At the office things were, again, very quiet. Normally the newsroom is thick with cigarette smoke, purple-lipped journalists talking loudly with and at each other, the endless tap of keyboards... Yesterday, they all sat at their desks, peering hard into their computer screens. When eventually there was an editorial meeting, for the first half hour nobody spoke of headline suggestions or the layout. One of my father’s colleagues was uncharacteristically bleak: “This reminds me of ’71,” he said. Nobody looked up in surprise because the gravity of the situation was felt so acutely by all. Pakistan was violently dismembered in ’71; yesterday, a former PM, assassinated. Two different and unrelated occurrences, yet with potentially similar outcomes. Pakistan’s Frontier Province has been taken over by the Taliban. There’s an insurgency in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province, and now interior Sindh is erupting in flames. Vehicles are being torched, petrol pumps and banks set ablaze, PML(Q) offices set on fire by mobs throughout the country.

Yesterday the local headlines read, ‘A turning point: election imminent’; ‘Benazir Bhutto voted 2nd most influential woman of 2007’. Today, the entire country has been plunged into darkness. Half the country is in a state of paralytic mourning, the other half is out on the streets. I hope, desperately, that this is not the beginning of another end for Pakistan.