It is raining on March 8, 2017 at the Torkham border post on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Half a dozen women and some children are sitting in an office compound out in the open. A security official approaches them and orders them to vacate the place that houses the offices of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, the tribal militia Khyber Khasadar Force and the civilian administration of Khyber Agency, the tribal area where the post is situated. He wants them to move to the Afghan side of the border. They all request him to let them remain on the Pakistani side.

One of them, Deeba, 29, is adamant. Clad in a shuttlecock burqa and crying incessantly, she insists: “I won’t go back to Afghanistan, come what may!” A resident of Khwar Nabi, a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Swabi district, Deeba is carrying her Pakistani Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC) with her. A few weeks earlier, she went to Jalalabad, the capital of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province about 70 kilometres to the west of Torkham, to attend a family event at the house of her sister who is married to an Afghan. Before Deeba could return home, a blast at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan on February 16 killed over 70 people, and Pakistan stopped all cross-border movement at Torkham, blaming the blast on terrorists who had come from Afghanistan.

By March 7, people and vehicles waiting to cross over stretched for kilometres on both sides of the border. Pakistan temporarily lifted the ban for a couple of days to let them pass. When Deeba came to know about the border opening, she rushed to Torkham along with her three children, including a two-month-old baby, but was stopped at the border post and told that she could not enter her own country because she had not left for Afghanistan with a visa. She protested that nobody had asked her for a visa when she went to the other side. Border guards had only looked at her CNIC and allowed her to exit Pakistan.

Stranded at Torkham, Deeba and her children, along with many others like them, spend a freezing night between March 7 and March 8 without proper shelter. The next day, they are neither willing nor equipped to pass another cold night in the open. “You have the power to kill me by opening fire with the gun you are holding,” she challenges the security official telling her to leave the compound. “But I won’t go back to Afghanistan.”

This is an excerpt from the Herald's September 2017 cover story. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Muhammad Saleem, 37, grows wheat, cumin, watermelons and onions in Balochistan’s Nushki district. He uses an electricity-run tube well to irrigate 100 acres of land that he owns. Over the last several years, he has seen his crops suffer every season due to water shortage since availability of electricity for his tube well has become highly uncertain. Not only have scheduled hours for power outages been long, unscheduled outages have become even longer.

“We get electricity hardly six hours a day,” says Saleem. “That is insufficient to cater to our irrigation needs.” During peak seasons for such crops as wheat, cumin, watermelons and onions – that coincide with the summer months of May, June, July, August and September – unscheduled power outages can be as long as four to five days. This ruins crops and causes grave financial loss to farmers, he says.

Farmers in a number of areas in north-western and central Balochistan, such as Loralai (where almond farming has virtually collapsed), Chagai, Mangochar, Pishin and Kalat, have migrated to cities where they work as vegetable/fruit vendors and shop assistants, mostly living with relatives. Their farms are turning into a barren land mass because they are unable to irrigate them, Saleem says.

Even in Quetta, Balochistan’s provincial capital, electricity is not available five to six hours every day. In some areas of the city, duration for outages stretches to eight hours a day and this has been the case since 2007. “Load-shedding has brought me to the brink of closing down my business,” says Ghafoor Ahmed, who runs a tailoring shop on Sariab Road. While most other local shopkeepers use diesel generators to produce their own electricity during outages, Ahmed says he “cannot afford a generator”.

Shopkeepers, flour mill owners and those associated with the cottage industry have been affected the most. Tariq Mehmood, a former furniture dealer, has closed down his “furniture workshop due to non-availability of uninterrupted power” supply. “I was not able to fulfil commitments to my customers,” he says.

Also, unlike many other parts of Pakistan where decrease in temperature reduces electricity’s demand and subsequently decreases load-shedding, electricity vanishes in Quetta and many northern and central parts of Balochistan the moment it starts to rain and snow. Whenever it rained and snowed heavily in January and February this year in these parts, inclement weather disrupted power transmission lines and people had to make do without electricity for days.

Whenever people pray for rain and snowfall (which has become rarer in recent years), they also pray for continuous supply of electricity, says Mirza Nadeem Baig, a 56-year-old shopkeeper in a market on Quetta’s Jinnah Road. Officials of the Quetta Electric Supply Company (Qesco) do not deny these claims and complaints. They acknowledge that Balochistan is not receiving electricity “according to its requirement”. Rehmatullah Baloch, Qesco’s chief executive officer, says the province needs around 1,650 megawatts of electricity but is getting only 650 megawatts from the national grid.

That is only half the problem, though. Even if the national grid wants to transmit to Balochistan all the electricity it requires, Baloch says, transmission lines cannot handle that load. “We could only get up to 900-950 megawatts when we tried to [increase the transmission of electricity],” he says. “When we tried to get more electricity than that, the main transmission lines started tripping.”

A related problem is electricity lost and stolen during transmission. The province loses anywhere between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of its electricity (depending upon the area and the state of the transmission lines) to these two factors.

And, lastly, electricity bills amounting to 190 billion rupees have remained unpaid for the last seven to eight years in Balochistan. Owners of 29,000 or so tube wells comprise the largest number of these defaulters, even when the provision of electricity to them remains heavily subsidised: every tube well operator gets 10,000 units of electricity each month at a lump sum price of 75,000 rupees but he pays only 10,000 rupees out of it. Of the remaining amount, the provincial government pays 60 per cent and the federal government pays 40 per cent. The total amount of this subsidy reaches 22 billion rupees every year.

All these problems are emblematic of what is wrong with the electricity sector, not just in Balochistan but all over Pakistan. Are there any efforts to fix them?

This is an excerpt from the Herald's April 2017 cover story. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

Ambreen Riasat woke up one summer morning and realised she was getting late for school. Her elder brother, Nauman, was already awake and she could hear him pack his school bag. Outside, the sun was already glaring down on the tall green trees and the grass rustling in the air on the mountain slopes. She rushed to the bathroom, a tiny space just outside her house with a pit and a tap. She washed her face, came back in, zipped up her school bag and ran to school. She was wearing a bright red shalwar kameez, a dress she had slept in.

Even at the tender age of around 14, Ambreen knew what part of her clothing she could not be careless about — a face-covering niqab that left a small space for her eyes to peer out. The stony path from her home to the paved road went steeply up the mountain. With the ease of someone who has been walking up and down that path for years, she hopped and skipped and ran all the way. Nauman was leading her as the two went past the trees bearing blood-red pomegranate blossoms and parrot-green walnut fruits.

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The government school in her village, Makol, is tucked away, almost invisibly, at the end of a narrow path covered by thick trees. A small peak, jutting out of a mountain, obscures its front gate. Most teachers at the school – including the principal – are men, and girls and boys study in the same classrooms. Girls wear niqab so that the men and the boys cannot see their faces.

When Ambreen returned home that day, her mother, Shamim Akhtar, was livid. Why did she not change her bright red clothes before going to school where there were so many men around, she asked her daughter. Ambreen tried to argue that she did not have time to change. Shamim would not hear it. “You are not going to school again,” she told Ambreen.

Shamim took her books away from her and confined her to the house.

Farmaan Ali, a teacher at the school, remembers Ambreen as an intelligent girl, a bright student. She could be naughty and easily distracted because she was so young, but she was smart and curious and a good daughter to her mother, he says. After classes, he had often seen her carrying large water containers home for her mother’s cooking and washing.

Her obedience, however, did not stop Ambreen from resisting her confinement. She kept protesting. She wanted to go back to her studies. She would often pick up her notebooks and start scribbling in them or she took her brother’s notebook and copied his lessons word for word. She was restless and often received beatings from her mother for talking back and asking to go back to her school. After her protests became too frequent to ignore, Shamim allowed her to go to a nearby madrasa for daily Quran lessons.

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All that happened in 2015.

Exactly a year after she had been banished indoors, Ambreen walked back to school. She was careful to keep well behind her brother so as to make sure he did not see her. She was more worried about her mother. Sooner or later, Shamim would find out that Ambreen was missing from home.

She quietly walked into her old classroom. It had changed. Other children had moved into it.

“The entire Makol came to see the vans but Ambreen’s mother did not,” says Mustafa.

After her arrival at school, a cousin of hers, who also studied there, went to the teacher Ali and asked him not to give Ambreen any books. She is not supposed to be in school, the girl told the teacher.

Ali discussed the matter with the principal, Khaliquz Zaman, and they decided to summon Ambreen’s brother, Nauman. They sent her back home with him. An angry Shamim gave Ambreen a serious thrashing but soon everything went back to business as usual. Ambreen helped her mother clean the house before everyone went to bed. Lying in his cot, Nauman could hear Ambreen sob.

That was April 29, 2016 — a moonlit night. Everything outside seemed to be bathed in a heavenly glow. By 11 pm, Shamim and Nauman fell fast asleep. Between midnight and 2 am, some men came in and took Ambreen away. Whether or not her mother knew is not clear.

Zarnab Gul lives on a hilltop in Makol. It was very early that morning when he heard screams. He opened the window of his room and looked out. He saw a big blaze below — at a place where a dusty shoulder jutted out of the village’s sole paved link with other villages and towns. Such shoulders are common on roads passing through hilly areas and are meant to provide parking space for broken-down vehicles or for travellers to wait for a bus.

