Peshawar, you broke my heart

Peshawar, we did this to you. We used you to be a buffer in a war which no one owned.


Halima Mansoor February 18, 2015
PHOTO: REUTERS

Back in the 1990s, I visited the city one sultry summer as a teenage girl. It was no oasis of freedom for the second sex; neighbourhood boys defied gravity to balance on window ledges to leer and men in the market forcibly pushed up against women shoppers. But the city resembled any other in the country in many essential ways: the streets were not punctuated by check posts, uniforms were not a common sight, roads were not blocked for security protocols of VIPs and children were not scared to go to school.

In 2014, I visited Peshawar for the second time.

One step out of Bacha Khan Airport and welcome to the military city of the north west frontier. Instead of pushy porters or clingy cab drivers, trucks with army personnel loomed in the foreground, inching along their predetermined patrol within the airport.

It was after 10pm and the city was shrouded in darkness, except for pools of light near check posts and along some streets. Unlike any other major metropolis, Peshawar was already under lockdown, shops shut, restaurants taking the last call and people scurrying home. University Town, later, emerged as the only viable late night option for life and a petrol pump store the only functional after-hours one-stop shop.

The tour of Peshawar was simple enough, “This is the corner where that blast happened, killing that many people, and that is the police station which was blown up a few times.” The cartographers of the city ink and reink with blood many times over, making the city’s map a hotbed of red flesh and missing roads.

With each subsequent trip, the same year and in 2015, the distance between the check posts shrunk, a shade card of uniforms coloured the city and roads became the currency of privilege. When very important persons live or work along a stretch of tar, other denizens lose their right, even if they are the ones who are continuously put to death, on our watch.

In Peshawar, narratives — personal and professional — falter and race forward with the systemic bipolar a war zone infects on the psyche; bravado and depression pirouette through conversations which often end with despair or a resumption of daily tasks. In any other country, these would be signs of a national emergency even with just a few citizens feeling this sense of helplessness or resorting to fatalism—subtle signs of reduced drive to survive. In Pakistan, it is called resilience—resilient citizens are expected to give themselves a pat on the back as only their rights whittled down further.

Peshawar, we did this to you. We used you to be a buffer in a war which no one owned. We used your families in the war before that too, where we sent your men to fight next-door in a war paid by dollars, oil and Yen. The city, the province was more useful to the boys to convert forts into headquarters and old tourism buildings into internment centres.

Since 1947, the elite have used language as a tool to mock and mock we did. For those in more privileged centres, the Pakhtun was someone who was vividly painted by jokes about intellect, witticisms mocking the inversion of masculine and feminine in speech, and reinforcement of other stereotypes. All without including the magnificent history, art or culture of the region.

We did worse to the neighbouring human mass we continued to cut down to a convenient acronym. Fata; we do away with the all caps and divisive periods between the four alphabets as we have found other tools to denationalise, dehumanise and demonise the people who live on our western border.

It is so easy to distract the rest of Pakistan from the plight of the limbs and organs of our country; the ones we want to harvest. More acronyms come into play like NAP or Nacta; we all mourn on Twitter, change our display pictures on Facebook and feel a bit better. It is as easy as handing a teacher or a lawyer a gun, building taller walls and branding health campaigns. Though, after the Imamia Mosque attack, Kurram’s Turi tribespeople (of the Shia sect) were asked to surrender their weapons.

What about the convenient no-man’s land? The people who live with pride based on the unique structures of their tribes are more than tribes people. But we won’t know will we? Not until these brothers and sisters of ours are as accessible to us as the rest of the country. Not until there is no us and them. We belittle them daily, perhaps just as I am now, by talking about what they need or what they would benefit from, while a war economy burgeons, its profits seen anywhere but in the warzone.

More acronyms. IDPs, TDPs come our way. And so their identity is constantly torn down, recreated, and put thrown the spin machine. We still do not know the few million who live in what are called agencies and frontier regions, we have never asked and when they speak, no one listens as there is no access.

Who benefits from this apartheid? Simply those who tell you it is safer for you, better for you to stay away from the wild west which only has big bad monsters. After all if no one can or will venture into Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, no one will know the extrajudicial business of proxies our own masters have run since before Partition. No one will see the deprivation of those who have as much good and bad amongst them as the rest of the ‘settled areas’.

I had the chance to ask people who were born in beautiful valleys there; they like you, like me want an opportunity to find their own identity, without the labels and with the amenities which are the right of human beings. A right they have not had since our colonial masters termed them wild tribals.

And the land of proxies is now a convoluted mess of forced alliances, allegiances and permitted sanctuaries.

It comes back full circle to the city of flowers, now a necropolis. F.A.T.A neighbours Peshawar, which constantly absorbs the disparities, becoming a de facto extension of the no man’s land to its left.

So what happens next? While we chase the one light which is being shone deliberately, we leave the truth behind us. 

Published in The Express Tribune, February 19th,  2015.

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COMMENTS (7)

Aamna H. Fasihi | 9 years ago | Reply I'm a Karachiite and have never visited Peshawar. Still I don't know why, I feel so sorry. Heart touching piece.
adil zareef | 9 years ago | Reply A HEARTBREAKING ACCOUNT OF A NECROPOLIS..ONCE A CITY OF FLOWERS AND GARDENS...OH PESHAWAR !
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