Uncle Obama, Stop the Drones, or I’ll Die: A Letter

Dear Uncle Obama,

My name is Palwasha and I am 7 years old. Uncle I want to tell you something so that you can help me because only you can help me. I will die if you don’t, so please read this.

I live in Waziristan and I used to go to school regularly. I am a very good girl and all my friends and family say that as well. One day my teacher told me that if some children don’t behave, if they tell lies, if they cheat and if they don’t listen to elders, then God is not happy with these children and He punishes them. But dear Uncle Obama, I have done nothing wrong, I always speak the truth, I never cheat anyone and I listen to my elders also. You know one day my friend brought school dinner and it was my favourite dinner but I did not eat it even when my friend went out for toilet. And one day my teacher asked me whether I like her or not and I said No because my mummy and my favourite teacher told me to speak the truth always. You see I am so very good but I don’t understand one thing. If I do everything right then why I am being punished Uncle. No one is ready to give me answer to my question so I thought to write you this letter.

I was living a very happy life with my mummy, my daddy and with my two brothers. One day when my daddy was telling me a story at night, a drone aeroplane came and threw a missile at our home. Uncle, it killed my mummy, my daddy and my younger brother. I and my elder brother, who is 12 years old, did not die. I cried and cried but my mummy and daddy and brother did not open their eyes when they were dead. My arms had small injuries and they are okay now but both of my legs were blown away when drone attacked our home. A lot of blood came out of my legs and arms. My aunty gave me a wheelchair to move around but I don’t like it. I want to run and fly like before. My brother, who survived, lost his right hand and now he cannot write or draw. He cannot eat properly and he has to use his left hand to do all work. Why I and my family are punished, Uncle? You can ask my teacher I am a very good girl.

Uncle, I cannot play now because I have no legs. My dolls also died in the attack and their dresses burnt completely. My daddy gave me these dolls as present on my birthday. My pink doll also burnt and it was my favourite, Uncle. I cannot change my clothes Uncle and my mummy is sleeping in her grave. I go to her grave every morning and every evening and cry and cry and cry and ask her to please come back to me but I think she is angry with me. My daddy is also angry with me. Uncle, my mummy and my daddy don’t listen to me and don’t come back. My daddy was not like that before. One day in my school, I bumped against a girl and fell down and injured my knee. He came to the school in no time and took me to the hospital but now I don’t have legs and they bleed and bleed but he is not coming back. Why Uncle Why? No one is with me to look after me and my brother can’t do anything you know. He does not know how to work and he does not know where to buy me presents and dolls. He does not know many stories to tell me.

Uncle, please stop these drones because if my brother is also killed, I would be left alone and I am very scared of those bad aeroplanes. At night, I get so scared that I can’t sleep. My daddy used to tell me different stories, sometimes funny, sometimes scary and yes, you know Uncle, one day he told me about Disney World which is in your country. He said he would take me and my brothers to Disney World where I could see my favourite Mickey Mouse. I was so very excited but now I can’t go there. My daddy is also dead. You know Uncle when he died, his body was cut into three pieces and some people did not allow me to see his body. But I saw him in the coffin from my window hiding behind the blinds. His coffin was all red and dripping with blood.

Uncle, please help me! Please ask your army men to stop drones. If they say NO, tell them that I will die also and my brother will also die. Tell them that I am just like your daughter and they will stop drones because you are stronger than those army men. They can’t say NO to you, Uncle. My friends play outside, they jump, they have dolls and when I see them, I also want to do the same but I can’t now. Please ask them Uncle Obama to stop drones and when my wounds heal, I will make you very nice food and omelette and tea. My mummy told me how to make all these things. I have only one doll left who did not die in the drone attack so if you stop drones, I will send this doll for your daughters as a gift and this is all I have to send. If you don’t stop drones my dear Uncle, I will die and I don’t want to die because I want to see Disney World and Mickey Mouse. I don’t want to die because if my mummy and daddy and my brother come back from their graves, they will be upset not to find me anywhere. Please please please Uncle, stop the drones. Uncle, I miss my mummy, daddy and my brother so very much. Can you please bring them back, just for me?

I am

Palwasha.

Waziristan, Pakistan.

Books Do Weep!

