Yay, school’s out! (there’s been another bomb)

• Maha Ali
• Oct 24, 2024
• 4 min read

It is no surprise that a child’s primary school years are the most formative in their lives; in terms of both creating a strong educational base as well a baseline sense of normalcy that they spend their lives either affirming or deconstructing. It is also no surprise that spending one’s formative years in an environment so turbulent as Karachi’s political front in the early 2010’s would have drastic effects on the students, whether they realize it or not.

This is a picture of my school in Karachi- the one I went to my whole childhood from age 3 to 16. It is located in Defence, with most of the students being from a homogenous background (read: we were all spoilt brats whose world started and ended at the boundaries of DHA, who were not concerned with the affairs of the city except how they affected us). But more importantly, we were all just children.

The early 2010’s were bad. They were objectively not a very good time to grow up- every day would bring about more headlines of murders and violence, every day the political situation would heighten. And as a response, our schools would be shut down. It became so normal that our school came up with a whole first respondent system- the class teachers would have the contact information of a few parents, who would then have to tell the other parents in case school was closed at a short notice the night before or even the morning of. My mother was one of these first contact parents- I remember her offering a quick prayer when she would get a call from my teacher while I would excitedly unpack my bag; no school meant being able to stay up till 11PM- plus I would be the one to call my friends’ parents phones to tell them the news so I could talk to my friends late at night- what a treat!

No school and being able to stay up also meant that I did not have to pretend to be asleep past my bedtime when my mom would check up on us- I could sit with her instead while we heard explosions outside our house together. School nights were the worst- it was impossible to sleep with the loud noises outside. Sometimes they would be fireworks, sometimes explosions- we didn’t know and honestly, we didn’t really care. They’d just be loud noises outside our window- strange lullaby to fall asleep to but a constant nonetheless. Just background noise. The explosions weren’t weird- what would be weird would be the silence the nights there weren’t any explosions. (I texted my parents while writing this and they said that they would often tell us that they would tell us there were fireworks just so we would stay calm.)

What used to be scary was when the conflict would be close to home. Our windows would shatter- Baba told us not to stay close to the windows at night. We’d go to school the next day with an exciting story to tell our friends. Our teachers were very conversational about it- they would take interest in our stories the same way they’d react to a student telling them about the new pet they had or their grandparents visiting. It was just another day, just another mildly interesting anecdote.

School itself would be very interesting those days. School would often be shut early- I remember our English Poetry classes in the last period would often be cancelled (much to our relief). We would go to the headmistress’s office in groups of five to call our parents to pick us up. More frequently were the safety drills- there were the regular ones for earthquakes and tsunamis and fires, and then the cool one- for a terrorist attack. There would be a different emergency bell for that, and the instructions were to immediately drop everything, close the lights and fan, and hide under our desks. This was so much fun for us- the novelty of playing hid and seek in our classrooms, with our teachers participating too, was so funny. What wasn’t funny was how all our events would get cancelled. Our costume parties, our movie days. Our turtle trip. which was a rite of passage for all students in our school, where the fourth graders would go to the beach at night and watch the turtle eggs hatch. I was devastated when I found out we weren’t having it- and even more when I found out my parents were part of the group that had pushed for this event to be cancelled.

However, this is not just a fun little trip down memory lane. These examples were my childhood, and the childhood of many other students like me. It becomes extremely important here to recognize our privilege here- we see this period as nothing more than a few events being cancelled. I personally cannot imagine a life where I did not hear fireworks every other night- but that’s all they were to me- fireworks every other night that would scare me. I want to make two points here- firstly, that conflict is experienced by different groups very differently, and secondly, we talk a lot about primary affectees of conflict, but even conflict experienced from a secondary privileged perspective does have a lasting effect on those who went through it. I am so beyond lucky to have just taken away the pain of having my events cancelled, and not the pain of having lost loved ones or my home. But I do not want to discount the gravity of how my own idea of what is normal is heavily skewed as a result.

I hope the world one day becomes peaceful enough for fourth graders all over to get their turtle trips.