Dressed in sorrow: From condoling death to hosting a funeral

Zahir Shah’s family went to Lahore to condole a death, his wife and children returned home with his own body.

PESHAWAR: The Pashto proverb “sorrow is the Pakhtun clothing” seems to hold true for most households in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The Grim Reaper has been on the loose across Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas for around a decade now.

Cities and villages alike have become targets for the militants and at one point people in the provincial capital became so used to bombings that they actually started expecting attacks on Friday.

Yaseen, a fifth grader, was handed a new wardrobe of sorrow in Lahore, where his family has gone to offer their condolences to a friend. Yaseen father was caught in a blast and died on the spot, while his mother was injured.

“We were walking through a bazaar when I heard a loud boom and saw my father fall down on the ground,” Yaseen recalled.

His father sustained fatal injuries to his chest, while his mother received shrapnel wounds to her legs.

Yaseen remembered that there was firing immediately after the attack, but he could not clearly recall the following moments.

Yaseen’s older brother, Daud Ali, was back in their home in a rundown neighbourhood of Kashmiri Mohallah, in the Yakatut area of the city. He told The Express Tribune that on January 24, his parents and two siblings went to Lahore to offer condolences to a friend on a death in his family.

“My sister wedding was set for February 20, so they also planned to do some shopping for the event,” Daud said.

When he found out about the blast, he tried to get in touch with his father.

“I tried calling his cellphone, but he would not answer. Then I saw the crushing sight of my mother and sister sitting beside my father on a TV channel.”

He added that when the call finally got through to his mother, she told him that his father was injured and they were shifting him back to Peshawar.

“She did not know that I had seen my dead father on the TV,” he said, his voice trailing.

Daud said that his father Zahir Shah was an employee of tax branch in Town-I municipal administration and that the expenses of transporting the body were borne by the government of Punjab.

Aftab Ahmed, a neighbour, told The Express Tribune that the late Zahir Shah was very poor and neighbours gathered money to pay for his funeral costs. He added there was now no one left to look after the five-member family. With the wedding still on for February 20, Ahmed felt the government should help the family out.

There were two more blasts in Peshawar on Monday. Six families lost a member. Another blast on Wednesday took 10 people away from their families.

Many children were orphaned, many women widowed. In the words of the seventeenth century warrior poet Khushal Khan Khattak, “Everywhere separation and absence have kindled the flame of grief, like unto green wood thrown upon the fire, how long wilt thou weep.”

Published in The Express Tribune, February 5^th, 2011.