In remembrance: In Super Market, Chaudhry Chacha won’t call for wicketkeepers anymore

The security guard was killed while inspecting the bag containing the bomb.

ISLAMABAD:

Everyone in Super Market called him Chaudhry Chacha. “Chacha used to tell us to include a wicketkeeper when we played cricket at night in the parking lot,” said Asad, an employee at a food outlet, referring to the security guard killed in a bomb blast on Saturday. “He would say ‘stop it, you’ll break the windowpanes.’”

A suspicious bag in the parking lot at quarter past two in the morning attracted the guard’s attention. It exploded when he nudged it. Chacha to his friends, Muhammad Azam to the world, He was fatally injured, several feet away from the same shops he had stayed up nights to guard for over 25 years. He died at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences.

The security guard, who was in his late 50s, belonged to Gujrat. He had a grey beard and an affectionate personality. The chair he sat on for his night duty and a giant sack filled with discarded cardboard and waste, lay just outside the crime scene parameter around a small crater where the bomb exploded.

Azam’s acquaintances said he used to collect cardboard and junk to sell in the morning to pay for breakfast. Super Market Traders Association President Sarfaraz Mughal said, “Chaudhry Chacha had been around since forever.”

The traders will pitch in to offer some financial support to Azam’s family, he stated. But none of the shopkeepers in the shopping plaza which Azam had guarded for more than two decades knew much about them.

Mughal said security at the market was deplorable. “The assistant commissioner told us to set up CCTV cameras at every exit and entrance point of the market but the city administration wants us to bear all the expenses.”

He pointed to a CCTV camera installed on the outside wall of a plaza. If the camera had more range, it could have captured the bomb explosion directly in front of it, he stated. “That would have helped police investigation but it is difficult for the traders to manage the CCTV camera installation and monitoring.”

Surveillance cameras might go up in the market in the near future and the Islamabad Police vowed to enhance security in the capital after the incident. But the lives of ordinary men and women remain at risk till the police delivers on their promise.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 25^th, 2014.