A peculiar memory popped up on my Facebook feed recently. Fourteen years ago, in October 2009, I was in the middle of taking my third professional exam (we had a total of five). We used to have the written part of the exam during one week, then there would be a brief break and then the oral examination will commence. On October 20, 2009, terrorists attacked a University in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. Nine students lost their lives. The regulatory authority for higher education in Pakistan ordered all educational institutions to shut down until further notice. That meant our oral exams were postponed until further notice. I had arrived in Lahore a day before this and took the next bus home.
It was a strange time to live in Pakistan. The global ‘War on Terror’ involving neighboring Afghanistan was about to spill over to Pakistan. I started medical school in January 2007. From 2002-2006, there had been occasional acts of terrorism reported in the remote, western part of Pakistan, but very few such events in the rest of the country. In July 2007, militants in Islamabad took over a mosque (Laal Masjid) and armed forces laid seige to the mosque for a week, until an all-out assault resulted in killing of about a hundred people in the mosque complex. That event was a harbinger of things to come. In October 2007, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, arrived in the country’s largest city, Karachi, after almost a decade in exile. She was greeted by members of her party and the procession was attacked by terrorists. In December 2007, there was another terrorist attack on one of her rallies, in Rawalpindi, and she lost her life as a result. Also in October 2007, militants took over the scenic Swat Valley, located 200 miles away from the capital. Terrorist activities increased manifold in major cities of Pakistan in 2008. There were multiple bomb blasts in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi.
I watched the Laal Masjid drama unfold on TV as I was home for summer holidays at the time. I had no sympathy for vigilantes who had harrassed and terrorised people of Islamabad prior to the standoff. However, I admired the bravery and to a certain extent subbornness of one of the leaders of this group, who had a masters degree in International Relations and had worked briefly in non-profit sector before he turned towards religious leadership. There is a certain romance to a person who is willing to die for their beliefs, however pugnacious those beliefs may be. The whole siege was played live on TV so I was constantly glued. After a few days, the excitement value wore off and resignation set in. There was only one way this was going to end. I became fearful to go to crowded places during that time period.
The closest I ever got to terrorism was in March 2008, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a Naval Academy in Lahore. I was attending a physiology lecture and suddenly the windows of the lecture hall started rattling. Our teacher stopped talking and there was an eerie silence for a minute. I thought there was an earthquake, something I had experienced in October 2005 when a major earthquake hit Pakistan’s northern areas. Once there was some calm in the class, our teacher resumed without skipping a beat. We found out later on what had happened. The Naval Academy was located within two miles from where the medical school was.
In March 2009, the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked by terrorists in Lahore and the injured players were brought to the hospital where I was doing my clinical rotations, and where I later did my internship. In May 2011, when OBL was found and killed in Abbotabad, I saw the news while sitting in a boring Internal Medicine lecture. At first, I thought it was satire, because there had been murmurs around for years that OBL had died of chronic illness.
Sitting thousands of miles away and more than a decade removed from that time, these memories seem like they are from a different universe. At the time, I felt very uncertain about life. Innocent people were getting killed every day for no fault of their own. Political situation was uncertain, as is always the case in Pakistan, and loadshedding was at full swing (which meant we had power every other hour). With all these traumatic events happening at the time, no wonder my mental health was in the gutter during medical school.