1,400km, a distance bridged with words

Hundreds of kilometers away, the desk and news bureau are divided by cultural, lingual and social limitations

KARACHI: The city has bled profusely in the past half a decade. Pouring all that heartbreak on the pages has dried up our eyes; only for them to well up again with emotion we thought had been spent. The Army Public School attack last year tore our souls and stitched them up anew. Our senior reporter Manzoor Ali lost a cousin, but he refused to leave the office to grieve. Instead, he coordinated the coverage for the day, unbroken and undeterred. Our crime reporter Riaz Ahmad has since written nearly 20 profiles of the students and staffers whose lives were cut so ruthlessly short in the grizzly attack.

Each time he spoke to the bereaved parents he told me, “Ali Bhai, meray se in ka ghum nahin dekha jaata” (I cannot bear to see their pain). And yet, there he was, every day, commuting from place to place on his motorbike to tell the stories he so believed needed to be told. And this is why all of us are still in this profession, shunning the corporate world of shiny new cars and polished shoes; to tell the stories that would otherwise be left untold.

Pages for the Peshawar city desk are edited and made in Karachi. Reporters from the Peshawar office work under the guidance of the city editor and send their stories via email to Karachi, where the desk edits, proofs and finalises the pages. The distance makes this task all the more mammoth. Nearly 1,400 kilometres away, the desk and news bureau are divided by cultural, lingual and social limitations. Yet, they stand united by a common goal, bound together by a love (bordering on loathing) for the job.

I was fortunate enough to take over as the desk head in Karachi from the uber-calm and extremely erudite Zehra Abid, who taught me more than a few things. One of the most important lessons I learnt from her was how to delegate. Initially, I read and re-read every word on the pages till it was time to send them to print. I read the PDFs on my email again as soon as I reached home and then again in print the next morning, cringing at every mistake, wishing the ground would open up and swallow me along with the dreaded newsprint I held in my hands. In times of such wretched frustration, Zehra was the lone voice of sanity. “Daily paper, daily mistakes,” she used to echo one of her own mentors, Mahim Maher.

My frequent trips to Peshawar, my first foray into the tribal belt are things I will cherish for way longer than my stint at the desk.
Covering the north western region has been a life lesson, literally. Having seen so many lives taken away so soon, I have come to appreciate the fragility of my own. What would I rather do if not this? Here, my imagination betrays me.