Hungry eyes

It was raining. After a week of clear and sunny sky that I used to know March with, it was again cloudy and rainy. I like to see the pouring sky especially when it dances in mild wind. I like rain because I see it as a soul of life on earth. The water that rains have been part of every living being on earth, from bacteria to vegetables, Dinosaurs and men and after going through us, they are going to be part of coming living beings. Yes, rains are transcendental and they carry life to every corner of earth. Usually when I sit and watch it raining, my mind goes blank and it makes the sound of rain loud and I can feel the cold touches of raining deep to my bone marrow. This time however, my mind was not blank. The pictures of old women and old men who invested their lives to raise their children and now just in snapshot of time with few spray of bullets, their sons and daughter gone forever and it was troubling my thinking. The pains of mourning families and their despair had dominated my mind and for a while I was deaf to hear any raining and numb enough to feel any cold. Then a car passes on Avenue and I come again to my conscious. I was standing for long out on the porch and I was cold. I came inside and turned on heat and sat next to heater to warm myself but the apartment was looking much smaller than usual. Now it is more than six months that I had shifted to this new apartment and it is well designed to fit comfortably a person and I was comfortable in it especially because of considerate, respectful and quiet neighbors.

Every generation has its own traditions and these traditions are based on their visions of life. There were a tradition of building spacious rooms in previous generation and the reason as I was told, to make children’s hearts and minds grow big. They believed that living space effects on thinking and personality of children and to make their children think big and have big hearts, they were making spacious rooms. I don’t know how much truth it holds but I respect the philosophy, it is based on. Parents were trying to go beyond their limits to make sure the availability of abundance in basic needs of their children. There was the concept of “hungry eyes”, something as a signature of bad upbringing. To install content in the children, one could hear again and again the proverb, “if one is hungry we can make him full but if one’s eyes are hungry then nothing in the world can make them full”..

My feeling was that the people who were targeted killed on Thursday (March 29th) was brought up in spacious rooms, they were raised to be content and have big hearts and think big, much bigger to think mean for others. Their heads and hearts were targeted because they were much bigger to be places for narrow-mindedness. They were raised to work single-mindedly for progress and of course their “progress” in this narrow-minded and envious environment is looked upon as a crime punishable by death.

The first time that I saw the real demonstration of “hungry eyes” was in Rawalpindi. I was early and had to wait for the bus to go back to Quetta. The waiting wasn’t boring as this overcrowded bus stop had a lot to observe. The buses go to all major cities in four provinces from there so one sees people from the provinces and northern areas. The diverse outfits, languages and behaviors and most importantly attitudes invite any curious person to observe. It is not just bus stop, the hotels, food stalls, costermonger, street vendors, cart pushers and taxi drivers, all trying to earn a living for their families. Whenever a bus arrives, the taxi drivers and cart pushers surround it to get passengers or offload and carry their goods to taxi.

A bus stopped in the middle of this narrow road, as usual taxis and carts surrounded it. A fat, bald and waddling old man that was appearing, the father of the family escorted the three women, two young girls and an elderly woman to other side of road and got busy offloading his goods on carts and then into taxis (A lot of goods, rented two just to take his goods and third one for his family). The women were looking different from crowd; they had fair skins and had half covered heads with dupatta but what I had never seen was that a lot of people had stopped and were looking at them as they were aliens or something strange. One could see the uneasiness and urgency in the girls, their mother (who was trying to cover her daughter by standing in front of them...notch.. huh) and the father who had difficulty in walking and was trying hard to get out of there. It was the first time that I had realized, how the normal looking crowd is terrifying when they have “hungry eyes”. There wasn’t anything unusual in dressing or behaviors of those girls. It was just their fair skins that had caused uneasiness for them (I could imagine that how something that should be a plus point make lives miserable in a crowd that are suffering from hungry eyes)

The same is true for Hazaras in Quetta. From journalists to former President of Pakistan (Pervez Musharraf) is saying the same thing. The crime of Hazaras is that… they are progressive and in short amount of time have “progressed” to appear as outliers and it has attracted the “hungry eyes”… Again, if some are hungry, their stomach can be filled but if their “eyes are hungry” then even the lives of people can’t fill them…