When my mind wonders a lot,
causing an inability to think of anything else but that one incidence, I resort
to jotting my thoughts down. But this time, I am unable to frame sentences, or
come up with appropriate adjectives to describe my emotions. I just keep thinking
of parents who lost in minutes, what they had been working on for years.
Yesterday I was moved by the
horrific incidence. 132 school children killed in the mass massacre by Taliban
gunmen. One Hundred and thirty two children. The numbers rose as if, they
weren`t children, but a bag of peanuts. Yesterday’s visuals were horrendous,
but today`s are worse. Grieving parents gearing up for the funeral of the
pieces of their hearts.
As I read their heart wrenching
stories, a million thoughts cross my mind. What if that mother would have
listened to her son complaining of a head ache and not wanting to go to school?
Will she ever be able to live in peace knowing that she pushed her kid to go to
school that day, when he didn’t want to?
That 5 year old girl’s first day
in school, resulted in her DEATH. Quite the contrary of what her parents had
planned for her. Will her parents regret the decision of sending her to school altogether?
As kids, we prayed for heavy rain
days so that our schools would declare a “Closed Day”. Would this kid have ever
imagined what the after effects of a Closed Day would bring for him? The sole
survivor of grade 9. All his classmates are gone. His friends, his foes, that
girl he had a secret crush on, that boy always hidden in the back row, his bench
mate who wouldn’t share his notes with him, that girl who always told on him,
his best friend who marked other fellow students with him, that boy who always
shared his lunch with him, his teachers that he liked and those that he didn’t.
All of them are gone, and the worst part is, that he saw them all fall. He is
left alone, probably with an injured body and a soul. Will he be scared for
life?
Those traumatized children who
were lucky enough to escape alive, will they ever be able to go to school
again? Seeing their classmates being pulled out and shot, their teachers being
burnt alive… will they grow up as a normal children?
Yesterday in the news, I saw a
picture of a bloody canvas shoe, the size of a palm. Today, there was a blog
post on that shoe, on how this man cried seeing that shoe because his daughter wears
the same size. This morning when he got his daughter dressed for school and put
on her shoes, he couldn’t help but think of that kid with the bloody shoe. This
was just one man who jotted down his feelings. I bet there were millions of
other parents across the globe, who didn’t have the heart to get their kids
dressed for school today.
Today, I am 16 again and am back
in my school. Where giggles echo in the hallway, kids are punished outside the
classrooms for misbehaving, students are running in between classrooms, pulling
pranks on each other, and high fiving each other for successfully bunking their
classes. Not in the scariest of my nightmares, can I ever imagine growing up
with a visual any different from that. Torn notebooks, pieces of clothing and
children’s shoes scattered in the hallways, pair of broken eyeglasses, blood
drenched floors, and burnt walls. This is not the image of a school that any child
would want to be left with.
With an exceedingly heavy heart
and a throat choked up on tears, I extend my condolences to all those who lost
their loved ones. And for Taliban, God damn you to the deepest pits of hell.
Leave us alone. Not only Pakistan bleeds today, but on this atrocious day, the
world bleeds. On this day, humanity bleeds.!
