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I don’t know if Bushra Khala coined the term “physiological depression” today, but with it she captured the essence of the consequences of prolonged mass psychological trauma: it sets into bones and muscles and organs all too sensitive to withstand too much depressive pressure on the psyche. This is what politics means for us today. How has it come to be so? In one of her novels Bapsi Sidwa writes that in Pakistan politics is enacted in all our living rooms. The characters are all too present, their images plastered all over; all the usual suspects assembled on sofas, grinning.

Here is just one case in point. An interstice, of a juncture, nothing more. We are told that here is a man who has signed documents, but not honoured them. That in itself in legal terms constitutes grounds for prosecution: by all means, it should at least rule out any such man from being in the running for the head of state. But, that it is the vague notion of a judiciary that could rule independently on such matters that the whole deal-making comes unstuck.

No judiciary. No truth. Only reconcile-the nation is told. But how, possibly?