Three Pakistani weddings in times of war

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being woken up at half past three in the morning by missiles striking your city, you’ll know that, in a state of grogginess, they sound, oddly, like urgent knocking on your bedroom door. That’s the sound my sleeping mind registered on the morning of 7 May, jerking me awake and upright in bed, then with feet on the floor in a matter of seconds. In retrospect, it’s telling that the thought that it could be guns firing never so much as crossed my mind, because that particular quality of sound, sonorous and brief, is so well-etched in the minds of Karachiites that it warrants no mistaking. 

The noise that woke me up that morning was low pitched and echoing – a sound reminiscent in my mind of high school, my shot put meeting sandy ground. As I unlocked my bedroom door and walked out into the living room, the scene that met me made the source of the relentless thudding clear: my father scrolling frantically through X, my mother cradling her head in her hands, my uncle and aunt sitting huddled together, staring at the walls.

In the first few seconds after my father blankly stated, “Pakistan is at war with India,” I stood still, barefoot on the cold tile floor, registering none of the implications of this and instead having the most absurd, feather-light thought: This would make a brilliant opening for the 1995 hit Bombay. In fact, I imagined it: velvety darkness torn open by missile trails, a slow zoom in to show Manisha Koirala rising from sleep as the walls of her house tremble, a sharp cut to her in a red saree standing on a rooftop, wind teasing her aanchal, an A R Rahman score swelling just as the sky behind her erupts into fire.