Will Peshawar ever be the same?

Here time is measured in sorrow, distance by catastrophe and life by chance but it’s referred to as the City of Flowers. “He’s five years and two months old,” says a relative when asked about how old his son was. “He was born two days after the explosion in Meena Bazaar.”

“Can you pick me up from University town?” — “What place exactly?” — The office that was bombed the other day,” says a friend who needs a drive home. “Can we not take the route through Saddar, I just don’t feel comfortable,” a colleague, who was one of the lucky survivors when a car bomb went off in the area, says.

Year after year, the debris of grief has piled up. The city is no more but an oxymoron against its own image. The flowers here have died. There is more concrete and steel dashed with red than there ever was.

Agony, loss and pain are not alien to Peshawar. It has had a reputation, some would argue, of surprising itself in the most violent of ways and then still finding its way back to a previous state of normalcy — that was actually not normal. Politicians, authors, columnists and the security establishment have often tried to push the sadness under the debris and rebuild the physical structures with a twist. They even formulated a term to make people feel better; ‘resilience’ is what they called it. While the people of the city were told how resilient they are, there was blood on the streets every single day. But they were resilient, enduring and were fighting back. At times, they didn’t know who they were fighting against but that sort of doubt was taboo. All they knew was that they had to fight back. At times, resilience gave way to apathy. A Friday without a bomb blast was considered strange; shopkeepers usually opened up for business after the “Friday bomb blast”.



When introspective discussions on suicide bombings first entered the realm of discourse, I recall overhearing one such discussion on the turn across the street to work on how to differentiate between a tragedy caused by an improvised explosive device and a suicide bombing. The conclusion was that if scavengers flew over the space where the explosion took place, it would be a suicide attack for obvious reasons. People who saw the city from outside considered this as a form of sociological innovation. Some said death never bothered the resilient; others concluded that the region was never peaceful and death was an inevitable fact.

With every bomb blast, when the dust settled, the enemy was more recognisable. While the city expanded, fear grew. And although a daily dosage of resilience pumped up the people, the war that was fought in the ‘unconquerable’ lands of the tribal areas and Afghanistan was now burning the fringes of the city. For some, the resilience was too much to handle and they said goodbye to the city. But there were people who believed there would be an end to this war and they lived on.

For the last couple of years, major incidents of terror in Peshawar have set the tone of unending violence. Each year, something that binds the city is taken away; the Meena Bazaar bomb attack, the killing of Bashir Bilour, the twin suicide attacks at the All Saints Church last year and now the indiscriminate killing of children in the Army Public School. The question is — will the oxymoron be reversed and will the resilience pay back?

Published in The Express Tribune, January 13^th, 2015.

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