Saleha enters the room on crutches — two steel poles wrenched from umbrellas — and lowers herself on a rope-strung bed. Greetings are exchanged. Even within these bare cement walls, the heat is searing. Saleha lifts her veil, a blue Afghan-style burqa that the women of this city, Mardan, typically don’t wear.

“What happened?”

“Bullet,” she says. “Fell from the skies.” She bends down to lift her shalwar, but the translator on call — a Pashtun in his mid-20s — waves away her hand.

“Bullet from the sky hit you in the knee?”

She looks at me with tired eyes. “Taliban.”

Saleha’s own home is in Swat where the Pakistan army is concluding its military campaign against the Taliban. A few months ago, fighting between the army and militants erupted in Swat’s Lower Dir and Buner districts, considered to be among the most beautiful parts of Pakistan. Now they are places of haunting contrasts: lush green fields bordering derelict streets, gutted houses under clear blue skies. Swat houses some 600 hotels, all of which look as though they’ve been abandoned for years.

Saleha is among the 2.5 million Pakistanis who were displaced in one of the largest human migrations in recent history. The world’s largest human migration took place in 1947; but the location wasn’t too far away. During Partition it was Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims killing each other, trains of the dead arriving in Lahore and in Amritsar. This time, it was the Pakistan military — soldiers specifically reared on a diet of Islamic nationalism to face off India’s “Hindu” threat — fighting with their own brethren. This, Muslims killing Muslims, has been too painful a fact for many Pakistanis to accept.

... contd.