One day I decided to pay a visit to the local library to register myself and to check out some books. Well, my experience was of a singular nature and it shocked the very soul of my being. As I entered the library, a thought occurred to me that I had come outside the working hours of the said library because there was no one in there save a lady sitting in a chair near the entrance.

“Excuse me! Is the library open?” I asked the lady who was enjoying some day-dream.

“Yes, it is! But what’s the matter?” she asked me as if I had entered the wrong domain.

“I want to register and if it is possible, I would like to check out one or two books at present.”

She shot a staring glance at me as if a hen stares at a duckling she has just hatched. Her expressions clearly conveyed that she took me for a fool.

“Okay! You can have a look at the collection and, then, if you desire I can register you as a member.”

“Thanks a lot!” I said and moved towards the book-shelves. My mind was still trying to untangle the mystery of the lady’s strange facial expression but I got it straight, automatically, towards the end of my tour de force.

I moved to the shelf marked Classics and tried to get some materials for reading. It was an amazing scene. All the books in this section, as well as in all other sections that I visited later on, to my surprise, were fairly protected with a thick coat of dust in the first place and with a curtain of cobwebs in the second place.

“Does nobody pay them visit?” a thought occurred to me at the back of my mind and, once again, the lady’s face at the reception came to my imagination. I placed my hand on a bulky volume and tried to pull her down but she was stuck there. A little show of strength helped me getting out the book but I also found myself getting up from the floor. A successful first attempt! I cast a glance about to see if somebody noticed the great fall but, thanks God, there was not a single soul in that big hall. Once again the lady’s face and her expressions started swimming before my inward eye.

“Who is weeping here?” as I heard a low moan, I reflected. My good God! The book in my hand was trembling and her moan had changed into a distinct wail by then. When I opened her, I saw her name inscribed on the forehead—it was War and Peace.

“Why do you weep my darling?” I asked her in my amazement and I sank into an armchair to listen to her story.

“Dear me, you are the first one in years to touch me”, she started in a very heart-breaking tone and the tears in her deep eyes lay very near to the surface, “since the time I was brought here, nobody bothered to listen to what I tell. During these years I was totally ignored and dust filled my eyes, ears, nose, mouth and all my body. Different types of insects have been eating my very being over these years. You can see for yourself. Besides, cobwebs were fabricated to suffocate me. My sister Anna Karenina is also with me. She is also in the same pathetic condition. Our father Tolstoy didn’t bring us to this world to bear such humility and onslaughts of cruelty. We were created to breathe in fresh air. For God’s sake have pity on us and tell the rest to treat us with pity, love and kindness.”

She could not stop her tears any longer and I promised to try my best so that her voice reaches a sympathetic ear.  

“Please have a look at the rest of us to get a firsthand knowledge of our plight”, she implored again.

I placed her at her residence and moved to another delicate beauty. Her name was Jane Eyre and she seemed to be very sensitive like her mother Charlotte Bronte. Next to Jane Eyre was her darling sister Wuthering Heights. Both these cousins repeated the same story as that of War and Peace. I could not forget the hope in their eyes which they had developed owing to my visiting them. Wuthering Heights was very well aware of her bewitching beauty and I think she was fully justified in her complaint against the cruel world which has lost aesthetic sense. Sons and Lovers looked at me in a way which was full of disappointment and contempt. I believed that she had lost all hopes of winning admirers. I consoled her and promised to take her on a trip. Don Quixote and Dr. Zhivago were gracefully resting on the shelf to die. When I asked about their feelings, they jointly issued a statement which said: “We shall die here on this scaffold with honour because we are not ‘Bromides’ i.e. commoners, but we shall not beg these dead people to help us to get out of this suffocation. We have great things to tell but if someone does not want any wisdom from us, we are too respectable to bow under the heavy weight of shameful negligence.”

And there she was! Sitting in the most elegant posture, which was full of pride in her talents and magnetism, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was looking at me satirically.

“The entire world acknowledges my talents and knows my worth. They praise my elegance in almost all the major languages of the world but you people, in this part of the world, are either bore or ignorant of my real worth. I feel it my insult to look at you because you are one of them”, and the words refused to come out of my mouth to reject her arguments.

