A ruthlessly perished bud awaits justice-I

Shahid Iqbal
Life is ephemeral everyone has to demise. The devastated family laments the departed soul intensely and after interring or cremating rituals are performed there arrives a period of wounds healing for the mourners. They realise the bitter but an indubitable fact that each living being in this macrocosm, one day, will have to taste the death. With the passage of time, the agony of bereaved family lessens in intensity and eventually, fades away. For a year or two, religious festivals become the sole occasions for the departed soul to refurbish his dying memories to the bereaved. Gradually, his fainted soul disappears from the scene. But sometimes, a demised soul defies all these traditional ways of mourning and re-emerges with invincible powers for shuddering the conscience of humankind. For our minds it becomes a Hercules task to efface his memories and the panacea ‘Time heals all wounds’ proves inefficacious allowing memories to overpower our minds. We find his soul wherever we move, even it importunes us in our sleeps with a pointed question, ‘What was his blunder for which his soul was grabbed by a savage and what favour could You do to me in my vengeance?’ At this point we grasp the logic behind Islam’s transcended stress on abstaining its followers from killing an innocent person by equalising his killing to the killing of humanity. Parvindar Singh, alias Kaki, who was born to a Sikh family
and was raised in a small remote village of Chakesar, located in district Shangla. Spending the precious key period of his youth in Malaysia to earn for his better future in Pakistan, he returned to his home country carrying many dreams with himself. None of which had materialized yet.The dreams he had weaved during his decade long stay in abroad. He attacked the dream of marriage to take start with, knowing not the plots devils do hatch surreptitiously to strangulate the tiny dreams weaved by the slender innocent buds. His marriage date had finalised and time in days was left to his wedding. He was
the youngest in all brothers and sisters and therefore, was the apple of his siblings’ eyes. Countdown of days had started, everyone in the family was anxiously waiting for the occasion of wedding ceremony to arrive and the frisson excitement of the family was at its zenith. One morning, Parvindar Singh left his home to do shopping for his swiftly approaching wedding. The next morning, the police recovered his corpse in the jurisdiction of Chamkani Police Station Peshawar. It wasn’t a corpse it was, in fact, the
perishment of a bud that had not blossomed yet. The unbloomed bud was lying plucked on a rough bleak piece of land wrapped in a blood-soaked duvet with unfulfilled dreams scattered all around it.
Nobody knew wether the firmament had ever been vouched for such a horrific scene but everyone was certain about the fact that it was the first ever incident of its nature that had happened to a person from a far-flung corner of the country known ‘Chakesar’ in its decades long verbally preserved history. The news greatly saddened everyone who heard of it. The small village of Chakesar wore a blanket of dark cloud of sorrows and sank in the mourning of a bud whose dreams had ruthlessly been shattered.