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Bina Shah

Pakistan

GALLERY

CONVERSATION

I decide to go visit my old high school and call the secretary there to set up a time when I can go see the Administrative...

Suddenly, a huge explosion rips through the air, and my windows rattle. They vibrate in and out, as if they will shatter inwards. In a few seconds, the windows stop moving, but I’ve already jumped up from my chair. I know what this is, because it isn’t the first time I’ve heard it: a bomb, and a strong one, judging from the way the windows shake.

Again. The first time I heard this noise was in the spring of 2002 when a suicide bomber drove a car right into a wall of the US Consulate and killed God knows how many people. The impact was so loud that day that my entire house shook and I fell off the chair I was sitting on. They found the limbs of dead people hanging from the trees in Frere Hall, a beautiful monument left from the time of the Raj, surrounded by green lawns and lush foliage.

But it’s that sound that haunts me, much more than the images that you see on television afterwards, the burning cars, the screaming sirens, the people running up and down in fright and fury. It’s the sound that replays itself again and again in my dreams, the sudden rattle, the windows moving as if they were made of cloth, not glass.

I reach for my cell phone and text all of my friends with a simple message: I think I just heard a bomb. Please b careful. I feel foolish sending this SMS, when I don’t exactly know what it is I’m warning them about. And it’s also after the fact, and realistically, if there’s going to be more bombing, what exactly can you do? But on the other hand, I do know; in the depths of my bones I know exactly what it is.
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