Gul called his wife and they went to their rooftop to see what was burning along the road outside. They could not make out anything. He shouted loudly to see if whoever was screaming would answer. He heard back nothing but screams.

Gul eventually went down to the road. He saw a van on fire. The flames were leaping towards another van parked nearby.

Gul knew the owner of the second van – a twenty-five-year old local driver Ghulam Mustafa. He dialled Mustafa’s cell phone number and asked him to come over. By the time Mustafa reached the spot, the fire had died out but his vehicle was all burnt down.

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Gul and Mustafa went closer to the vans to see their condition. Both froze with horror when they saw that there was a person sitting inside the first van — burnt to a cinder. The arms and legs of the body, relatively recognisable, suggested it was a girl. The two also spotted a school bag inside the van. “I was surprised that the bag was still intact,” says Mustafa. “Nothing could have survived that blaze.”

It was dawn by then. Ali, the school teacher, heard an announcement from a local mosque about a dead body lying in a van on the roadside. He walked down the hill from his house and saw a crowd moving in the direction of the van. When he reached the place where the van was parked, he saw the singed body of a young girl tied to a seat. There were notebooks inside a school bag tucked in her hands. Those belonged to Nauman, Ambreen’s brother.

The girl in the van, according to her autopsy report, was strangled before she was set on fire. Her hands and legs were also tied with some plastic material to ensure that she did not move out of the van. When the police arrived, they concluded from the notebooks that the dead girl was Ambreen.

While everyone rushed to the spot where the body was found, Shamim stayed at home even though she lived only a short walk away. “The entire Makol came to see the vans but Ambreen’s mother did not,” says Mustafa.

Shamim says she did not notice anything unusual when she woke up that morning, except that the door of her single-room house was open. She went out to the bathroom, washed herself, offered her prayers and went back to sleep. She says she heard announcements about the burnt body of a young girl but she did not pay attention. When Nauman was leaving for school at around 7:30 am, Shamim asked him to wake Ambreen. That is when, she claims, they realised that she was missing.

Shamim ran out of the house and checked in the bathroom and the thickets close by but Ambreen was nowhere to be found. She went to the neighbours and asked them about her daughter but no one had seen her that morning.

Her statement triggers some troubling questions. She was sleeping right next to her daughter in a small room. How could she not know if someone came in and took the girl away? Why did she not notice Ambreen’s absence before her son told her about it?

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The police detained Shamim and Nauman and took them to the police station. They were both beaten up. Shamim was slapped and the soles of her feet were struck hard with sticks. “You can beat me as much as you want,” she cried, “but I have not killed my daughter. Why would I kill my own flesh and blood?” She was released, along with Nauman, for lack of evidence.

Shamim’s husband, Riasat Khan – a small, gaunt old man with a shrunken, bearded face – is a labourer working in a ship-breaking yard in Gadani, Balochistan. He stays at his workplace, hundreds of kilometres away from Makol, for most part of the year. He was at work when his daughter’s body was found. He reached home a couple of days after Ambreen had died. He says he has no clue what happened to her.

Shamim, younger than her husband and also more articulate and worldly-wise than him, does not like to talk much about her daughter. Instead, she mourns the death of her eldest born, a boy named Waseem, who had died of an unknown cause a few years ago. He was fine one day and then the next day he was bleeding from the mouth, she says. Within hours he was dead.

Shamim has a photo of Waseem. He seems to be in his early teens at the time the photograph was taken. She has no photograph of Ambreen that can enable an interested outsider to know what she looked like.

There is a notebook in his hands. Ambreen used to scribble and doodle in it. He is also drawing something — a mishmash of lines and spirals, like the mystery surrounding his sister’s death.

In the sparse room where Ambreen’s family lives, there is almost nothing that suggests that the girl even existed. A small stove next to a low wooden shelf in a corner of the living room-cum-bedroom marks the kitchen area where a few tin containers carrying cooking oil and some spices are lined neatly. Next to them are pots and pans and a couple of trunks with clothes in them. The bright red dress Ambreen wore to school last year could be in one of those trunks, but there is no way of knowing that. Next to the trunks, charpoys are lined against a long wall facing the only opening in the room: its door. Ambreen used to sleep on one of those cots.

As Nauman starts talking about Ambreen, his mother looks at him. He is sitting on a charpoy right opposite the door. There is a notebook in his hands. Ambreen used to scribble and doodle in it. He is also drawing something — a mishmash of lines and spirals, like the mystery surrounding his sister’s death.

Makol, located about 10 kilometres from the military’s premier training facilities in Abbottabad district, is a typical settlement in the mountains: houses are scattered, separated by small hills, pathways and tree-lined courtyards. It consists of a few hundred houses. Most of them are built with bricks and mortar and have concrete roofs but a few are mud huts with thatched ceilings – like the one Ambreen’s family has.

In this village lives a rich man: Muhammad Pervaiz. His family owns vast tracts of land and many houses here. He is also the elected chairman of a union council of which Makol is a part, along with a few other villages.

Last year, Pervaiz’s young daughter Saima disappeared from home, allegedly with a man she wanted to marry. Her parents looked for her everywhere they could but did not find a clue of her whereabouts. There were rumours in Makol that Ambreen knew where Saima was. She reportedly was the human link through which Saima communicated with the man she loved.

Pervaiz is known to be unhappy about Ambreen’s role in his daughter’s disappearance. He is reported to have convened a council of the elders of the area in his home some time in 2015 where it was allegedly decided to punish Ambreen. It was not a jirga, a tribal judicial council, in the exact tribal sense because those living in Makol are not bound by any tribal affinity (they all come from different castes and working groups) and it had no legal and political legitimacy as the jirgas have in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. It is still reported to have the sanction of the rich and the influential in and around Makol.

Shamim alleges it was Pervaiz who came to her house along with some other men on the night Ambreen disappeared. He took her away to question her about Saima’s disappearance, Shamim says, but she does not have any evidence to substantiate her allegation.

Others in the village speculate that she knew all along that Pervaiz was out to get her daughter. That is why she took Ambreen out of school soon after Saima had disappeared and the jirga had taken place, they say.

Something she has noticed in many similar cases: That a woman who leads a life of moral laxity always ends up dying in ignominy.

Pervaiz’s wife, Rubina, a housewife reluctant to speak to an outsider, swears by her husband’s innocence. “He was at home with me on the night of Ambreen’s murder,” she says. She also denies the allegations that the punishment for Ambreen was approved at a jirga held inside her home. “That was not a jirga. After Saima went missing, a few elders from the community talked to each other inside a closed room. There was no discussion on the subject ever afterwards,” she says.

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Rumours continue to swirl around the case. One of them joins Pervaiz and Shamim as secret lovers who killed Ambreen after she had come to know about them. According to another rumour, Shamim could have killed both Waseem and Ambreen for some unknowable reason.

Many weeks after Ambreen’s murder, Safeer Ahmed, a junior court official in Abbottabad, a few kilometres to the north-west of Makol, insists that Shamim was “involved” in some kind of a “racket” and that is why she had her own “daughter killed to cover up her crime”. Makol is a small place where everyone knows everyone, he says. “It is not a city. How can the mother not know the person who took her daughter away? There is some great secret here.”

Pervaiz and around 10 others – including the owner of the van in which the body was found – were arrested in early May 2016 and are in jail pending a trial. The police are yet to release a complete forensic audit of the crime scene. A judicial inquiry into Ambreen’s death, ordered by the provincial government, is also going on.

Whoever killed Ambreen was both meticulous and methodical. According to police investigations and statements of witnesses who discovered her body, the killers had cut off electricity to the nearby street light and damaged the water pipeline passing through the place so that water to extinguish the fire could not be secured easily. Ambreen was dumped on a seat right above the van’s gas tank. When the fire started, she did not burn slowly. The fireball cause by the gas roasted her body instantly.

Her teacher, Ali, remembers how many in the crowd that April morning took photos and made videos of the crime scene. Those grainy and terrifying images and the recent renaming of the local school after her are the only signs that Ambreen did once exist.

Even her grave in Makol graveyard remains unmarked: a small mound of dried earth with a shapeless piece of rock placed where a tombstone should have been.

Dewal Sharif is like Makol in many ways. Both are located in the same mountain valley that links the tourist resort of Murree in the south to Abbottabad in the north-west through scattered settlements nestled amid forest-covered ravines and snow-capped peaks. But Dewal Sharif is much bigger and, with its own commercial areas and multiple road links with the rest of the country, is more economically developed than Makol.

And there are more private schools in Dewal Sharif than there are shops in Makol. Maria Sadaqat, a tall 19-year-old girl, was both a beneficiary and a contributor to this sprawling private education system. Her death on June 1, 2016 is also linked to it — albeit indirectly.

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Many in this town of more than 10,000 people agree that Maria was a bright girl. Even when she was studying at a local school, she taught other students in her class. By the time she reached the second year of college, there was competition among the owners of private schools to hire her as a teacher. The head teacher at Al Abbas School – where Maria had done her primary and secondary schooling – was certain that she was going to teach at his school. Shaukat Abbasi, proprietor of the Suffa School of Modern Studies, believed she would join his institution. He was, after all, a close friend of Maria’s father Sadaqat Abbasi.

