“A widow is a person who loses her spouse; an orphan loses his parent, but there is no word in English for the one who loses his child because, afterwards, there is not much left to lose,” said the protagonist of the movie in his deep, midnight radio jockey voice while adjusting the black spectacles on his nose. His face seemed dead and expressionless, and his eyes were blank. I pressed the stop button on my phone and wondered whether we could halt a painful scene in real life. My mind immediately drew analogies between this scene and the pain through which the parents of the children buried alive under the rubble of a collapsed building in Lahore must have passed. With those children, their parents would have buried much more: dreams, hopes, futures, laughter, generations and life.

On August 26, 2025, I wrote an op-ed with the same title. To emphasise the gravity of the matter, I am publishing under the same title today.

Buildings speak — not with words, but through the cracks that snake across their walls, ceilings, slabs and beams. They speak through peeling plaster, blistered paint,........

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