Our pitched battles

You hear the constant rat-a-tat of machine gun fire as people crouch down and huddle together for safety. It’s a terrifying, gut-wrenching video shot on a cell phone by some braveheart as he stares possible death in the face. He holds the phone camera steady, catching the attacker barging into the mosque hallway, firing like a maniac, and then exploding himself in a bloody carnage of death and mayhem.

This mobile footage of the attack on the Peshawar imambargah captures the horror of terrorism on tape like never before. But will a desensitised nation be moved?

It’s World Cup fever here as Pakistan battles India today in a combustible blend of sport, politics and history. For the eight hours this rivalry plays out on the cricketing field, little else will matter for us. Explosions, killings, sectarian genocide, slaughter of innocents and the burning fires of hatred, bigotry and intolerance — all will fade into the background as ball collides with bat amidst rapturous roars of millions of crazed fans. Eight hours of unity will cement a fractured nation in unparalleled ecstasy of winning, or the unbearable pain of losing. Dormant emotions will snarl like a raging river, smashing through dulled senses and resigned indifference to electrify a nation shocked into paralysis. And then…

Then it will end. The horrors will return and the nightmares will come back into focus. But only for a while. Yes, just for a bit, before the next match drags us back into a sea of cricketing passion.

Something is not right. The brazen slaughter of men, women and children shocks us for no more than a few days — or perhaps a few weeks. Collective anger flashes, then subsides. Resolve tightens, then lightens. Perhaps such is life. It moves on. Time heals all wounds.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” (Milan Kundera, author)

The horror of December 16 is not yet two months old. The slaughter in Shikarpur is a wound still bleeding, and the death toll from the carnage in Hayatabad is still rising. We are at war. But could you have guessed?

Life does indeed go on, even in the worst of times. During the decade-long civil war in Lebanon — where streets were little more than shooting galleries — people adjusted to the ravages of war by building walkways, shopping plazas and restaurants underground. Elevators in the hotels of Beirut even today have buttons that read B1, B2, B3, B4 and B5, ‘B’ of course denoting ‘Basement’ floors.

So yes, by all means let’s revel in the cricketing fever, let’s all dance with joy at every Pakistani success and weep tears of sorrow at the dismal performance (may it never come) — but — let’s not forget. Forgetfulness breeds apathy which leads to indifference and desensitisation. And when you have reluctant warriors as your leaders — men who would rather be shopping than leading this fight — then distractions like the World Cup can acquire an air of semi-permanence.

Every horror, every slaughter, every barbarity just seems to raise the bar of what we can stomach. Like the frog in the water who keeps adjusting to the temperature as the water heats up on a stove, and the frog ends up boiling to death, we too seem to be improving our threshold of pain with every successive bloody blow. No more, we say, and then more happens. Never again, we promise, till it does — again. The page has been turned, we are told, except it’s the same as the last one. And so it goes, round and round, spinning on its familiar axis, sameness over and over and over again. The boom boom of the bombs becomes fainter, the wailing and shrieking of victims becomes duller and more distant, and the empty rhetoric of leaders turns to unrecognisable gibberish as words and actions dissolve into nothingness.

Something is wrong here. Is it the guilt of enjoying the World Cup while brethren bury their dead? Is it the fakeness of solace in our humdrum routine while ‘other’ countrymen get slaughtered by terrorists? Or is it resigning to fate that things will just not change in Pakistan; that leaders will just not transform into statesmen; that we will never learn — ever — to rise above and beyond our own petty interests and agendas unless it happens to us?

Today then is a day of mixed emotions. Yes, we are all glued to our TVs, and perhaps no news, howsoever bad it is, will distract us from the Pakistan-India match. What resilience! What passion! What singularity of purpose and strength of resolve. Terror may strike, but we will not care. TV ratings will prove this if ever there is a doubt. No breaking news on any channel will snatch viewers away from the game. No sirs, that’s how the cookie crumbles; and that’s how we fight our monsters. Yep, with cricket.

Am I being cynical? No, not at all. I love my cricket. But I love my country too. I want my team to crush India. I want my country to crush terror. I want Team Pakistan to win the World Cup. But more than that, I want our nation to win this existential war that we are supposed to be fighting. Sure I want my electricity and gas back, I want my petrol to stay cheap and inflation to keep under control. Indeed, I want all the good things that every government promises — but more than anything else, I want security of life and property. More than anything else, I want my kids to stay safe.

So let us enjoy the game today, and let us hope we ground India into dust. But do not forget that revenge over India on the field pales into insignificance when compared with the revenge we want for the slaughter in Peshawar, Shikarpur, Hayatabad and all other cities awash with blood.

Here’s to victory on both fronts.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 15^th, 2015.

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