The following was the sequence of events on my 27th December. I had office as usual, and was supposed to catch an 8pm flight to Karachi to attend the wedding of one of my closest friends from college, Shireen. I had planned to make it to the “dholki” tonight and also attend the main wedding function on Friday. So this is what my day went like…
09:30 AM – Alarm rings. Press “Snooze”
09:35 AM – Alarm rings again. Press “Snooze”
…. This goes on every 5 minutes… until 10:30 AM …
10:30 AM – Alarm rings. Press “Shut up” button. Get up from bed. Get ready.
10:45 AM – Pack for Karachi.
11:00 AM – Leave for office.
11:20 AM – Reach office. Start work.
01:30 PM – Go to pick up mom from Daewoo station, who was coming from Multan.
01:45 PM – Go back to office. Give car to mom. Continue work.
05:50 PM – Hurriedly get up from a meeting with the CEO. Leave office. Grab a riksha back home. Tell him to step on it.
06:10 PM – Get a call from Zartash, director of our company, informing me that he has just been informed from a friend in Pindi that Benazir has been critically wounded in a suicide bombing, and has been taken to hospital.
06:25 PM – Reach home. Do some final packing in a hurry. Get another call from Zartash: “Benazir is dead”.
[It takes a while to sink in. A few seconds pass in shocked silence]
“Oh God. That is unbelievable!”
“Yes. This is certainly going to lead to a lot of trouble.”
“Yes. I am now double-minded about going to Karachi.”
[some more exchanges follow. How? When? Who?]
“Take care”
"Khuda Hafiz"
06:45 PM – Packing complete. Still in shock. Go back to the same riksha, put in my luggage and we leave for the airport.
06:55 PM – By this time I have exchanged more than 25 messages and have received at least 5 phone calls all related to the tragic death of BB and more importantly, the events to follow.
07:00 PM – Get to talk to Shireen. She is not sure if today’s event is going to take place or not. I am now undecided if I should even go or not.
07:02 PM – My decision is made easier by a phone call from dad, ruling out the option of me going to Karachi, because violence has already started in the form of burning buses and cars and shootings in the city.
07:10 PM – Park riksha outside airport. Call PIA to cancel my ticket. After a lot of “network busy” signals, I finally get through. Unfortunately, all their systems have crashed. The guy at the call center tells me to call back later. The flight is to leave in 50 minutes. I don’t want to waste money on a flight I’m not going to take. I call back again. Still no luck.
07:20 PM – Tell riksha-wala that this is not the end of our adventurous journey. I put my luggage back into the riksha. Call Shireen and let her know I’m not coming. We take off for home.
07:30 PM – reach Cantt. area, keep checking for any sort of unrest. Thankfully, on the route I took, there was none.
08:00 PM – safely reached home.
However, I later talked to people in Karachi, and they told me that they were constantly praying to God to get them home safely. One of my cousins saw a shooting right ahead on their road, as a result of which women were running out of their cars with their children and hurrying to go and lie down in nearby empty plots to avoid crossfire. Bullets firing, children crying, tires burning, women running… I can only imagine the fight-or-flight reaction of the people watching this horrific scene, worried about their own safety and those of their children.
As of now, 10:00 PM, Lahore is mostly silent… not a car in sight. One can only hope that this is the end of the chain of reactions to this terrible event, but knowing our people, it is too high a hope to have.
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