Feelings not allowed

You know that feeling of not seeing someone for years, for more than a decade, but still remembering exactly what their presence feels like? Yes? I do, too. You remember the distinct trembles in that voice, the unique contortions of that face, the vibes emanated. Well, do you know the feeling after you hear, completely out of the blue, that the very person you remember so aptly in your memories has taken a bullet to the head and passed away?

No? Well, I do. Let me elaborate.

It’s a feeling like no other — a punch in the gut, a very violent whirl of staggering emotion, sadness mingled with fear mingled with disgust. For me, it’s just this past Friday — it’s the phone ringing at noon, it’s the news that the boy next door I had grown up with, spent all my summer vacations with until the age of 12, is no more.

There’ve been those who have questioned my reaction. Told me that I really shouldn’t be upset. I mean, I hadn’t seen the guy for a long time so technically, I have no right to hold on to memories, no right to grieve. It is Karachi, after all, and we all know the bullets are getting closer by the day. I need to ‘toughen up’.

Why did it happen? There are many whispers all around. Sectarian conflict, political enmity, sheer bad luck. And yet, at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter. A living, breathing 24-year-old is gone, and he has taken his visions to make this city a better place with him.

What does matter is how ‘tough’ we are getting as a nation. Too tough. We have taken our defence mechanism of numbing ourselves down to a whole new extreme. Grief is now be compartmentalised. Tears are only to be shed if the injured, the deceased, shares a certain proximity. There are degrees of tragedy, and JUST one person killed is certainly not one.

Yes, I understand. It’s a battlefield out there, and if we ‘feel too much’ we won’t survive. But what happens when we, collectively, feel too little? What happens when we no longer remember what peace feels like, when our young ones take pain as a constant, when our change-makers fall asleep?

What happens when the bullet finally finds us and no one cares?

Published in The Express Tribune, August 25^th, 2013.