Bandits with black friars spattering blessings

came through the sky to kill children

and the blood of children ran through the streets

without fuss, like children’s blood.

-- Pablo Neruda

 The morning after, Wednesday 17 December 2014, it had already started to sink in, as usual. I saw and felt it -- or rather its absence -- in the morning in Karachi. Nobody -- not a single person -- expressed his outrage, or anything remotely resembling that, while exchanging greetings with others, having breakfast at a dhaba or taking the elevator with him.

Others may have witnessed the same elsewhere in Pakistan. The night seemed to have successfully done its work to beat the cries of conscience -- even the will to fight for survival -- into a resigned acceptance of this, yet another nagging fact of life in Pakistan.

Perhaps each one of the normal people that I came across was feeling as numb as I was; unable to think clearly, trying hard -- and failing -- to find a way of dealing with it. Finding it difficult to keep the tears from rolling down one’s cheeks, and instead feeling them inside, falling on one’s injured heart.

Groping for a little straw of a mundane human contact which could give an assurance that normal, everyday life is still possible. That it is still possible for one to dress one’s son or daughter in a uniform and send your dear one to school.

Before the last night fell, the effort to give horrible spins to our children’s and their teachers’ brutal killing had duly started. TV channels invited some known Taliban sympathisers in their talk shows to try and justify what TTP proudly claimed to be its doing. It sounds like inviting Babu Bajrangi to analyse the Muzaffarnagar riots.

But this is what happens regularly on Pakistani TV channels after every incident of terror in which a high enough number of Pakistani citizens have been killed. Provided those killed do not belong to one of the country’s religious minorities.

One prominent supporter of the Taliban, Maulana Abdul Aziz of the infamous Lal Masjid in Islamabad, was heard saying in an invited live call, and in his calm, restrained voice, that the incident was indeed tragic, even deplorable, but we should try to see who is actually responsible for it. He openly accused the successive Pakistani governments to have ‘prepared the Taliban, the mujahideen, for Kashmir’ and then giving them reason to turn their guns against Pakistanis. That statement of the maulana seemed to have helped us normal people a great deal in looking at the latest massacre of school children and staff in Peshawar in a larger perspective of ends justifying the means.

And what was the incident? Seven Taliban ‘mujahideen’, fully armed with firearms, explosive devices, and liquid fuel (allegedly with suicide vests too) entered a school in Peshawar (from the back door, mind it!) after reportedly burning the van which had brought them to the scene, burned the lady Principal and a few other female teachers alive in front of everyone present and purposefully started killing students and the remaining staff members.

While the massacre went on, for several hours, killing 132 children and nine members of the school staff and injuring 121 people in total, one Mohammad Khorasani, claiming to be the spokesman for the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan called the BBC and claimed responsibility of the massacre in no uncertain terms. He said that this attack was in retaliation of the Army’s operation against the banned outfit in Waziristan and elsewhere and threatened more such events. He is also reported to have said that the mujahideen carrying out the attack had been directed to adhere to the religious rules and target only big enough children, as small ones are not considered fit to be killed.

Not just Maulana Aziz but some political leaders representing national parties tried successfully to ignore the implications of Khorasani’s statement. Imran Khan, Chairman of the PTI, condemned the barbaric act -- carefully avoiding calling the self-confessing perpetrators by their organisation’s name. His aide, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, went a step further and claimed: "We do not know who they are, what they are and what they want."

Shahbaz Sharif, the Chief Minister Punjab is on record declaring some time back that Taliban were working for the same cause as his party, and requesting them to spare Punjab in their activities. However, none of the great political leaders lost the opportunity to sympathise with the victims and their families and to declare that their fight with the ‘terrorists’ (‘whosoever they are’) would continue despite this ‘cowardly attack’.

The public debate has, since, turned towards the more urgent questions of whether the children killed in yesterday’s attack can legitimately be called shaheeds (martyrs) or not, whether the ‘misled’ brother mujahideen sacrificing their own lives while butchering (Muslim!) students and immolating their (Hijab-less) teachers would actually go to heaven or to the other place, and so on.

No one, so far, has expressed the wish that Mohammad Khorasani, the person who claimed responsibility on TTP’s behalf, be tracked down, arrested, and tried in a court of law. No surprises here. Everyone obviously knows that it would be useless, even meaningless. After all, his arrest and trial will hardly bring back those who lost their lives, nor cure those who are injured, right? Whether it will encourage him and the handlers of Taliban mujahideen to plan and execute more atrocities like the one visited the school in Peshawar is a thought better avoided.

Especially, when later in the day, we were to be blessed by a recorded video sermon dealing with the previous day’s cruelty from Maulana Tariq Jameel -- of Junaid Jamshed fame, and the one known and admired for describing the exquisite beauty and enormity of the promised virgins in Heaven. He was to inform the fortunate parents of the boys and girls ‘sacrificed’ (for some lofty, heavenly purpose) that their children have gone to heaven (along with the tamed beasts that killed them, most certainly).

So, the Pakistani public, using its much-praised quality called resilience, seems to have decided to put the ‘tragic, even deplorable’ incident of terrorism in Peshawar behind and move on, as always, hoping that no such incident will take place again. And even if it does happen, God forbid, the ends (wonder what in the world they are!) are going to somehow justify the means. It has learned -- from experience, from religious sermons, from textbooks, from the national media and from politicians’ statements -- never to question the ends themselves.

It is said in the Holy Quran that Allah does not put a burden on a human being which is heavier than his endurance. Looking from that angle, the endurance - resilience - of the Pakistani public seems to be in endless supply. Some of us, I am sure on this Thursday afternoon, are even going to have a heart to offer Friday prayers led by these (and such other) maulanas and join them in their sincere wish that our butchered sons and daughters get their rightful place in Heaven and that Allah save us from further ‘deplorable’ tragedies of the kind that happened on the previous Tuesday.

Let’s hope that our hopes are fulfilled.