Fourteen in a locked room 

https://arab.news/y2bz9

“When they speak of inquiries, of compensating families, of resilience, of rebuilding, we know what they’re not saying: that this was preventable, that our loss was their failure.” 

I wrote that in January for Dawn, about a shopping plaza in Karachi. 

It was never about the plaza. I thought I was writing about a building I had known since I was a girl, about crockery and kitsch and a shopkeeper who could explain to me exactly how much heat a glass dish could take. But the last part of that column was not about Gul Plaza at all. It was about the system and it would have fit any fire in this country, in any year, with the name of the building swapped out. 

That is what repeats. Not the fires. The buildings are all different. A shopping center on M.A. Jinnah Road. A garment factory in Baldia. A nursery on the third floor of a public hospital in Islamabad. What comes afterward is identical, and it arrives in the same order every time, so reliably that you could set a watch on it. 

It begins with paper, and the paper always comes before the deaths. Three weeks before more than 250 workers........

© Arab News Pakistan