Quetta is no stranger to gloom and doom; but when death visits your workplace and snatches away a young, energetic mind full of dreams, the sense of loss is deep and profound.
As Quetta's DawnNews Bureau Chief, I worked closely with cameraman Mehmood Khan, who was killed in the Civil Hospital suicide bombing.
Mehmood was killed alongside 70 people — most of them lawyers — in a deadly suicide bombing in Quetta on August 8. He had run to the emergency ward to get footage of the hospital where the slain lawyer Bilal Anwar Kasi's body was being kept. As the crowd thickened, the bomber struck, ending his life selfishly with so many others; among them, our dear Mehmood.
Today, three long days after his death — on what would have been his 26th birthday — I try to make sense of what his family and friends have lost.
He is survived by his wife, seven children and a mother.
I recall our fondest memories as I meet with his family at their modest mud-walled house in Quetta's Killi Shaboo area for his fateha. It is unimaginable that his young wife and little children will have to live without Mehmood. A chill goes down my spine when I think of his smiling face, constantly haunting me. How will this family go on?
His brother Rozi Muhammad tells me that Mehmood's six-year-old daughter Bibi Malaika can barely sleep at night. Blissfully unaware of his death, she insists that she will only sleep with Papa once he comes home.
"She sobs all night, pining for him to come home."
At the age of 15, Mehmood married the widowed wife of his brother, who had died a natural death. She had three children of her own, and he adopted all of them
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