Sleep my darling – chapter 2

By  DELILAH

It is difficult to do much when one has three children under the age of five. I called up Dr. Baji in the afternoon but I couldn’t explain anything to her on the phone. She said she would speak to Sarmad and set up a time when he could take me to her. Dr. Baji had become a very important person in our lives. She had been our savior once we had migrated to Karachi after the great earthquake of 2005 had struck Pakistan and Balakot had been destroyed. Those days are so clear in my mind – the days which changed my life forever.

When the earthquake, with its epicenter in Kashmir, had struck, the area around the river, where the population had built all its lodgings, was flattened in one titanic moment. The houses reduced to the tar squelched by the road-roller of nature. The twenty thousand strong population of Balakot, was now only left to a scattered few thousand people. Ninety percent of the houses had been obliterated, as if they had always only been a collection of rubble. When the earthquake struck us, my mother Shameem, Basheera, Gulzar, Jameela and I were all outside washing clothes and grinding spices. When the ground moved, it was not as if someone was shaking a chair I was sitting on, when it moved it was as if I had been put in Zafar Bhai’s wooden pirate ship which violently oscillated between northeast and northwest, without a belt to hold me down. Dust rose from the green lush lands and the earth groaned with deep rumblings as waves of magnetic pulsations passed underneath our flattened bodies. Right then the most important thing was to stay alive. The vengeance of nature calmed after a few devastating minutes, to leave back destruction, death and doom. We had been lucky to be outside when mother earth had unleashed her wild dragons underground. Our house was one of the few left standing in Balakot, yet erect in such a way that the frame and the wooden door held up strong, but when we stumbled in, dust and a sickening choking smell of waste rose up. The roof had collapsed. I pushed my younger sisters out toward the open ground, lest it started shaking again and the rest of the house collapsed. My mother, I had to physically drag her out as she screamed and cried for the loss of all her belongings. Little did she know then all that she had lost. After a while when she had decidedly calmed down, we took in the situation of Balakot from our slightly raised vantage point and what we saw hit our heart as a fatal high voltage electric current. A thick curtain of smoke and debris hung in the air. Under which existed a wasteland of stone, rock and sand. There was no Balakot left.

“The school. Look at the school.” My mother whispered hoarsely.

Azam Gul. Ajab Gul. They were in school. The school which was not there anymore.

“Look at mashra khoor (elder sister) Bakht’s  house!” Jameela’s scream of anguish drew our eyes towards the left. There seemed to be a gaping hole in the ground where Bakht’s house had stood.

The ground started moving again. We dropped to our knees and flattened ourselves close to the heaving earth. I squeezed my eyes shut and heard the rivers of mud and rubble sliding. Once it stopped, we cautiously rose up. The small hills and mountains near our house had lost half their visible side, lying in a pool around their base. I looked back at our house, the mocking door still hung on its hinges. No one could escape through that door. Not Bakht, nor I.

A figure enshrouded in blood and mud clawed his way towards us. My mother ran to it, as I silently cursed my luck. He was still alive.

“The school has collapsed Shameem, my sons, my sons are inside, bring whatever we have that we can dig with, our sons are inside Shameem, our sons are inside!.” My father whimpered to my mother.

The horror of his words slowly sank in. I looked at the flattened school. A breeze, cold and taunting blew around me and played wanton with my father’s kurta, then it winked, raised its eyebrows, gave a  mock-bow and left. It was still again.

In the distance a boom alerted us to another building collapsing, giving way to its weakened foundation. My mother snapped out of her trance as did the rest of us. We ran towards our house and salvaged axes, spades, steel cups, whatever we could scoop the rubble with, the family was torn which way to run first, Bakht’s house, or the school. My father had lived for his sons, the ten year-old Azam Gul and the nine year-old Ajab Gul. We hurried towards the school first.

