaching three classes a day to undergrads and working a job. Where would he have found the time to be a terrorist?

The man who spent all his day at his shop and spent a lot of time at the mosque and went for Haj every year. Who did not even have any friends and never spoke to anyone. How would he become a militant?

The games that people who have lost loved ones play with themselves. The magical thinking. The storytelling. That was the D-Chowk camp. The real-life ghost stories. The crime stories. The terror stories. But always, always, and first, the love stories.