Once again I recalled to my mind the strange expressions of the dear lady at the entrance. Things were getting square I reckoned.  

Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Stowe, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, and From here to Eternity by James Jones all were suffering from severe attacks of asthma. I promised with a heavy conscience that I would arrange for them an able physician. Lie down in Darkness by William Styron, The Return of the Native and Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy were almost at the verge of death. They were being consumed by acute consumption. I could do nothing about them at present so I tried to steal myself away from them. Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer and Moby Dick by Herman Melville had both gone mad because of the continuous years of neglect. They were even laughing at me for they had not seen the like of me in decades.

I crept to another part of the library. By this time the residents of all the other shelves had become aware of my presence and everyone started crying for help. They were telling their stories of misery. I sought shelter from this babble and almost hid myself behind another shelf. No sooner did I straighten out my breaths than the daughters of Shakespeare called me out and begged to listen to them. All were crying at the top of their voices but I could distinctly hear those voices having the highest pitch: they were Hamlet, Tempest, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shakespeare’s model girl Romeo and Juliet. I, once again, gave them my word that I would take their case to a higher court for securing them justice. Hamlet asked me something which left me ashamed as well as blank before her:

“Why have you forgotten the great genius of our father, William Shakespeare? Don’t we deserve respect and acknowledgement in the name of our great father in this part of the world? Fie upon thee if you say No”.

The families of Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Marlowe, Keats, Milton and many more great families were all living in the neighbourhood of Shakespeare’s daughters but they only kept their silence as a token of their respect for the greatest playwright the world has ever produced.

“What should we say to you? You yourself seem to be helpless in improving our lives.” This was the silent message that they seemed to convey to me.

I was confused beyond mind and memory and measure by all this and felt myself sinking into an ocean of regret and shame. My brethren have, if I have not, shattered their dream of a happy life. I could not justify their cold attitude towards these fair dolls. Also, I could not help bringing people back to the world of these beautiful young ladies I have mentioned above. I was almost at the verge of losing my conscience when, at once, I felt a sudden rub against my legs.

“Who’s there?” I thought to myself. Shocks upon shocks! A cat, along with her four lovely kittens, was staring at me as if I were an intruder in her peaceful world. At about the same moment, a huge bat flew in a circle and hooked itself to one of the ceiling fans in that big hall.

“Oh God! Is this a library or a haunted house-cum-zoo?”

The mystery of the lady’s strange expressions had almost come to a logical conclusion in my mind.

“You are the first one in years to touch me” these words of Miss War and Peace echoed in my mind and untangled the mystery.  

I walked with heavy steps to the reception. My dear young lady was by then fast asleep.

“Excuse me!” I attempted to bring her back to reality show, “I have decided to register NOW if you can help me, please!”

“Very well! Come after three days to get things straight.” She informed me in a sleepy voice with the most boring expressions in the world on her face.

“Why after three days? Why not now? I want to check out some books.” I protested in an inquiring way.

“Gentleman! I have to arrange for membership procedure, you know documentation, forms and other necessities okay! Right now, I don’t have any such thing because you are the first one in many years to visit this library with a demand for registration.”

I got out of the library with a clear mind about her first expressions. My dear Miss War and Peace said absolutely the right thing.

We Have a Dream!

Wars, terrorism, killings, slaughters, beheading, bloodshed, blasts, kidnappings, chemical weapons, atomic and nuclear devices, live-streaming of innocents being killed and beheaded, smoke, dust and the outcome of all these in the form of global warming, natural disasters, earthquakes etc.: this is the picture of our  world today. God did not create this world for all these horrific phenomena to happen. He gifted this world to humans as a place to live in with peace and love for fellow citizens. Man, who was created in the Shadow of God, has turned into a demon over the centuries and changed the mother earth. According to most revealed religions, there is a world hereafter with Heaven and Hell for pious and sinful people respectively but man has transformed this world into a living hell at this very moment. But we have a dream that one day the clouds of enmity, hatred and demonic intentions will shed away and humans will start living with love and compassion for each other, irrespective of the colour of their skins, creeds, languages, or nationalities. We still have a dream!

