TWO nights ago, I logged on to our evening meeting the way I have done twice a day, five days a week for nearly six weeks. On my screen: half a dozen faces I have come to think of as family, based in Beirut. News was coming in of an impending Israeli bombing. They were scrambling — checking phones, calling relatives, trying to locate family members — and simultaneously, they were working. Editing, producing, filming. Because the news goes on.

I sat in Islamabad, safe, watching them hold themselves together from across a screen. The friction was unbearable. A war brews in my backyard too, and yet there I was, untouched, while they split themselves in two — one half terrified, one half professional — because that is what survival looks like when the bombs have been falling, on and off, your entire life.

I thought of the last time I was in Lebanon in 2009. My friend Shaan and I travelled the length and breadth of the country for two weeks, lost half the time, pre-Google Maps, finding our way through broken Arabic, French, English, and the extraordinary generosity of strangers. We walked into a Hezbollah stall, a kind of travelling museum of resistance, and, upon hearing we were from Pakistan, were treated like long-lost........

© Dawn