Sadaqat and Shaukat had become friends some years ago. The former was working as a driver then and the latter as a Grade-17 government officer. They, respectively, came from the relatively poor lower part of Dewal Sharif town and its better off upper part. It was originally a case of a small man trying to be seen as being close to a big man; a way of gaining some social and financial traction in a highly hierarchical society. Then Shaukat gave Sadaqat some money to set up his own chicken coop.

Perhaps to return his favour, Sadaqat decided that Maria would teach at Shaukat’s school after she passed her intermediate exam. All her younger siblings – five sisters and a brother – were also to attend the same school as students.

Her colleagues at the school liked Maria but they thought she was a little odd for a girl of her age. Firstly, she was a couple of inches taller than most women around her and then she did not wear any make-up other than an occasional application of kohl to her eyes. The teachers felt “embarrassed standing next to her”, a member of her family recalls.

She had one foible though — she liked spending money on buying watches. One of her watches had a small dial with a long thin leather strap. She wore it on most workdays. The other one looked like a gold bracelet that she paired with pearl earrings. Recently, she had started wearing a delicate gold nose ring that her grandmother had bought for her.

These distinctions apart, she wore a black abaya, as did all other teachers working with her, while walking to and from the school. It had a sprinkling of black shiny objects on the shoulders and across the front. And like most teenage girls, she loved bags. Her shoulder bag was made of imitation fur and leather — a popular design sold everywhere in Murree’s bazaars.

Maria was friendly and confident and had the talent for putting people at ease with her conversation. Her friends and family say she always had a story or two to tell. She was obviously an object of envy among her peers.

Her father was very proud of her. Maria had brought him prestige in the community and additional cash to his family kitty.

Some months after Maria started teaching at Shaukat’s school, Sadaqat developed business problems with her boss. Accounts differ. Sadaqat says Shaukat was his business partner — they shared profit and loss. When the business was doing well, Shaukat was receiving his share of the profit but when sales and profits were badly hit, he started asking for his money back. Shaukat says he had given the money to Sadaqat as a loan.

At first Shaukat did not press his demands much. Sadaqat, in the meanwhile, went to Saudi Arabia on a work visa as a labourer. It was then that the environment started changing for Maria at the school. Rumours began circulating that Shaukat had sent a marriage proposal to Maria for his son — an already married man with a child who also taught at another private school. Others suggested that Maria and Shaukat’s son were having a secret affair. To avoid the scandal to blow up in her face, she quit her job. Her siblings were also transferred to a different school.

[Also read: The evolution of honour killing]17

The relationship between Sadaqat and Shaukat was steadily souring all this while, especially after Sadaqat came back from Saudi Arabia, abandoning his contract halfway. Almost penniless, he started a vehicle repair shop in the market area in lower Dewal, where Shaukat appeared regularly, demanding his money back in full view of other people. The two often exchanged hot words.

One day in May this year, the two men almost came to blows. But Shaukat backed off, sensing that the much younger and fitter Sadaqat would outdo him easily in a fist fight. Sadaqat, though, believed the quarrel was not over.

The next day, he left Dewal to attend a funeral in the nearby town of Phagwari. All the elders of his family and five of his children went with him. Maria was left at home to take care of her special-needs sister, six-year-old Habiba.

At 11:45 am that day, Shaukat – along with four or five other people – arrived at Maria’s house, a small three-room stand-alone house on a hillock. He called her outside. As soon as Maria opened the gate, the men slapped her and pulled her to a clearing where some goats were tied. They ripped her clothes and beat her in turns, making a circle around her. “You are stalking my son. Today, I will set you on fire,” Shaukat said to her. The men forced her to the ground. Shaukat took out a plastic container, threw kerosene oil on Maria and set her ablaze. She screamed for help but no one came to her rescue. The men then threw her down a nearby mountain slope. She landed on a path, many feet below. This is how the events of the day transpired, according to the statement that Maria gave to the police from a hospital bed and the accounts of her family.

Her neighbour’s son, a 12-year-old, was playing on the rooftop of his house when he heard someone screaming. He rushed to Maria’s house where the screams were coming from. He found her lying on the path, still in flames with her clothes ripped at many places. He called his sister. She gave Maria water to drink and called Sadaqat, who came back home and took Maria to a government hospital in Phagwari.

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The hospital did not have any facilities to treat burn victims. He eventually shifted her to Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) in Islamabad for treatment.

Maria lay there in a bed, fully conscious for 36 hours. She recorded her statement – an audio and a video – describing her attackers in detail. On her last day in the hospital, an uncle roughly the same age and with the same white beard as Shaukat, came to see her. She screamed in terror. “Master Shaukat is here to burn me,” she cried. “Baba, throw him out.”

She died the same day.

Seen in her pictures, Maria looks like a younger version of her grandmother, Subeda — same height, same straight nose, same high cheekbones and same curious brown eyes. Subeda wants the courts to give Shaukat the same punishment he has inflicted on her granddaughter — death by fire. Maria’s father has the same demand.

Sadaqat and his family, however, seem more sad than angry. “For me, she was a son,” he says. “All my children are very bright but Maria was exceptionally intelligent.”

While the financial dispute between Sadaqat and Shaukat is well known in Dewal Sharif and rumours about the latter’s desire to make Maria his daughter-in-law are widespread, few men outside Maria’s family believe that he killed her. Many of them are willing to vouchsafe for Shaukat’s good character; others remember him as one of the best and the most respected educationists in the area.

After the police arrested him and put him behind bars, there were, indeed, public marches in Dewal Sharif in his favour. Many female teachers and students also participated in those.

“She is already dead and she has also named me, but as a human being I feel sad over her death,” he says calmly

Members of Maria’s family allege that Shaukat was enraged because she had refused to become the second wife of his son. “He kept threatening her,” says Maria’s aunt Sobia. “If you don’t marry my son then I will make sure you marry no one else,” she quotes Shaukat as telling her niece.

I manage to sneak inside Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail on June 28, 2016, to have a meeting with Shaukat. We talk in a room full of people where the prisoners stand on one side in a cage-like iron structure and their visitors on the other side, both groups trying to have a conversation through tiny holes in steel sheets separating them.

He looks older than he did in a video of him available online. He also appears withdrawn. He acknowledges his verbal squabble with Sadaqat and also claims that he backed off that day in May in the market so that he could avoid getting hurt. But he denies even being in Dewal Sharif the day Maria was burnt. “I had gone to a village 45 kilometres from Dewal to enquire about an ailing friend.”

Shaukat says he came to know about the incident through a phone call. “Then I heard Maria’s father had nominated me and my neighbour for the crime. We ran away initially but surrendered a few days later.”

He insists that he never saw Maria after she had left his school. “She has given her pre-death statement under dictation from her father,” says Shaukat.

Maria’s family members say they kept asking Shaukat to come forward and clear his name while the girl was still alive. He did not do that. “The media was baying for blood. How could I risk my life by going there?” he responds.

Shaukat also denies that he ever asked for Maria’s hand for his son. “I swear I never talked about marrying the two,” he says.

As I start to leave, he stops me. “She is already dead and she has also named me, but as a human being I feel sad over her death,” he says calmly, showing no outward signs of agitation, anger or animosity. “I really feel sorry for her,” he adds.

In his online video, apparently made when he was being investigated by the police, he makes a passionate plea about his innocence. “I have a grown-up daughter of my own. Those who have grown-up daughters of their own don’t eye other people’s daughters.”

Given Maria’s last statement and the media’s coverage of the incident, it looked unlikely that Shaukat would be released from jail any time soon.

The police investigations, however, soon absolved him of the accusations. A few weeks ago, a committee formed by Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif to investigate Maria’s death declared that she had “committed suicide and was not murdered.”

According to a report published in daily Dawn on July 2, 2016, the “committee headed by Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Abubakar Khuda Dad Khan, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Khuda Bux Cheema and Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Ghasud Deen analysed forensic data, obtained polygraph tests, mobile phone records, fingerprints, medical reports, talked to doctors and conducted interviews in order to ascertain the cause of death.” The officers recommended releasing Shaukat and two of his alleged accomplices.

They were released on bail soon afterwards.

The police are also said to have leaked Maria’s cell phone data. It showed she was exchanging amorous messages quite regularly with Shaukat’s son.

Asma Jahangir, the renowned human rights lawyer and activist, visited Maria’s home as part of a three-member fact-finding mission sent by the Supreme Court Bar Association soon after the incident of her burning. Jahangir has seen her autopsy report and spoken to her family. She has also met Maria’s neighbours who were the first ones to hear her screams.

She says she found Dewal Sharif divided along gender lines over Maria’s death. The women were “in full sympathy with the victim whereas the men were either justifying [the] crime or denying it totally,” says the mission led by Jahangir in its recently released report. “There was a concerted effort to paint the occurrence as a suicide rather than murder,” it adds.

“It was obviously not a suicide. It was murder,” Jahangir says in her office in Lahore.

They are straightforward murders, disguised as honour killings to escape punishment

She cites Maria’s postmortem report to say that her hands, feet and head were unburnt. This, she says, suggests that more than one person held her down to the ground while she was being set ablaze.

