Quetta is a city of obituaries. When I first began working as a journalist in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, a tragic incident took place at the city’s Civil Hospital that is still seared into my mind. After a bomb blast, bodies were brought to the hospital’s mortuary and despite searching for hours, one family couldn’t find the body of their relative. The bodies in the mortuary were charred beyond recognition.
The victim’s mother arrived in tears and went straight to a body, shrieking, “He is my ‘laal’”. Everyone was shocked, even the journalists present, because the body wasn’t identifiable at all. Except for the mother who had given birth to the boy, no other family members recognised him.
Over the decades, much like those bodies, Quetta has become unidentifiable.
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