We have a dream that man will not cut his brother’s throat for the sake of bettering his own economy. Instead he, himself, would sleep hungry but feed his brother. He would request his brother to share the reward of his harvest rather than snatching it at the gunpoint. If his brothers in Africa are struck with hunger and drought, he would stop going to KFCs and McDonalds to save a few pennies to be sent to the dying brothers in Africa whose innocent eyes keep watching and waiting for food to come from somewhere; but sometimes those innocent eyes shut silently and kick the bucket because the moments of waiting do not pass at all. We have a dream that the stronger will not exploit the weaker and the weaker would look up to the stronger, not in jealously but in hope that the stronger would support him through thick and thin. We still have a dream that if a black person dies of hunger in Africa or in Asia, his white brother in Canada, the US or the UK will have restless sleep; if the black suffers from the pangs of continuous drought, the white mother in the West would send love to him across all the oceans without caring about distances that stretch between them. If a man confronts aggression in the East, someone in the West would stand for him; and, likewise, if a Western gets hit by any misfortune, an Eastern would send him Nirvana across thousands of miles. We still have a dream today that this is going to happen despite all odds.

We have a dream that powerful countries will not invade and wage wars against poor countries on the basis of lame excuses of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) and terrorism in order to seize their natural resources and lands. We have a dream that the powerful will realize that the colour of the blood is the same in all human beings, whether black or white, yellow or tan in any part of the world. A child in America, Canada, or the UK feels the same amount of pain as a child in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine and Syria when his innocent hands and limbs are torn apart and blown off with a bomb or missile fired in the name of the War on Terror. We have a dream that the East and the West will have mutual love; and in case of any misunderstanding on any issue, they would strike a deal on the table amicably rather than going to war against each other and promoting the weapon industry. Ammunition cannot differentiate between good and bad, black and white, innocent and guilty, young and old, women and children and Eastern and Western. Therefore, when ammunition is set on fire, it destroys everything and terminates life. So, what would be the use of all these natural resources that the world is hiding in its stomach if no one is there to use them anymore?  

We have a very vivid dream and still have it and will always have it that the colour of the skin will not be a matter of pride or prosecution in any part of the world. As it is beyond human approach to have a specific colour of the skin, no one has any legitimate right to be proud of or to feel inferior on the basis of a specific colour of the skin because the colour of the blood is always the same. We have a dream that we will, one day, live as brothers and sisters leaving behind all colour schemes.

We have a dream that humans will not kill or prosecute each other on the basis of differences in religions, beliefs and creeds. They would respect every religion and provide others enough space to practice whatever religion others believe to be true according to their understanding. If religions come from God, leave it to God to decide on the Day of Judgment who was right and who was wrong in his choice of religion. We have a dream that people will follow live and let live philosophy in all walks of life, especially in religion. Religion is a code of conduct and it is meant to discipline humans in their day to day lives. All established religions of the world condemn killing the followers of other religions, debauchery, theft, falsehood, dishonesty and promote universal love. We still have a dream that people will follow their religions truly and live like brothers and sisters whether they are Muslims, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Atheists, and Zoroastrians. We have a dream today!

We have a dream that there will be no secret societies and espionage in the world and that people and nations will respect others’ privacy. We dream that the stronger nations of the world will not spend billions and trillions for secretly knowing what other nations and certain individuals are doing. Rather, we expect them to spend that money on the welfare of their own people in the first place and then on the poor of the world in the second place. The money that is being wasted, at present, on espionage, intelligence agencies, surveillance equipment, either along the ground or in the space, will be used to provide the needy with proper food, clean water to drink, adequate education, and a safer place to live in. We also dream that instead of acting like wolves in sheep’s clothing, human beings and nations will work hand and glove for the sake of much needed uplift of their living standards across the globe. We dream that the money, allocated for espionage and secret societies, will be spent to protect our mother earth and its environment from global warming and cooling and all sorts of natural disasters. A safer and cleaner world would be the greatest gift we can give to our fellows, children and coming generations. God’s earth is getting polluted not only with poisonous by-products of weaponry, industry, transportation, communication, Geo-engineering but also by hatred, dishonesty, debauchery, fraud, spying, stealing and many more evils that cannot be accounted for here. We dream that we put all hands on the deck for removing the existing evils to make our world, once again, the same place that God created millenniums ago. This is our aspiration and this is the dream we dream today. 

Dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.