Chapter 16.
By Higher Authority
Something very strange just happened. The birth of a revolution perhaps. When people lose their minds completely and want answers to questions they can't even phrase anymore, they will take to the streets to find them. Shops are shut down all over Karachi and it's very likely that as I type this, many innocent people are becoming the victims of senseless violence and rage running throughout the city. Since no one outside of the political scenario even knows whose blood it is they even WANT to get on their hands anymore...they just want to get away with bloody murder.
The problem, I now feel, with Pakistanis in general...is that they don't know enough to be able to satisfy themselves through rational thinking. Sometimes I fear the problem is that they just don't appreciate people on tv getting away with killing a lot of innocent people, when deep down inside the heart of every true Pakistani, lies a closet killer...I write this because I think it's a sick truth about our people. We aren't uneducated...we aren't indecent...we aren't confused or misled by higher authority...
We're murderers. We LIKE the thought of killing. We're all a sick bunch of killers. And life goes on that way. Whether you're fighting from the provoked end or the end doing the provoking...we all just want in on the killing. People just need something to DO here. Someone fucking help us...get us a few new MALLS or something...more video games...anything. Anything.
When one person dies in this country, the first thought of anyone who knew them is to get blood. Someone's blood. Just anyone. They like the pain inside their hearts to show on the faces of others. Through the scars on old, aging skin and faces which laugh in the face of today's events, because, depressing as it may seem...they've actually seen so much worse.
Yet, life...will go on...the country is falling to pieces...but it's happened so often now it's almost routine. Everyone knows to get into their houses and stay there till the gas pumps around the city open up again...no questions whether it was all made up or not...whether people planned this and blamed it on a religious fanaticism group so that they get rid of a threatening candidate for control of power, ALONG with having just cause to start bombing guilty landlords in the south west. Two birds with one, single, shot from a bullet. So many more people will die...and its going to be treated as normal behaviour of course...just a result of just another famous face being shot to death. Yes, life will go on. Murderers just need a reason to get out of the house and get angry and something. That's all. We prayed for death and destruction, secretly...a guilty pleasure we dare not reveal...and it came in this form this time...but...someone or the other is always MORE affected by the death of someone else aren't they? But it's okay...we shall treat it as just another statistic caused by some made up belief that maniacal mythical bearded men with AK 47s in the north are organised and smart enough to plan and assassinate key political figures in the major cities of the south.
Not to mention that this probably puts a real DAMPER on many upcoming artistic endeavours around the country...because people are too stupid to see that things like music, paints, colours, theatre, and just a little bit of laughter are pretty much the only things that will save us in the eyes of God...if He's even watching over this place anymore of course.
The Pakistan People's Party's hopeful candidate for Prime Minister of Pakistan, Madam Benazir Bhutto, has been shot in the neck, and killed. Rest in peace, dear lady. I can't imagine anyone having done enough evil to deserve death at the hands of a MORTAL judge, but I hope for everyone's sake that your death had some divine role to play in the future of this country.
There's a lot of tension out there tonight, but nothing a few glasses of New Year's booze won't get rid of. This is Pakistan. I give it five days.
