They looked terribly young to be so bloodthirsty. The oldest appeared no older than about seventeen and the youngest were about eleven or twelve. In another time and place, they might have appeared as fresh faced angels frolicking in a park or sitting in a class room. Here they were though, on a busy street in Lahore with bandanas around their heads, carrying sticks, stones and burning torches looking quite intimidating.

It was my bad luck that I had wandered into their midst. Even worse, I was in a Government of Punjab car with a uniformed policeman riding with us! I imagined the headlines the next day: “Local boy makes good in America, returns home only to be burnt alive by rampaging youth”.

There had been some inkling of trouble in the morning when we had to drive through a heap of burning tires on our way to my friend’s office near the Mall. The protests were over some blasphemous cartoons published in a Danish publication a couple of days before. I hadn’t thought much about it though and even after dodging the burning tires, I thought it was just some crazed Mullahs. Sitting in my friend’s fourth floor office, we saw a protest march in the street below but again, it seemed like a few dozen people at most, mainly just marching and chanting slogans. I was eager to get to the Lahore “Dry Port” where a lot of the stuff we had shipped from America was awaiting ‘clearance’. There were clothes, personal items, our children’s toys, light fixtures and other household stuff that we were eager to get home. It had been six weeks since the stuff had arrived in Lahore for us to get all the necessary papers to take it home. I had remarked to someone that it had taken less time to get it shipped from Arkansas to Lahore than to get it from Mughalpura to Model town, where we lived. Asad, one of my childhood friends, is a senior bureaucrat and had been immensely helpful in moving along the machinery of State to get our stuff released. He offered to give me an official car as well as a policeman to go with me to the “dry port”, “just in case those SOBs give you any trouble”. I was happy to accept.

We ran into trouble almost immediately we left his office. The main road appeared to be blocked by the protests so we squeezed into side roads until we got close to the area. To those unfamiliar with Lahore, the area around the Lahore railway station, the University of Engineering and Technology (originally the Railways Workshop School) and surrounding areas are largely working class, poor and congested. There is only one main road leading through it and it was blocked at several intervals by burning tires, bushes, tree limbs and the like. After dodging one roadblock, we finally ran into a crowd of youngsters who would not let us go farther. I had initially thought it was just a bunch of kids creating a ruckus, playing games but this bunch looked like they meant business. There were several wearing bandannas, carrying sticks and looking sooty, presumably from the tire burning. It was when I saw the burning torches in their hands that I felt a stab of fear. They crowded around the car peering in curiously and then ordered us all out:” Bahar niklo”. To his credit, the police constable with us got out and began talking to them. I thought it was quite brave of him. They kept insisting we leave the car, he kept telling them what they were doing was wrong and they needed to go home and let us go about our business. Finally, one of the boys got tired of the argument and said “Theek hai, bolo Bush kutta hai hai (fine, say Bush is a dog)”, the constable looked at me, smiled ruefully and did as he was told upon which the boys cheered loudly and let us go.

We meandered around several more side lanes, dodged a few more burning tires and finally parked and walked about a mile to the dry port. It turned out that I still did not have all the ‘clearances’ that I needed and had to leave empty handed yet again.

It was only the next morning when I saw the extent of the mayhem that I realized what a narrow escape we had. Several buildings had been destroyed, cars had been torched, and there were numerous injuries though no deaths. A police official had been dragged from his jeep and beaten. Nobody seemed to know who the protesters were or where they had come from. Having seen them up close, I would guess that they were alienated youth from the same poor localities, school drop outs, day laborers, the unemployed, the hopeless, the disenfranchised. I see children like them everyday, working in auto workshops, selling fruit off the backs of donkey carts and offering to clean car windshields in busy markets. These are the people Pakistan’s economic ‘boom’ has bypassed, who live in squalor and misery, who have no hope for a better tomorrow and who will vent their fury on everything they see as the cause of their misery, whether it’s McDonald’s, George Bush or a police inspector. Has their voice been heard in the halls of power and privilege? I doubt it. So they will go back to eking out an existence the best they can until next time.

As for me, I finally found a ‘clearing agent’ who for a modest fee, did all the legwork and delivered our stuff to our home, free and clear. No more trips to the Dry Port for me.