LAST week, my daughter Suhani, who is still shy of her fifth birthday, asked her mother if her school in Islamabad would also be bombed. There was no easy denouement to such a conclusion with the little girl responding that the thought just “occurred” to her.

The loss of innocence in what is childhood is, if anything, heartbreaking.

I recollect an even younger Suhani “break news” to yours truly about the military operation at the Lal Masjid in 2007 and what happened to Benazir Bhutto outside the Liaquat Bagh later that year.

When she said this, my heart sank — not just at Pakistan's high noon but how the perpetrators were killing the spirit and soul of our children along with their intended targets.

One can argue that children in Swat, for instance, are much worse off than elsewhere in the republic thanks to the morbid vision of people like Mullah Radio but then, children are children anywhere they may be.

Three decades ago, my father, like many others before and after, took a conscious decision to make Islamabad our home.

It was premised on the obvious corollaries Islamabad is the best planned city in Pakistan — lean, mean and green in disposition, it offers the cleanest air and last but not least, by virtue of being the federal capital, was reckoned to be the most secure place in the land.

As if the script was made-to-order, my own childhood, teenage and adulthood were spent lazily partaking the fabled beauty and quiet of Islamabad.

As schoolchildren, we were smack in the middle of Zia's martial rule but never needed to look over our shoulders. The worst thing that disturbed peace this side of civilization was the mysterious explosion that rocked Ojhri Camp — an arms depot in Rawalpindi that sent missiles and explosives flying into Islamabad. It was terrifying but only seemed like an aberration.

Later, “divine intervention” in the skies of Bahawalpur turned Islamabad's history around.

But not even the dog-eat-dog years of the 'decade of democracy' that followed shattered the calm of our lives even though Islamabad was the fancied theatre where anyone who was someone was trying to stage his or her brand of Macbeth.

Dark palace intrigues and the sounds of boots in the distance was as much of a soap opera in the absence of live television as it is today, but it did not deter the citizenry from carrying on with the business of life.

Kargil did cause a flutter but those replicas of Chagai and long range missiles dotting the federal capital's landscape — for all their misplaced worth, questionable installation and bad aesthetics — somehow lulled the citizens into slumber with a sense of comfort.

Surprise of surprises, not even the mid-air plane drama in 1999 that blitzed a seemingly impenetrable “heavy mandate” — all in a day's work, Reader's Digest style — could lead to blood on the dance floor.

In fact, Islamabad was still a picture of poise the next day where an uninitiated observer could have been forgiven for not knowing if the khakis had intervened once again.

May be, the citizenry was cool because they could easily draw the arithmetic from the beaten formula to capture the Islamabad throne.

And then Nine-Eleven happened.

It changed Islamabad probably, more than it did the American hinterland or even where terror actually grew wings Afghanistan. Still, with the pariah status effectively removed and patronizing dollars pouring in their billions, we breathed easy.

In the interim, peace with India resumed and turned mushier like never before with the result that the people got sucked into pet dictatorial diversions — mostly, cricket — but in Musharraf's case, also an apparent cultural glasnost. Even a failed attempt at statesmanship in the backdrop of romantic Agra in 2001 was taken into stride.

Half-way into the general's rule, his assertion that more mobile phones and cars on the road reflected an economic turnaround may not have been bought by everyone but it did enough to camouflage the impending doom.

However, life in Islamabad got progressively worse as the war-on-terror theatre expanded and the general ran roughshod in an attempt for obstacle-free perpetuation. As a result, the ghosts of March — Ides, by another name — returned to haunt the federal capital.

The sacking of a chief justice, who took the suo motu road to judicial redemption and later defy the dictator's attempt to push him into the sunset, followed up by a military operation at the Lal Masjid led to a cataclysmic shift in a territory previously described as “half the size of Arlington cemetery and twice as dead”.

Since then, present and clear danger has come to dominate the landscape. After a spate of deadly suicide attacks and bombings over the last two years, the fear of the unknown stalks the citizens everywhere.

For many of us residents, these incidents are like scenes from a horror movie that refuse to go away. It is one long silence of the lambs.

The writer is News Editor at Dawn News. He may be contacted at kaamyabi@gmail.com