The Engine of Memory: Trauma, Duty, and the Journalist's Path

Retreating inward, the walls of the present dissolve into the acid wash of the past in a powerful personal narrative of resilience.

[The Beginning]
The fortress gates of the school clanging shut, the severing of the umbilical cord in a dusty courtyard, a traumatic childhood memory of separation anxiety. A small boy standing alone, the metallic echo of a bully’s laugh, the crushing weight of a mantra: you are the engine, you are the engine. The crushing weight of wagons behind him, a chain of siblings whose future tracks were foretold to be laid by the straightness of his own. The sheer, suffocating pressure to be perfect, to be righteous, to be a monument, not a boy; a perfect eldest in a classic Pakistani family dynamic.

[The Breathe]
Generational trauma compounded by the Gulf War of 1991, the sky was a predator stained with the chemical trail fears of Saddam. Then came exile to boarding school, a dusty train rattling through the Sindh desert, arriving not at an oasis, but a regimented citadel of starched uniforms and barked orders.

[The Buzz]
The slow swirl of the ceiling fan in a cavernous dormitory, becoming a child parent to his younger brother, while his own softness was bruised by desert thorns. A daily fragile smile worn like armor for a younger brother who looked to him for strength. The buzzing noise of expectations, a swarm of duties: be a father, be a soldier, be a saint.

The earthy smell of the parade ground, the peace zones of stolen moments staring at a distant, indifferent moon. The crying in the shower stalls, the weeping letters never sent.

The search for tranquility in the eye of a storm, the hard-learned lesson of becoming machine-like: the relentless cycle of drill, study, command, protect. Everything was a stark, brutal clarity, and yet it was all shrouded in the haunting haze of lost tenderness.

[The Basic]

The counting of days became a catalog of injustices. The boy forged in that furnace, tempered into a scribe of the silenced, his journey a profound coming-of-age story. Daily radio show, a satirist with a reporter’s notebook and a punchline tossed in the salt of activism. He waded into the heart of humanitarian crises covering floods, famine, and army operations, documenting the resilience of the Pakistani people. Their unwavering faith and unity amidst political turmoil gave him a million reasons for gratitude and faith.

[The Bushfire]
Now, the man watches the geopolitical tension of a world on the brink. The anticipation is a low voltage in the air, a constant humming dread of drones that promise a global conflict. It is a cycle of violence he knows by heart, an echo of the war he first survived within himself. This is more than a memoir; it is a testimony, a mental health perspective on how the wars within shape our view of the wars outside, and a search for hope and healing in a fractured world.