The fact-finding mission report quotes one Ejab Abbasi, chairman of union council Dewal Sharif, as saying that he met Maria in hospital twice to probe her thoroughly. “The victim was absolutely certain and remained consistent about her version of the incident,” he is reported to have told the members of the mission.

Jahangir says she also tried to meet Shaukat’s family but they were unable to meet the mission for unspecified reasons. She clarifies that it was not her mandate to find out who had killed Maria. “My mission was to ensure that the investigation was carried out independently. There was obviously a lot of prejudice against the girl. I wanted to ensure that the rumours did not sidetrack legal proceedings.”

The fact-finding mission initially “was quite satisfied with the inquiry” but its members were “shocked to know that the investigation had declared the main accused as being innocent”. They also point out that a magistrate hearing the case did not accept the police recommendation to release the accused “and yet bail was granted” to him.

The report lists developments that might have had some negative impact on the investigation. “There was a campaign of character assassination of the victim and her family and … there were credible reports that the family members were being threatened and induced to accept some reward for their silence.”

Jahangir points to a widespread public perception, especially among men, in Dewal Sharif — something she has noticed in many similar cases: That a woman who leads a life of moral laxity always ends up dying in ignominy.

He passed through her street every day. She waited for him half-hidden behind a half-open door. “Why don’t you look my way? Why don’t you talk to me?” she gathered the courage to ask him one day. “I have nothing to offer,” he replied. “I want nothing,” she said.

Muqaddas Bibi was a young girl with a soft face. “She was the daughter of a potter but she looked like she belonged to a family of Rajputs,” the boy’s mother says.

Taufiq Ahmed is a handsome young man with a thick mustache and thick wavy black hair, oiled and slicked back stylishly. One of his legs is shorter than the other but that is barely noticeable. He works as a tailor.

The two lived in the same Buttranwali village, a nondescript settlement a little off the road that connects Gujranwala with Sialkot — nestled amid green fields being steadily taken over by ramshackle housing and brick kilns. They came from two different castes and their financial status varied. Though the girl’s family was poor a couple of generations ago, they have been doing well of late and are regarded well off by the village’s standards. Ahmed comes from a family of carpenters which struggles to make ends meet even when some of its members have branched into other professions. They had no chance of having an arranged marriage.

Three years ago, the two ran away and got married in a court.

At first Ahmed’s family was hesitant to accept Muqaddas into its fold but she took to her married life wholeheartedly. “She made rotis every day for the family, washed clothes and was always helping everyone,” says Ahmed’s mother. Everyone in the family and the neighbourhood soon started liking Muqaddas. An elderly woman living next door to her would come to her complaining of headache and Muqaddas would apply oil to her hair to massage and soothe her.

Ahmed lives in a small single-storey home made of red bricks, unplastered and unpainted. It is hard to distinguish from other houses in the village. His entire family has one room to sleep in — a simple structure with bare walls, save for a couple of framed images of the Kaaba.

Ahmed works from 7 am to 11 pm in one corner of the house, making about fifteen thousand rupees a month by stitching clothes. Muqaddas would serve him tea every few hours.

“Once women become independent, they also get a mind of their own and want to marry of their own choice. This is seen as a major contravention of family boundaries.”

About a year ago, they had a daughter. A few months after her birth, Muqaddas became pregnant again. She was happy about her second child. The delivery was still two months away but she made new clothes for herself to wear after she had given birth.

One day this June, she felt ill and Ahmed’s mother offered to take her to a hospital. They were to take a bus to Gujranwala, slightly more than 10 kilometres away. While Muqaddas and her mother-in-law were waiting at a bus stop, her mother arrived there and grabbed Muqaddas by the hair and the neck. “It all happened so fast,” says Ahmed’s mother, “that I did not know what to do.” Before anyone could come to their help, Muqaddas’ mother had dragged her daughter into her house and closed the door from inside.

As a crowd gathered outside, the mother screamed at the daughter. “Why did you marry a cripple?” Other members of the family were also present inside the house and they are known to have beaten up one of Muqaddas’ sister-in-law for trying to help her. Within minutes, the mother took out a knife and slit the daughter’s throat.

As Muqaddas lay dying, people waiting outside tried to enter the house but could not. “They must have planned for a long time,” says a visibly angry Ahmed. “Our women seldom leave the house. They have been waiting for a chance all this time to grab her.”

The old woman who liked Muqaddas for oiling her hair curses the girl’s mother. “The whole neighbourhood is in shock,” she says crying. “This is not about honour. Once the girl had become a mother, the question of honour died there and then.”

Ahmed’s mother now looks after his daughter. “What will this little girl think when she grows up?” she asks before she starts crying. “I am going to take good care of our child,” Ahmed says, lifting his daughter in his arms.

Muqaddas is buried in a grave behind a wall forming the village’s boundary. There is an empty bottle of camphor and fresh flowers lying on the grave.

Back at his home, Ahmed takes out an album carrying the photos of the couple. In one photo, a heart pierced by an arrow overlaps them as they pose for the camera. “I want to ask the world, if love is forbidden then why did God give us a heart,” he says. “If these people call themselves believers, do they not believe that couples are made in heaven?”

The months of May and June this year have been the cruelest. Violence against women has been rampant during this period. In May alone, the national media reported at least five cases in which women were murdered — in most instances by their close relatives.

Zeenat Bibi’s killing stands out among all these cases for multiple reasons. An 18-year-old girl living in a working class neighbourhood in southern Lahore, she was burnt to death on June 8 by her mother, Parveen Rafiq. This is the first known incident this year of a girl torched to death by her own family. Zeenat also did not belong to a village where some supposedly primitive anti-women social code operated. She lived and was killed in the second biggest city in the country where tribal concepts of male honour look distinctly unfeasible to follow. And she was killed by her mother — not by her brother or father though they may have a role in it.

Yet the cause of her death is what it has always been in such cases: “bringing shame to the family,” as her mother put it, according to a report published by daily Dawn.

Parveen, who confessed to her crime and is undergoing trial, set Zeenat on fire more than a week after the girl had reportedly eloped with one Hassan Khan. The two had married in court. “Hassan had agreed to let his wife return [to her parents’ home] after her family promised ... to organise a traditional wedding reception for the couple,” the newspaper reports.

Less than a week before the girl was murdered, the neighbours had seen her brother carrying home a jerrycan of petrol. The fire that killed Zeenat was so big that it was extinguished only with help from the official rescue service.

Ammar Majeed, who works at Jahangir’s law firm, AGHS Associates, as a media officer, has been visiting homes from where violence against women is reported. He has seen cases similar to that of Zeenat’s. In his reckoning, these “are crimes of ego” that “have nothing to do with honour.” A mother, upset that her daughter did not listen to her before deciding who to marry, resorts to killing not in order to redeem her honour but to satisfy her pride.

From experience, Majeed knows that such pandering to the self often has a destructive outcome. He once asked a boy why he had killed his sister. “Because it was satisfying,” is the answer he got.

Khawar Mumtaz, a veteran of the women’s rights movement in Pakistan, has worked in different capacities over the last three and a half decades — first as a member of the Women’s Action Forum (WAF), then as a founding member and head of the Aurat Foundation, a Lahore-based lobbying and research group on women’s rights, and recently as the chairperson of the National Commission on the Status of Women. “Most cases of violence against women in the 1980s were reported from tribal areas in Sindh and Balochistan,” she says. The situation has only worsened over the years as similar cases are being reported from everywhere in the country.

One reason, according to Mumtaz, is that the economic, social and political environment is changing in Pakistan. “Women are doing much better economically, politically and socially as compared to the past,” she says. “Women are marrying late. More and more women are working.” This, she says, is one of the major factors in the backlash against them.

Mumtaz points to “a total disjuncture” between how the society is moving ahead and how social structures and social roles are still playing out in the same old ways. She gives an example: “Once women become independent, they also get a mind of their own and want to marry of their own choice. This is seen as a major contravention of family boundaries.”

That explains why it has become acceptable that a woman can work to provide for her family but it is still not acceptable if she exercises choice in marriage. “Violence then is likely. It is part of a control mechanism.”

Shahnaz Rouse, a professor of sociology at the Sarah Lawrence College in the United States, has also written about social and political changes that have led to an increase in violence against women in Pakistan. In her book, Shifting Body Politics: Gender, Nation, State in Pakistan, she sees the crucial shift in attitudes towards women having resulted from the militarisation and progressively increasing masculinisation of society itself since the military regime of General Ziaul Haq.

Freely available arms and ammunition and Pakistan’s status as a frontline state during the war in Afghanistan and the drug trade are some of the contributing factors to the social changes she highlights. “The militarisation of the state and civil society [is] a result of the international/global politics of the last two decades, combined with the collapse of the liberalisation policies of regimes following Zia … the continued reliance by all three [regimes] on “Islamic” ideology as constructed by increasingly militant and conservative religious groups for “strategic” and/or ideological purposes, have resulted in an alarming masculinisation of public space.”

The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia goes another step backwards. Her book deals with one of the most brutal manifestations of the notion of shame and honour being linked to women and their bodies on a mass scale. Women were humiliated by being paraded naked in the streets or forced to abandon their religion and marry their rapists, never to see their families again during the cataclysmic events of 1947. Thousands of them died willingly at the hands of their own men to avoid bringing shame and dishonour to their families.

