THERE is almost nothing left of the frail wooden building. Pakistanis, however, are adept at imagining the whole where there is only a bombed-out hulk.

The promises to rebuild the Ziarat residency in Balochistan ring out aloud but provide little solace. Can a reconstructed history still be a relic? Can a newly rebuilt old building still bear the imprint of a moment now past? Can a restoration ever be a true return to the original condition? Pakistanis are also used to unanswerable questions.

It seems that it was shockingly easy to bomb the residency and claim a victory against history. The assailants, now known to be members of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), came in the middle of the night, at its darkest and most desolate hour.

Amid the shadows, it would not have been too difficult to plant the bombs here and there in the empty rooms with their old and silent furniture. They could have been placed by the spare and simple beds in one of the bedrooms or under the table in the dining room.

There was no one to object and no one to protest; if one of the guards would have woken, he would have been silenced. Those that come with bombs do not worry about such objectors.

The timers on the devices must have ticked, marking the seconds and minutes to the end. In this massacre of the already dead, and in the dim embers of burnt beams, the cowardly bombers emphasised their protest against the past.

The bombings for the day, June 15, were not yet done. If a darkened building in a remote hill station in Balochistan is the epitome of the unguarded past, then a bus full of female university students is the emblem of the unprotected present.

The second attack took place in the unashamed light of day, on the campus of Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University in Quetta. The bus was parked on campus, its doors open to students. One of the women was a suicide bomber. She waited until the bus was full, until she could condemn the maximum number of people to the cruellest of ends, and then blew herself up. The bombings for June 15, 2013, as we all know, were still not done. As emergency personnel gathered in the smouldering wreckage of the bombed-out bus, amid the limbs and laments, more devastation lay ahead.

The injured girls who had been at a distance from the bomber were rushed to the Bolan Medical Complex. Those who wished to kill more were even more resolute than those who wished to live and those who wished to save.

Outside the emergency ward of the hospital, where the bloodied girls were taken, another suicide bomber awaited. He waited until high-level officials were seen to arrive in the area and struck. His assault was assisted by more gunmen who opened fire inside the emergency ward, killing the head nurse and three nurse trainees.

As the sun finally set on the bloody day, 14 women were dead. The militant group Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ), took credit for the attack, eager to own the ghastly bloodletting.

Both the bombing of the building and the bombing of the bus were acts of erasure. In the case of the BLA, destroying an old house stood for a rebellion against the past, a statement against the ills and injustices, real or imagined, of a creation they disown.

In burning down the house where Quaid-i-Azam spent his last days, they may have thought that they could accomplish the annihilation of Pakistans story, the progressive vision of its creation. Perhaps they believed that burning down a house in the dark translates neatly into burning down a country.

It is a coward’s calculation; if it was true, Pakistan, riven with so many burned houses, would have long since perished.

The revolt of the LJ is against the present. The rebellion of those of their ilk is against contemporary Pakistan, where, despite having guns held to their temples, their schools burned, and their bodies threatened, girls continue to study and demand their share of education.

After thousands dead in terrorist attacks and countless others facing incredible odds, the bus at Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University was full of these brave girls of Pakistan.

Despite the repeated attacks on healthcare workers, the sexual assaults on nurses, the lack of laws to provide them security, the emergency ward at the Bolan Medical Complex was full of Pakistani women.

They stood there teaching and learning and tending to the sick, unafraid and undeterred. It is the duration of the strength of these women that is notable; it persists after 11 years of the ‘war on terror’, after the Taliban’s repeated threats to ban women from public spaces, after their abandonment by Pakistan’s political parties, all eager to sacrifice to the whims of extremists.

Those who bombed and killed and shot and burned on June 15 were driven to destroy what is indestructible. The monuments of the past can be burnt to the ground with ease, but they remain standing in the minds of those who remember and will continue to do so; memories remain and cannot be touched by the most potent of explosives, the most destructive of bombs.

Similarly, the present can be terrorised with hatred and defiled with bloodshed, but its perseverance is greater than the act of one or even one thousand suicide bombings. Those that seek to destroy attack the past and terrorise the present, but those that seek to build must, and do, look only to the future.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com