Fourteen souls. Fourteen dreams. Fourteen futures crushed not by a bomb, not by a bullet, but by a ceiling. A bloody, granite, concrete ceiling. In a tuition centre in Lahore, Pakistan, the roof collapsed on children who had come, as children do, to learn. To escape. To better themselves. Instead, they got a sky burial without the ceremony. A fine example, one might say, of the universe's gallows humour, if only one had the stomach for it.
Government officials, predictably, are 'investigating'. This means, in the grand tradition of Pakistani bureaucracy, that a committee will be formed, a report will be written, and the families will be offered the kind of compensation that covers a funeral and a half, a few prayers, and a lifetime of nightmares. The building, we are told, was 'weak'. Well, what a surprise. The same adjectives could be applied to the country's regulatory framework, its building codes, its entire bloody attitude towards the lives of its young.
Let us not mince words, for there is no time for that when the blood is still wet. This is not an act of God. God, if He exists, doesn't run tuition centres. This is an act of man. Of greed. Of negligence. Of a system that puts the acquisition of a few more square feet of shoddy concrete above the safety of its children. The building was, I suspect, a monument to corruption. A pyramid of bribes and shortcuts, topped with a roof that was always going to fall. It was only a matter of time.
And now, the inevitable chorus of whataboutisms and recriminations. The opposition will blame the government. The government will blame the opposition. The parents, meanwhile, will blame themselves for sending their children to a place they thought was safe. They will be wrong, of course. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of every official who signed off on that building, every inspector who took a bribe, every developer who cut a corner. They should be given a tour of the collapsed building. Not as investigators, but as the next tenants.
But I am a cynic, and a drunk one at that. I know that nothing will change. The ceiling will be rebuilt somewhere else, with the same shoddy materials, the same lack of oversight, the same casual disregard for human life. Because that is the way of the world, especially for those who live in the margins. Children in Lahore, children in Gaza, children in the forgotten corners of London. They are all the same. Their lives are cheap currency in the casino of political expediency.
So let us pour a gin for the dead. A cheap one, because that's all they would have got in life. And let us toast to a tragic truth: the only thing more fragile than a child's skull is the promise of safety in a corrupt world. The only thing more certain than the next headline is the one after that, and the one after that, until the headlines themselves become a collapsing roof, burying us all in a numbness that is worse than grief.
But for now, we mourn. Fourteen children. Fourteen stars that fell before they could even shine. And we wait, with the weary patience of the damned, for the next building to fall.