“They are straightforward murders, disguised as honour killings to escape punishment,” Butalia said in an interview about some recent incidents of violence against women in India.

The word honour invariably appears in news reports covering violence against women. Maqsooda Solangi, who has been working for the Aurat Foundation for six years, believes that many crimes are seen as honour killings because the media portrays them as such. “News contents are spiced up,” she says.

The situation is particularly bad at relatively small Punjab-based Urdu language newspapers. Whenever an honour crime occurs, it is covered in a way that focuses on the love marriage aspect of it, Solangi says. She adds that the coverage of crimes against women in local-language newspapers in Sindh is not as salacious as it is in Punjab.

It was during Zia’s era that honour killing first entered the lexicon of the news media and human rights activists, Mumtaz says. It has its origin in a 1979 judgement by the Peshawar High Court that declared that Islamic concepts of qisas (retribution) and diyat (compensation) must be taken into account before deciding any cases involving the death penalty. Awarding capital punishment without any provision for forgiveness is un-Islamic, the court ruled.

In politics, this put Zia’s self-professed Islamist regime in an uncomfortable position as far as hanging – without provision for forgiveness – of deposed prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was concerned. The verdict also raised alarm among women’s rights activists. It will lead to impunity for those men who kill their women because they can benefit from forgiveness – which in such cases is the prerogative of their own next of kin – is how the activists looked at the possible impacts of the law. They were proved right. The next decades saw a spike in crimes against women but most of them did not lead to conviction and punishment. The accused, the police, the prosecutors and even the judges used family honour as an excuse to condone such crimes as crimes of passion, committed on the spur of the moment by someone incensed by the injury to his or her own honour.

This led activists to demand that the state and the courts treat murders in the name of honour as a separate category of crimes in which forgiveness, qisas and diyat did not apply. As a term, “honour killing” thus became a part of everyday language.

In March 2015, after multiple failed efforts to reform the law, the Senate, the upper house of the parliament, finally approved a piece of legislation the activists have been asking for all along: honour killing became a crime against the state; the parties to it could not reach an out-of-court settlement in such cases. Women’s murders became “non-compoundable” — provided that the prosecution was able to prove that those were honour killings. Tabled by Senator Sughra Imam in 2014, the legislation, however, lapsed because it could not win approval from the National Assembly, the lower house of the parliament, mainly due to opposition from the religious political parties.

“Every murder should be seen as a crime against the state, not a matter between two individuals that they can resolve mutually,”

Jahangir believes the focus by activists on the term honour killing has hardly been helpful. Lawyers now spend all their energy and time on proving the crime to be an honour killing, she says. If they can’t do that, she says, the parties to a case can still go and affect a compromise no matter how gruesome the murder.

Additionally, qisas and diyat, as Islamic instruments to settle murder disputes, still stay on the statute books. The legal heirs of a victim also have the right to drop the charges at any point during the proceedings.

Jahangir blames non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for this state of affairs. “If they can write in English, they think they can also draft laws,” she says. Their advocacy has only added multiple layers of litigation that women face in courts, she says. Any benefit that could have come about in terms of stricter penalties for honour killing has been apparently cancelled out by these additional legal complexities, Jahangir adds.

Many in the NGOs seem to recognise these problems. A report commissioned by a group of women’s rights organisations and development foundations in 2015 attributes major hurdles in justice for women to a number of legal and judicial problems. There are hardly any female judges; availability of a lawyer is as low as 2.5 per 100,000 people and there are not enough female police officers, says the report entitled The Laws of Honour Killing and Rape in Pakistan: Current Status and Future Prospects.

The report cites surveys conducted by local human rights organisations that reveal a general lack of faith in the judiciary and very low levels of contact with the courts, especially among women. Most importantly, it points out that the reformed laws have changed nothing on the ground. The lack of sympathy encountered by survivors of rape and other forms of violence against women and the tendency among the police officers to encourage out-of-court settlements seem to have survived despite changes in the law, it says.

Nafisa Shah, a long-time campaigner for women’s rights and a member of the National Assembly affiliated to the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), readily agrees that the criminal justice system needs reforms. In an interview at her residence inside the parliamentary lodges in Islamabad, she argues that the recent cases of women’s murders are far more complex than they are made out to be.

In the past, she explains, the manner of killing women was different. “Most murders were spontaneous acts committed with such weapons as axes or clubs and they usually happened in rural areas,” she says. “Now there seems to be premeditation in these killings.” The existing laws, she says, do not define honour killing in such a way as to cover cold-blooded murders.

Shah is soon to publish a book, Honour Unmasked, which contains the results of her own field research on the subject.

“Patriarchy is violent against women. It is particularly violent against fearless women.”

Shah, as well as Jahangir and Mumtaz, agree that distinguishing one type of crime from the other – as has been the case with honour killing – has created more problems than it has solved. Ideally, all three say, all crimes should be treated alike – investigated, prosecuted and adjudicated in the same manner regardless of the gender, caste, creed, ethnicity and the social status of both the perpetrators and the victims.

“Every murder should be seen as a crime against the state, not a matter between two individuals that they can resolve mutually,” says Mumtaz.

Fauzia Azeem was a small-town girl from Punjab’s southern backwaters of district Dera Ghazi Khan. Her father, Muhammad Azeem, was a tenant farmer in his native village of Shah Saddar Deen on the Indus Highway.

Fauzia was married off at an early age — she later said she was less than eighteen at the time. She got a divorce after giving birth to a son. Next, she worked as a salesgirl and as a bus hostess in Multan.

In 2013, she made her first media appearance, as a contestant for Pakistan Idol, a music show aired on television — not as Fauzia Azeem but as Qandeel Baloch. She was rejected in the auditions. She then chose social media platforms to post videos that, her critics said, were bold to the extent of being provocative by Pakistani standards. She dallied online with sports stars, politicians and, finally, with a mullah.

Qandeel Baloch developed a mass fan following. Her videos were liked and shared by over 700,000 followers on Facebook and by more than 40,000 people on Twitter.

One the night of July 15, 2016, her younger brother, Waseem, and cousin, Haq Nawaz, killed her (exact details of her murder are yet to be fully known). Their reason in a confessional statement: she was bringing dishonour to the family.

In the First Information Report her father registered with the police in Multan -- where she was found murdered in her rented house -- he gave multiple motives: “Waseem … used to stop Fauzia from working in showbiz … my son Waseem has killed my daughter Qandeel Baloch in the name of honour … he has done this for money…Waseem has killed Qandeel Baloch on the instigation of my other son Muhammad Aslam Shaheen who is a subedar in the army.”

A week after her murder, The Second Floor (T2F), a meeting place for discussions on political, social and cultural issues, organised a panel discussion. Titled Bold Women, Bad Women: How to talk about Qandeel Baloch, the discussion moved from looking at her private and public life, her views on sexuality, independence and feminism and public reactions to her online activities, to the issue of violence against women in general and honour killing in particular.

Dr Nosheen Ali, who taught sociology at the New York University recently, said at the discussion that a limiting framework of morality divided women into good and bad. We need to ask who has created this divide, she said. “How is it enforced and who does this benefit?” These questions, she said, take us from “a framework of morality to a framework of patriarchy.” She, then, observed: “Patriarchy is violent against women. It is particularly violent against fearless women.”

Abira Ashfaq, a Karachi-based lawyer and another panelist at the discussion, agreed with Nosheen Ali but she added that all murders should be treated just like honour killings are so that people who are killed in the name of ideology or religion also get the justice they deserve. She gave the example of the murder of Zafar Loond, a leftist Seraiki activist living and working in Kot Addu town, less than 100 kilometres from where Qandeel Baloch was killed.

He was shot dead outside his house only a day before her murder. It is not clear who killed him. What is known is that, fearing opposition from religious activists, his family did not bury him in his ancestral town of Shadan Loond, which, like Qandeel Baloch’s ancestral village, is also in district Dera Ghazi Khan.

There were allegations that he was an Ahmadi.

Loond’s funeral prayers were offered in Dera Ghazi Khan city where he was buried in an unmarked grave.

An earlier version of this article was published in the Herald's August 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a freelance journalist and photographer.

The writer was earlier referred to as Annie Ali Khan. The name has been changed on her request.

Ismail’s uncle was in Greece. He had found work on the docks in one of the islands, he was safe, he was also sorry. He had to sell some family heirloom, jewellery, to be able to venture that far but he would be compensating his sister for that soon. He apologised for making everyone worry but there had been no time to explain. The immigration agent arranging his journey demanded immediate departure. Travelling without official documentation required both secrecy and urgency.

For the next 10 years, Ismail heard stories about his uncle’s life abroad. His uncle would travel often, sometimes for work, sometimes on the run from immigration authorities; he moved around inside Greece, then left for France, eventually settling in Spain.

He opened a shop on the famous La Rambla street in central Barcelona, a place with such a dense population of migrant business owners from Pakistan that people from Punjab speak of finding long lost relatives there while buying cigarettes.

Ismail also came to know of other migrant settlements, like Southall in London, where some of his distant relatives were now running a grocery store. Just two years after starting college at the University of Gujrat as an engineering student, he dropped out, put together some money, packed his bags and decided to try his luck abroad as well. This was 2008; he was 21 at the time. Back when he had both his legs.