The school’s walls had buckled. My mother and father were repeatedly calling out to Azam Gul and Ajab Gul. Looking at the mound of grey and the still emanating seething smoke I felt something in my heart die. The small pink faces of the boys, leaving in the morning for school in their grey uniforms with their tiffins in hand was fixated in my mind. A few other relatives of school children, fathers, mothers brothers, sisters were also calling out to their loved ones. The sounds echoed like a knell sending ripples of loss into our hearts and souls. With an unacknowledged agreement we all dejectedly grasped our tools and cups and starting removing the rubble. The sharp edges of the debris cut into our hands as we picked up the broken wall pieces bit by bit and threw them behind us. There were one hundred children in this particular school. One hundred grey-clad boys and green-clad girls. After three hours of back-breaking labour without proper tools and lack of manpower, only three bodies had been pulled out so far. I kept assisting the rescue effort with a dead zeal, trying unsuccessfully to hold my veil between my teeth.

A choppy, motor sound came from the sky. A helicopter. Help was finally coming, aid was coming, now they would dig out all those captured under the rubble. Azam Gul and Ajab Gul would be found. Exhilarated, we stopped doing whatever we were doing and gazed hopefully into the sky. But no one stopped. No help came. They just flew over us a couple of times. We even waved red cloth on sticks at them, hoping  that they would understand the distress signal and come aid us. The last time the helicopter went over our heads, no one even batted an eyelash. Our country had left us to rot.

The afternoon sun had crossed its high point. My sisters, all in their early adolescence, were exhausted and seemed to be going into shock now.  My mother had stopped moving the rubble. She was now staring at the razed wreckage in her hand and toying with it aimlessly. I threw back the bit of ruin in my hand and walked over to them.

“Basheera, go home with the others, find whatever food you can and whatever utensils. We must cook food and eat. Pilar (father) and Moor (mother) cannot think straight right now and we have to hold the fort.” They say men are strong. But the strength I had suddenly gained astonished even me.

“How can you think about food right now mashra khoor Niamat?” Gulzar angrily asked.

“I’m hungry mashra khoor Niamat.” Whimpered eleven year-old Jameela.

“Be rational sisters, we have to eat if we must gather energy to look for our loved ones. You go prepare the food and I am going over to Bakht’s house to see the situation there.” My heart sank as I thought about Bakht and recalled the crushed house I had seen from high up.

“I’m sorry mashra khoor Niamat. I understand. Come sisters.”

My sisters trudged to our house, and I started walking towards Bakht’s house. The sight I saw exposed me to the mighty power of the Almighty. Bakht’s family had all been buried automatically by nature. Their house and the surrounding houses had been literally scooped up and overturned in a ditch of a depth of approximately a two-storey house. We neither had the equipment, nor the energy to dig them out for a proper interment. Nobody could have survived that. My knees buckled with sorrow and I sank to the ground. Bakht, Bakht, Bakht. The only one who understood my pain.  My companion, my friend, my witness, my sister. Gone. The crushing pain I felt cannot be explained. All that I can say is that if one has a strong poison, this is how it probably burns and racks the body from the inside. A frightening emerged after the tsunami of emotions subsided – now who would believe me? I felt bile rise up in my throat. I don’t know how long I sat by the abyss.

A chill settled in the air as the sun’s rays lost their intensity. I gradually pulled myself up and made my way back to the school site. I choppily described what I had seen at Bakht’s. Food and tears mingled with each other as we all shared in the group hug, crying and trying to comfort each other at the same time. The ground shook time and again with aftershocks, but now we were used to the tremors that came.

Evening descended and in the waning light my sisters cried for their dead mashra khoor.  They were lucky they could cry. My mother sat on the gravel by the school in a stony silence. She was unable to feel or register any feeling. My father was still removing the rubble with a few other survivors from the village. I sat near my still-silent mother and sorrow-exhausted sisters. That entire day we had seen the few survivors lugging bodies without shrouds in funerals without processions to give them burials without rites. There was no one to help anyone. All the survivors were dealing with their own loss and tragedy. Soon night would come, nothing would be visible and we would all have to sleep under the open sky with the ground rumbling beneath.

The night was cold. We huddled together to keep warm. It was dark and the moonlight was wan and not enough to throw light upon anything. My sisters fell into a deeply exhausted slumber. My mother’s sleep seemed more out of sadness than exhaustion. I looked at the moonlight and thought about Bakht, maybe it was better she was dead, she had lived her short life intoxicated on naswar. As I closed my eyes willing myself to sleep, I felt a presence on my side. I braced myself.

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