Someone says something about ISIS bombing a park in Lahore on the bus this morning, the man beside him with the white beard and souvenir t-shirt someone probably brought him from Ottawa says,
“Not Islamic state this time bud, just the good old fashion Turban heads”
The politically correct woman across the aisle with the high cheek bones and expensive looking briefcase corrects the bearded man.
“No, not Turban heads, Taliban”
She sends an apologetic half smile in my direction.
I pretend not to see.
I didn’t turn on the news this morning, I was late, and because of that I have no idea what they are talking about.
But the sinking feeling has returned to me once more, my old friend sits with all its weight in the pit of my stomach.
I do not know what this friend is, sometimes I wonder if it is guilt, perhaps regret, something heavier than air, a nagging mother eating me from the inside out.
Today I pray silently that it it isn’t guilt. I have enough to feel guilty about I couldn’t possibly handle something like this. Not today.
Plus why should I be guilty, I have done absolutely nothing wrong. I can guarantee that I do not know those people, the ones with the bombs. They aren’t my friends or my family, I don’t see them in the masjid at Eid, or say Salaam to them as they pass me in the streets. I don’t know their parents or their sisters or their wives. We do not share world views, or recipes, or mutual friends.
I hate what they’ve done.
I cannot afford anymore guilt today, especially the unwarranted kind.
I do not belong in a conversation about terrorists, I tell myself.
This is not my fight. I do not need to reassure strangers on a bus that I will not stand in a few moments to reveal a complicated mess of deconstructed kitchen appliances strapped to my chest or pull a rice cooker contraption from my backpack, I am on my way to work, just like them, I am on my way to work, and nothing more.
A woman in a navy blue trench coat shakes her head and says
“Yeah whatever you call them, I don’t know what’s wrong with these people?”
And I can feel her eyes.
There are other people on the bus, the 8:30 am bus on its way to the subway station, in fact, there are a lot of other people, but no one says anything more, and neither do I.
The woman in the trench coat says something to the man with the beard, they both look at me. Not with accusatory eyes, but something else. Something I do not recognize.
There is a book in my hands, something I’ve been trying to read for months, and though I am looking at the words, perhaps even reading them, I am thinking about the interaction that had just occurred between these 4 strangers, and me.
Somehow I was part of that conversation, even though I said nothing, even though I was not addressed by them in any way, even though I sat away from them, even though I was seemingly preoccupied.
They knew and I knew that I was some sort of implied subject.
The rest of the morning I was lost in thought, trying to understand what exactly had transpired earlier on and what it had to do with me. I sat in front of my computer at work afraid to see what had happened in Lahore.
This is how it always goes:
I hear a news story, something tragic and catastrophic and immediately I feel sick, as I should when tragic and catastrophic things happen.
But this sickness is beyond a prayer that no one has died, beyond a prayer that there were no children hurt, it has a third layer, a third prayer that the attacker isn’t a muslim. That I won’t have to sit in the lunch room and explain “Not all Muslims”, that I won’t feel the need to cry louder and be more outraged, a prayer that I can mourn humanity without having to “explain myself”
When I finally find the courage to look, I see that people did die. I see that at least 29 of those people are children, I see that the attackers are “Islamists”, Taliban, Turban heads. Muslims.
I take my coffee to the break room and find my coworker flipping through this months volume of Cosmo. She looks up and smiles as I walk in, she asks how I am as I sit down beside her.
I ask if she’s heard about the bombing.
She says you mean the one in Belgium,
I shake my head,
“No in Lahore”.
She asks
“where’s that?”
Later in the day I call my friend on the phone, she picks up, I hear it in her voice. I tell her I’ve called to check in on her, she says she’s fine, she doesn’t know anyone who was killed in the blast.
We both say Alhamdulillah at the same time.
Stay safe I tell her before I hang up.
I meet a friend for tea after work. I tell her about my experience on the bus, she says “I’m sure it was all in your head”
I smile and drink my tea.
She says “I mean not in your head, in your head. What I mean is, I’m sure they didn’t think you were a terrorist.”
I think about the news article I read the day before:
“4 Year Old Who Mispronounced Cucumber for “Cooker Bomb” Faced Terror Warnings Family Says” we finish our Tea and part ways.
On my way home I think about the 29 children.
The bus is packed. I wonder what you have to believe in order to kill a child. Do you have to truly believe that these lives pave the way to something bigger, how many bodies do you have to stand on to see this view, this bigger picture, this grand scheme?
Did they tell themselves that these 29 little people would be martyrs? 29 children dying in a war they couldn’t possibly understand. 29 children who didn’t make the intention for martyrdom, instead they made the intention to play with their friends, to eat with their family, they made the intention to live.
Tiny bodies, tiny body parts, tiny bones.
I wonder if the mothers will be able to find all of their children. I wonder if they’ll be able to burry them whole. And if they cannot, if some part of them was lost in the rubble of what was meant to be a good day, if it can never be recovered, will their mothers search for that hand, or that finger, or that leg forever. Always checking corners, sidewalks and gutters as they walk down they street?
The bus lurches forward and I step on a mans shoe in an attempt not to fall, he yells at me to “watch it !” as I regain my balance. I say nothing, today is not the day to argue with men on public buses, not when the word terrorist is hot on everyone’s lips, I am too easy a target, and it might just kill me today. I cannot risk it, the thought makes me sick, I cannot be compared to men with guns and bombs, to people who think children make good martyrs.
Later on as I bend into sujud for my night prayer, I forget which rakaah I am on. I try to remember but I can’t stop thinking of little kufis and hijabs littering the park floor, bloodied thobes, or charred burnt body parts. I think of the Nigerian and Yemeni children, little girls in the horn dressed in jilbabs following their brothers home from school. Children who intend to live but are made to die.
I wonder if tomorrow this weight might be replaced by apathy, perhaps I wake up late and miss the bus and am so consumed with how shitty my day is that I forget to think about these children, and if this no longer stirs me,what does that say about my humanity?
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