This is an excerpt from the Herald's June 2016 issue. For more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

Sahrish Ahmad is a clinical psychologist at Lahore’s Jinnah Hospital. In 2013-2014, while she was doing her masters, she proposed a research study on Rescue 1122, a public sector emergency service set up to help people caught up in accidents, fires and other emergencies. Her teachers at the Centre for Clinical Psychology at the Punjab University, Lahore, accepted the proposal immediately.

To start working on her research project, Ahmad first contacted Rescue 1122 to get the contact information for possible respondents. Senior officials at the rescue service, however, turned down her request on the grounds that all contact information of the callers who seek help is kept confidential. She then contacted her class fellows, friends and relatives for help in reaching out to anyone known to have sought – and received – help from the rescue service. Finding such people turned out to be quite easy.

Hundreds of thousands of people in different parts of Punjab have used services provided by Rescue 1122 over the last 10 years or so. Between 2004 and 2014, the rescue service has handled over 1,159,667 road traffic accidents, responded to 1,465,344 medical emergencies, dealt with 121,387 crime incidents, managed some 5,918 collapsed buildings, provided rescue in 6,904 cases of drowning and responded to 70, 232 fire incidents in all districts of Punjab, a Rescue 1122 performance report, issued in 2014, reads.

After getting to scores of people who were behind some of those calls for rescue, Ahmad identified five of them through sampling methodology advised by her supervisors, Tehreem Arshad and Dr Rukhsana Kausar. These respondents were all young – aged between 22 and 27 – and belonged to middle class families. She interviewed them in detail, asking both quantitative and qualitative questions.

Thematic analysis of those interviews revealed that the overall level of satisfaction with Rescue 1122 performance was high. The respondents regarded the rescue workers as “professional, empathetic, dedicated and calm.” They also rated the rescue service as having better infrastructure in comparison to other emergency services in Lahore.

Ahmad’s hard work notwithstanding, this is not a conclusion that one needs a research project to arrive at. Opinion on the streets of Punjab in general, and Lahore in particular, about the quality of Rescue 1122 services is mostly positive. People like Dr Yaasir Ijaz, a Lahore-based anesthetist in his early thirties whose friend met an accident after Eid last year, go to the extent of saying they would have lost their near and dear ones had there been no Rescue 1122.

Arslan Raza, a young telecom professional in Lahore, is similarly full of praise for the rescue service. “I called Rescue 1122 after I witnessed a roadside accident in front of a cinema recently. The ambulance arrived in less than five minutes to provide first aid,” he says. “This is a very quick and efficient response, even by international standards.”

Shaukat Niazi, a 53-year-old language and linguistics expert in Rawalpindi, cannot agree more. “Once a cousin of mine fell from the stairs and broke her nose. [I called Rescue 1122 and its staff] was there in five minutes to administer emergency medical aid,” he tells the Herald. “They were very professional.” Niazi also talks about how the rescue service helped him shift his father to a hospital. “We could not do the shifting because of his spinal injury so I called Rescue 1122.” The ambulance arrived in a few minutes, with stretchers and all. “Four rescuers handled the situation like no other ambulance crew could,” Niazi says.

The story told by Riaz Azhar, a 40-something banker based in Lahore, is no different. He recalls how Rescue 1122 took less than 10 minutes to arrive at his Defence Housing Authority home when his mother had a heart attack five years ago. “I asked them about charges and they told me that it is a free of cost [public] service.”

Meet Irfan Gull. Dressed in an olive green uniform, he looks set to step into a battle zone. With his hands tightly clutching the steering wheel of a red-striped white high roof van, he only needs to turn the key in the ignition – and get orders from his seniors – to speed off to his mission. Not to save the borders or fight the terrorists, though. He, instead, fights fires and other emergency situations that can arise anytime anywhere within the municipal boundaries of Lahore, where he works. He is an ambulance driver for Rescue 1122.

Only 12 years ago, Lahore – as well as the rest of Pakistan – did not have an ever-ready, resourceful and dedicated workforce to take care of such emergencies. There was, of course, a fire brigade in every big city but its staff was not trained to do anything beyond spraying water and other liquids on a raging fire. They could neither provide first aid nor did they have ambulances to transport the injured to a hospital and the dead to a mortuary.

Those who met road accidents had no government department to look for help, leaving it to the passers-by to use either their own vehicles or hire rickshaws or taxis to carry the dead and the injured to nearby medical facilities. And this, too, was only possible when the passers-by were able to shrug off the apprehension that helping the victims of the accident could entangle them in legal and police proceedings which nobody has the time and stomach for. Wherever ambulances were available, mostly at government hospitals, they were generally ill-suited to tackle emergencies because they neither had equipment for first aid nor trained human resources to administer first aid.

For Gull and his colleagues, lack of availability of equipment can determine the difference between life and death.

In 2004, all that changed — first in Lahore and, a few years later, in many other parts of Punjab. That year, the Punjab government set up Rescue 1122 as the country’s first specialised emergency service, running ambulances driven by highly skilled drivers, and providing emergency healthcare through certified paramedical staff. In 2007, Rescue 1122 started operating its own fire brigade, equipped with water bowsers, ladders and fire trucks and manned by a trained workforce. The Rescue 1122 performance report claims that the service has “saved millions of lives” over the last decade and “has an average response time of six minutes.” In the same period of time, the report claims, the rescue service has “saved losses worth over 185 billion rupees through professional firefighting on modern lines.”

What does Gull feel about this great work that the rescue service has done? He says he is tired. Being among the first people to respond whenever there is an emergency in Lahore, a sprawling, chaotic, ill-planned city of more than 10 million people means he has to be on high alert all the time. The action, he says, can take place anywhere on the street, at someone’s office or home, or on the road. “We take care of the people caught in emergency situations before” anyone else does. “This happens every time someone dials 1122.”

As his colleagues try to breathe life back into the rescued persons inside his ambulance on bumpy roads, Gull has to navigate the mean streets of the city where traffic never gives way. Having to spend endless hours on the wheel, ensuring a quick response time and safe driving simultaneously, is extremely stressful, he explains.

And that is just one source of his exhaustion. Gull contends that the rescue service does not have all the equipment, money and human resources it requires. This shortage puts the existing resources in serious stress. For one, there are not enough ambulances, Gull says. “And we are paid salaries so low that they provide no motivation to continue with the high alert, high stress and high risk job that we do,” he goes on. “The government is paying peanuts to people who save endangered lives and who make life and death decisions every time they are out in the field.”

Gull’s colleague Faisal, a medical technician, bitterly remarks the government pays no attention to improving wages and working conditions at Rescue 1122. “We are often promised revision in our service structure. We also hear that a commission will be set up to identify the problems in the service structure but at the end of the day everything remains the same,” he tells the Herald.

Faisal also talks of a catch-22 situation: the hiring of more staff to reduce the workload on the existing workers will also lead to the worsening of the already bad financial status of the rescue service because the provincial government has failed to increase annual monetary allocations for it.

A part of psychologist Ahmad’s research concerns exactly that: the stress the rescue workers have to endure. A high proportion of Rescue 1122 staff that participated in her research was found to be experiencing psychological distress, she says.

“No, we are not God,” says Gull with a sigh when asked how difficult it is to maintain a high level of performance under working conditions he does not like. “We are humans. When we get exhausted, we can make mistakes too,” says Faisal.

Opinion on the streets of Punjab in general, and Lahore in particular, about the quality of Rescue 1122 services is mostly positive.

Furqan Noor is a telephone operator at Rescue 1122 in Lahore so, unlike Gull and Faisal, he does not have to venture out on the streets to help people in distress. Yet, he feels immense emotional and psychological pressure whenever he is on the phone receiving calls for help. “Often, I am holding back tears when I am answering calls,” he says. “Someone’s baby’s heart is not beating and the mother is screaming on the phone,” he narrates one of the many heart-wrenching stories he is privy to.

A woman once called him and said she wanted to commit suicide. She told him that she had been beaten up by her husband and that she did not want to live anymore. And then she asked him about the easiest way to die. He tried to talk her out of it but he is not trained to handle such a situation. “We are trained to be calm and cooperative while at the same time trying to extract information like the address and directions,” says Noor.

Ahmad’s research finds that fielding such distress calls is an emotionally draining assignment. When rescue workers have to deal with highly emotional and tragic situations as a matter of routine, that can make them insensitive, she argues. Clinical psychologists call it “compassion fatigue”. She recommends that immediate steps should be taken to monitor the psychological and mental health of rescue workers and instant remedies should be provided to those who require them.

Dealing with emotional problems of those seeking help, and also their own, is not the only worry that operators at Rescue 1122 face. To deal with a huge number of fake calls for help is a much bigger problem to them. In Lahore, for instance, only seven per cent to 10 per cent calls received at 1122 helpline are genuine requests for help. All the rest are fake alarms that lead to the unproductive deployment of scarce rescue resources. A prankster reporting a fake fire would make five to six fire engines, an ambulance and many rescuers rush to the site. Some callers even try to flirt with female operators or female medical attendants dispatched to help them, says a Rescue 1122 official in Lahore. Those making fake calls, according to the law, can be arrested and imprisoned for six months besides being liable to pay fines ranging from 50,000 rupees to 70,000 rupees. But senior officials at the rescue service say they have no time and resources to pursue the fake callers in courts of law.

