A death of someone else's making.

I have a few theories of how I’m going to die: slowly, painfully, of cancer. Struck down in a traffic accident [as anyone who has ever seen me cross a road will agree with 100%]. A mugging gone wrong. [Trigger happy people abound].

But this is the year 2019, Syria and Iraq are still smouldering, the horrors of war are still emerging, and here, in Pakistan, one is now apparently waiting for war. To be struck down. For trigger-happy men to make decisions about the lives of millions of people. We do not have the right to choose our own deaths, to even plan for a future. Even that right has been stripped away. Every 2, 5, 10 years, I am reminded that choosing a future is a luxury. It is not a right. That the future is reduced to merely waiting, waiting for the big flash in the sky, for death.

PakistanSaba ImtiazComment