[Reader-list] Did God make a mistake in Pakistan?

[rehan ansari]

Bilal Minto writes a column for DNA

 

Did God make a mistake in Pak?
Sunday, DNA, October 16, 2005  20:17 IST


 

Bilal Hassan Minto hopes that next time God feels like doing a little justice, he could do a bit of homework first lest there is a mistake

 

LAHORE: Despite my frivolity, I am finding it hard to say anything funny today. A couple of  hundred miles north of here, hundreds of thousands of people lie dead and a few more hundreds of thousands await death. It will come to them; surely, and slowly. In the ghost cities and villages up there, the dead far outnumber the living.

A young mother sits besides the debris of her erstwhile home pulling at something. It is the hand of her four-year-old son and it is the only part of him visible. He was crying loudly before. Then he was whimpering. Now he is quiet. For his mother whom God has graciously spared, life’s journey is suddenly much, much longer than she ever expected. Unless she ends it herself, like some others have done. A father finally displaced enough rubble to reach his son, the only one alive underneath. When he saw the son he knew that the only favour he could do him was to finish him. He picked up a heavy stone and did that. Then he killed himself. 

God’s self-appointed representatives are telling us that this is a warning; that the people have gone wayward and left God’s path and that we must repent and beg for His forgiveness. True. Very true! Muzaffarabad, Balakot and Rawalakot were a hedonist’s paradise. The little dead girls and the little dead boys in their school uniforms, the little crippled starving girls and the little crippled starving boys and their crippled starving families, were busy in orgies when the slap from God came. 

No, they were not merely trying to get by through another difficult day in their less than ordinary small lives. They were drinking and dancing and having orgies at 8.50 in the morning. Or did God simply miss the target and make a mistake?

Manto wrote a short piece on the killings during partition in which a Muslim slays a passerby thinking he is a Hindu. Then discovering that the dead was circumcised, he says, “Saala, mishtake ho gaya”. Next time God feels like doing a little justice, he could do a bit of homework first lest there is a mistake. He could ask me for a list which I will have ready with the correct names and addresses from Karachi to Khyber. 

Bilal is a lawyer & filmmaker. bilalminto at gmail.com


		
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