Those working in the field say they sometimes experience much bigger insults than the embarrassment caused by fake alarms. We have been “attacked, bitten, spat on” by the irate public, claims Gull.

When Rescue 1122 was first set up in Lahore, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi was Punjab’s chief minister and his Pakistan Muslim League–Quaid-e-Azam (PMLQ) was the ruling party both in the province and at the centre. Though his family and him have been living in Lahore for decades, they are known as the Chaudhrys of Gujrat, where they come from, and are usually elected from. They do not have a constituency in Lahore to call their own and are considered rank outsiders compared to the Sharifs, the family of the incumbent chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif. Setting up Rescue 1122 in the provincial capital before anywhere else is seen by political pundits as a calculated move by Elahi to attract at least some public support in the biggest city in the province.

That still rankles with the Sharifs, goes the widely circulated conspiracy theory among the residents of Lahore when asked about why the Punjab government is reluctant to increase the annual budget for Rescue 1122 and improve the working conditions of its staff. There appears to be at least some truth to these theories. Recently, newspapers in Lahore carried Rescue 1122 ads seeking donations to improve the service’s finances.

Many in the city were upset over the ads. Why is a government department asking citizens for donations, they wondered, and lashed out at Shahbaz Sharif for ignoring Rescue 1122 while spending generously on his own public transport projects. Others were confused. Is a government department even authorised to seek donations? Senior officials at the rescue service respond to that by citing the Punjab Emergency Service Act of 2006. “The service shall have the authority to accept donations in the shape of land, vehicles, equipment and other such items which may facilitate the functioning of the service,” reads a section in the act. Seeking donations, the officials say, is perfectly legal.

While the provincial administration almost ignores calls from Rescue 1122 staff for more money and machines, it is aware that the rescue service is quite popular and shutting it down will be a politically disastrous step. This neither here nor there kind of approach is creating a situation where the quality of the rescue service will only go down as population increases and human resources and machinery required to cater to its needs become exhausted and worn out.

Many people already have complaints. Salman Muzaffar, an Islamabad-based banker in his mid-forties, got into a fight a few years ago and needed Rescue 1122 help to get to a hospital. He says the rescuers came to him quickly but their ambulance had severe hygiene problems. It was in a shambles, requiring cleaning and maintenance.

Others have more serious grievances. Arooj Zahid, one of the editors at a popular magazine in Lahore, called Rescue 1122 recently after her grandmother had experienced severe breathing problems. The rescuers took more than 45 minutes to reach her home. By that time, her grandmother had passed away. “They were late because they could not find the address,” she says.

Elishba Karis Abel, a 28-year-old teacher in Lahore, faced a similar problem when she called Rescue 1122 for help. The rescuers were required to shift her grandmother to a hospital at 4 am, she says, but they could not find her home. After wandering around the area for quite some time, they called her brother to seek directions. And then her mother had to drive in front of the rescue ambulance to show them the way to the nearest hospital. “Even a short delay can be critical for a patient who needs immediate medical care,” says Abel and suggests that the government should equip the rescue service with a navigation system so that rescue workers do not lose their way.

Abel also wonders about the problems that the rescue workers could be facing while trying to rescue people in the countless narrow lanes of Lahore’s Walled City which are not even mentioned on the maps available in the markets. There have been a number of horror stories of people living in the Walled City not receiving timely help in emergency situations, she says.

One such tragic story unfolded on January 14 this year. At least five members of a family were killed as a house caught fire in the Lohari Gate area of the Walled City. The nondescript narrow lane where the house was located was so difficult to locate and so inaccessible that it took the rescuers too long to reach there in time to save lives. In a similar incident on May 17, 2015, six children belonging to another family lost their lives after their house had caught fire in Lahore’s Shad Bagh area which is not even in the Walled City — though it is equally densely populated and difficult to navigate.

Gull apportions some of the blame for problems in service delivery to the condition of the ambulances available. When he started his job, he says, he was given a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter to drive. The second batch of ambulances was all Toyota Hiace vans but lately most vehicles procured in the first two batches have been replaced by Chinese Kinglong Hiace vans. These are five to six times cheaper than the Sprinters — and twice as inefficient, he says.

Even where the equipment exists, it is woefully short of the numerical requirement. For Lahore, the country’s second biggest city and Punjab’s largest, Rescue 1122 has 27 ambulances and 20 fire trucks, according to its own 2014 performance report. This means just one ambulance for 370,370 people (supposing that Lahore’s population is still 10 million). The rescue service has only two turntable ladders and two aerial platforms, both essential tools for putting down fires in multistorey buildings and for tackling other high altitude disasters.

Another big issue afflicting Rescue 1122 is the lack of a service structure for its employees. In the absence of a service structure, no rules and regulations are available for raising salaries and making transfers and promotions of the staff possible. If media reports are to be believed, senior rescue service officials have promised a number of times that a service structure will soon be put in place but nothing has come out of those promises yet. A Rescue 1122 official tells the Herald the rescue service cannot take any decision on the service structure on its own and that this is causing delays in announcing it. Approval of the service structure is the prerogative of the Punjab government’s home department, he says wishing to remain unnamed.

In November 2015, a multistorey factory making polythene bags in Sundar Industrial Estate near Lahore collapsed, resulting in the death of more than 50 people, many of them as young as 14 years old. Evidence has piled up since then that the factory had a poorly planned building. It had no emergency exits and its owner had continued expanding it through unapproved extensions. Eyewitnesses told the media after the collapse that the building had developed cracks after an earthquake in October 2015 and even then the owner, who also died in the accident, was not ready to evacuate the workers and shut it down.

Many of the deaths at the factory could still be prevented if the rescuers had the right type of equipment to cut through the collapsed concrete columns and heavy cement slabs under which scores of people had gotten trapped. As it turned out, Rescue 1122 did not have the technical skills and machines to remove debris without increasing risks to the lives of those to be rescued. In the event, army engineers had to be called out to dig and smash the collapsed structure and heavy machinery – such as cranes, bulldozers and dumper trucks – had to be borrowed from private builder Bahria Town for debris removal. Even then it took close to a week to clear all the debris – a massive 17,200 tons, according to the district administration – and retrieve all the injured and the dead from under it.

While the district administration was full of praise for the private builder for providing help in tackling the disaster, there was loud criticism of the government over failing to monitor, and stop, the flawed construction of the building before it collapsed and, most importantly, for not having invested enough in rescue services.

Dealing with emotional problems of those seeking help, and also their own, is not the only worry that operators at Rescue 1122 face. To deal with a huge number of fake calls for help is a much bigger problem to them.

For Gull and his colleagues, lack of availability of equipment can determine the difference between life and death. He recounts how in December 2014 he was ordered to rush to Anarkali bazaar where a commercial building was on fire. Along with him were 16 fire engines and 80 firefighters. They reached the site of the fire in eight minutes but could not make it inside the narrow street where the building was actually located for the next 45 minutes. The building – which had only one entry and exit point – burned down in front of the rescuers as they struggled to carry water hoses and fire extinguishers inside it. Even more unfortunately, the accident resulted in the death of 13 people.

The rescuers needed to cross many hurdles before they could start extinguishing the deadly fire. Hundreds of motorcycles were parked where the narrow street leading to the building branched off the main road. Vending carts clogged both the street and the road. And there were no hydrants, no fire extinguishers close by. Even the staircases and the parking areas were turned into shops, making it impossible for the rescuers to move within the burning building. Long-neck cranes could have helped the rescuers avoid all these impediments but Rescue 1122 does not even have enough high ladders. The lack of these ladders was felt acutely when the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) Plaza caught fire on May 9, 2013. The LDA officials claimed the fire took long to extinguish because the rescuers did not have the required equipment to reach beyond the plaza’s sixth floor. In another glaring instance of equipment shortage, Rescue 1122 had only 12 life jackets and three to four rafts to rescue the entire population of Muzaffargarh district in 2010 floods.

In some incidents, the lack of proper equipment has endangered the lives of the rescuers too. Back in 2011, four firefighters fainted while fighting a massive fire in one of Lahore’s most crowded commercial areas, Shalmi Market, inside the Walled City.

Some rescuers recall the inferno on December 20, 2008, at Rawalpindi’s Gakhar Plaza with shock and horror. As this commercial building caught fire, rescuers rushed to it, but found out that they had no cranes or high ladders to be able to vacate it in time and put out the fire without having to enter the burning premises. Many of them went in as parts of the building were already crumbling around them. This resulted in 13 of them getting trapped in raging fire and falling debris. All of them were later found dead.

Suggestions vary on how to expand the Rescue 1122 coverage, both geographical and in terms of disasters it can handle. Some say it needs to equip and train itself to handle emergencies such as animal bites, disease outbreaks, chemical spills, torrential rains and storms, flash floods and terrorism. Others, like Rameez Ahmed, a textile engineer at a factory in Multan, say rescue services need to spread awareness among the general public on how to manage low intensity traumas and disasters such as non-fatal accidents and damage done by localised weather phenomenon.

Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the United Nations in its 2012 report on Pakistan also recommended the same. It noted that Rescue 1122 had been advised (by the UN) to spread awareness and education among common people regarding first aid, disaster and trauma management. The rescue service, indeed, is doing just that, though on a small scale, by providing training to students but the compilers of the report were not satisfied. Rescue 1122 has failed to do that because of lack of funds, they noted.

Yet another suggestion is that Rescue 1122 should extend its services to remote and underdeveloped places where people are prone to medical emergencies but have next to no healthcare facilities available close by to address those emergencies. More often than not, patients die while being transferred to a far-off hospital. Rameez Ahmed recounts how his friend died recently of a cardiac arrest in Narowal, a town about 50 kilometres to the north-east of Lahore, because there was no hospital in his hometown that offered treatment for coronary diseases. If a Rescue 1122 ambulance was available to transfer him quickly to a hospital in Lahore, his life could have been saved, says Rameez Ahmed. Consider how people suffer similar tragedies in far-off places such Layya, Bhakkar, Rajanpur and Sadiqabad which are all hundreds of kilometres away from a decent healthcare facility.
To a certain extent, Rescue 1122 is already operating in some remote areas of Punjab but its services are limited to major cities and towns and the equipment available there does not even match the one available in Lahore. The expansion is also impeded by a lack of funds and absence of coordination between local hospitals and emergency service providers, sources in Rescue 1122 say.

While these issues await resolution, Gull and Faisal just keep doing what they have been doing for years — providing help to people in need of rescue. And they continue to plead to “the powers that run the country, the many health ministries, secretariats and departments, the prime minister and the chief minister” to allocate sufficient funds for the rescue service. “We might just have to rescue you someday,” they seem to be saying to all these policymakers.

This was originally published in the Herald's February 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

He, as well as his six brothers, received their education from Jamia Farooqia, a Deobandi seminary in Shah Faisal Colony, Karachi, where around 3,000 students are enrolled in courses ranging from the memorisation of the Quran to specialisation in Arabic literature and Islamic jurisprudence. After his graduation, Hashim decided to open a madrasa inside his house in Haider Chali, a mostly Pakhtun working-class neighbourhood in Karachi’s north-western Sindh Industrial Trading Estate (Site) area. The two-storey house was purchased in 1992 by his father, Haji Karim, originally a resident of the Swat valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Hashim shifted his family upstairs and turned the small bedrooms on the ground floor into classrooms. This is how Al-Karim Islamic Academy – named after Hashim’s father – came into being in 2007. The madrasa provides basic religious education to around 200 boys and girls who mostly live in nearby houses and streets, and pay a monthly fee of 150 rupees each. Being a teacher of the Quran, Hashim is known as Qari Hashim among his students and their families.

A small room that serves as the office of his madrasa has bare brick walls and cemented flooring. The only furniture in it is a tattered sofa and a small wooden table, a copy of the Quran placed on it. On the dusty afternoon of March 23, 2016, Hashim is sitting in this office, explaining how he does not have anything to do with his elder brother, 33-year-old Shakirullah. “He has a mind of his own,” Hashim says of Shakirullah, whose wife and children live upstairs along with the rest of Haji Karim’s family.

This is an excerpt from the Herald's April 2016 issue. For more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

There is another abundant harvest here: of death, of lives brutally cut short by terrorism. It has numbed its victims into silence, sapping whole families of their life force, turning them into mere shadows of their former selves.

On a hot July afternoon last year when the dozing fields were abuzz with the shrill snoring of cicadas, a young villager clad in a soiled vest knocks at a guest room in the village to stir a shadow awake. The old door, bleached by a blistering sun, creaks open after several knocks, sending yellow wasps hovering into hot air. An old face peers out of the dark, blinks confusedly at the bright day and the unexpected guests.

“There are people here to talk to you, baba,” the young man tells the old one, who nods uncomprehendingly but opens the door wide. There are several charpoys inside, lined against the walls. Against one wall hangs a straw prayer mat. Despite the sunlight streaming in from the open door, despite the whitewashed walls, gloom lurks in the corners of this thatched mud structure.

At first, Hazrat Jan appears reticent. He speaks in monosyllables, with a distant look in his eyes. He is uncomfortable; a proud old man not sure how to speak of his grief, certainly not to a stranger. Or perhaps he is trying to protect himself from the embarrassment of breaking down. He clenches his jaw as he speaks of his son, Azam Jan, looking around uncertainly with red-rimmed eyes. Hazrat Jan is a man resigned to his fate.

“It is all up to me now,” he says. A school guard who raised his son to become a driver in the police, only to lose him in a bomb attack on a polio vaccination team in January 2014, Hazrat Jan now finds himself caring for four grandchildren. “The children are all that is left of my son,” he says.

The children come in, one by one. They stand together expectantly, a sad tableau of orphans, the girl nestling close to her protective grandfather. Theirs is a bold gaze, a confident handshake. Unlike their grandfather who has been shattered by this loss so late in life, they are brimming with the zest of youth like all boys and girls of their age, undeterred by the raw deal fate has dealt them.

Children lose fathers – to disease, calamity, war – all the time; this is what their calm faces seem to convey. Fathers should not bury their sons is what Hazrat Jan would have said, had he been expressive. As would other fathers in the surrounding villages who have lost sons to the war on terror in recent years. Violent death brought on by acts of terror has reversed the natural cycle of life in this part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

To find elderly men left behind to mourn their young sons in villages here is not difficult, given the large number of men recruited from the area as policemen in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The police here are usually the first line of defence against the terrorists, and a major target of acts of terrorism.

This is an excerpt from the Herald's February 2016 cover story. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

When did Sabeen Mahmud’s life change?

It is the summer of 1989. She discovers a Macintosh computer or – as a friend of hers put it – she “intellectually fell in love with the idea of computing”.

It is 1997. She is considering several offers to move abroad. One evening, she accompanies her mentor Zaheer Alam Kidvai and his wife to meet their friend Dr Eqbal Ahmed, the famed scholar and anti-war activist, who has just returned to Pakistan from the United States. Ahmed takes her aside. One private conversation later, she decides to stay home.

This is an excerpt from Herald's Annual 2016 cover story. To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

It was a 9mm gun, probably a Stoeger. Before Saad Aziz got this “samaan” through an associate, by his own admission, he had already plotted a murder. On the evening of Friday, April 24, 2015, he met four other young men, all well-educated like him, somewhere on Karachi’s Tariq Road to finalise and carry out the plot. As dusk deepened into night, they set off towards Defence Housing Society Phase II Extension on three motorcycles. Their destination: a café-cum-communal space – The Second Floor or T2F – where an event, Unsilencing Balochistan: take two, was under way. Their target: Sabeen Mahmud, 40, the founder and director of T2F.

Two of Aziz’s associates, he says, “were just roaming around in the vicinity of T2F.” A third was keeping an eye on the street outside. Aziz himself was riding a motorcycle driven by one Aliur Rehman, also mentioned as Tony in the police record. When he received the message that Mahmud had left T2F, he says, he followed her. “Suzuki Swift, AWH 541,” he repeats her car’s make and registration number.

As the car stopped at a signal less than 500 metres to the north of T2F, “Tony rode up alongside it.” Mahmud was in the driving seat, Aziz says. “Next to her was her mother, I think. That is what we found out from the news later. There was a man sitting in the back. I fired the gun four or five times at her.”

The complete story appears in Herald's July 2015 issue. Subscribe to Herald in print.

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Contents

On the cover Heart of darkness — Shia resistance and revival in Pakistan | by Laila Rajani

Persona The argumentative Pakistani — An interview with Ayesha Jalal, Pakistan’s leading historian | by Ali Usman Qasmi

Tapestry On popular demand — The many faces of folk entertainment | by Danyal Adam Khan

Counterpoint

Great expectations | by Andrew Small

No exit | by Huma Yusuf

Who’s afraid of the Islamic State? | by Arif Jamal

Meteor Et Tu, Doctor No?

Abacus By the people

Matrix Crash course

Ideograph Delaying tactics

Slingshot How can the Constitution be changed?

Arena

Fiscal farce | by Umair Javed

Open question | by Moosa Kaleem and Umer Farooq

Harmony springs eternal | by Maqbool Ahmed and Zehra Nawab

Review essay Paradise lost — How Mirza Waheed’s work of fiction highlights oppression the Kashmiris experience | by Afia Aslam

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“Those women there, they wear too much make-up,” said Hafeeza, wrinkling her nose and lowering her voice, as if they really were next door. She lived in the desert too, but her own house, next to Derawar Fort and near a road, seemed to make her regard herself as separate from the nomads deeper inside, where the metalled road faded into the white flatness, dahar, of the desert. “And such glittery clothes…!”

Further away, on land made arable by a trickle of irrigation water and a cocktail of fertilisers and pesticides, Rasheeda’s eyes lit up. That was a family wedding, she said; most of her relatives lived there, in the deep desert. Many years ago, a plot of land had been allotted to her father-in-law; in order to cultivate it, she lived here now with a few of her sons and her daughter and her daughter’s daughter, a sombre-eyed girl of eight. Some weeks ago, this granddaughter had also very nearly been married off, in a tricky case of watta-satta – a form of bride exchange – averted at the very last minute.

This is an excerpt from a story published in Herald's April 2015 issue. Subscribe to Herald in print.