Last week there was a very large explosion in a commercial area very near my house. The sound travelled over a mile around, shattered the glass of every window in the Defence Housing Authority and scared my dogs to spontaneous urination. The explosion itself injured over 25 people and killed one man instantly (the blast flung him through a third floor window and he was found dangling from a tree 120 feet away, an image I can't get out of my head). This being Pakistan, the first reaction of almost anyone in the vicinity was: "Flee, for the terrorists are all up in our grill." Thankfully this turned out to be premature: the blast was an accident involving faulty gas cylinders.

Now one finds oneself in the unusual position of being reminded that some explosions do in fact occur all on their own, without the involvement or premeditation of human beings. The strange thing is it wasn't the only one. A temple to Lahore's Burger Crowd (now there's an oxymoron) called Coffee, Tea and Company was also blown to smithereens because of a gas cylinder. I probably don't need to remind you that people have to use gas cylinders nowadays (to cook, silly!) because the state is about as useful at providing utilities as a tampon is at starting a fire.

Anyone who lives here can testify to the momentary terror of a loud noise that may portend anything from a car backfiring to a suicide bomber with a twitchy finger. People keep saying that life goes on, that the cities continue to do their commerce and that these existential threats, though disturbing, do not arrest the momentum of life.

But they do. They so do. (And if I hear more upper-class dim-wit use the word "resilient" in this context I will have to put an end to it there and then.)

I was in Karachi for work a few days ago and, after having dinner with some friends, was getting dropped off to where I was staying. It was perhaps a little past midnight, which by usual Pakistan Social Timings (PST) is 7 pm. I was going from Shahrah-e-Where-am-I to the corner of Khayaban-e-Who-Knows, and I promise you, on the 18-minute drive through the streets of Pakistan's largest metropolis, home to some 20 million people, I saw 15 cars and only one person. One.

Karachi residents know it's been like that for years. People go out less at night now because of the mortal danger of target killers, murderers, gangs, thieves, robbers and kidnappers. Apparently the going rate to have someone killed in Karachi is Rs. 5,000 or $50. (That's right, we're the Filene's Basement of Death, sale continues through 2014...)

Mind you, this is above and beyond your run-of-the-mill suicide bomber. Those empty streets struck a chord with me because so much of life and laughter in Pakistan takes place after dark (we are a nocturnal society every which way) and to see conspicuously deserted streets at night was a striking visual of just how much space we have surrendered already to fear.

The same thing happened when the Little Mullah That Could bulldozed into Islamabad in a blaze of deadlines and pinstripes. Somehow he managed to arrest cargo transport and commercial activity across the country, making "business" here less of a fact of life than a mythological battle. Now His Holiness has gone back to Canada (those pesky asylum laws always get in the way of good revolutions) and we are left to pick at the remains of yet another "tsunami". (Memo: the fact that we routinely use the unimaginative but evocative "tsunami" to describe everything in Pakistani politics is surely indicative of how unfunny everything has become.)

Those who write about this county, and God knows that's about everyone I know, have acknowledged this nihilism in their own way. You rarely get the feel-good, we're-off-to-see-the-wizard-the-wonderful-wizard-of-AZ essays anymore. Gone too are the "this is someone else's war" whines, banished are the "we just need more time" op-eds. Practically everyone agrees that things have gone from worse to OMFG. A reader wrote to me the other week to say that he liked these columns, adding that the ultimate legacy of these pieces will be to serve as a "documentary archive of the disintegration of Pakistani society."

Isn't that depressing? In his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books, Douglas Adams describes an eatery called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. People from across dimensions of time and space would reserve a table there to safely see the precise moment the Universe would end in the future. They'd watch the whole magnificent spectacle over a plate of calamari and then go home. I suspect that scenario would work rather well here. Practically no one I've met thinks they're changing the world through their art or writing or films or TV shows or law practice or business venture. Everyone is in a sort of arrested momentum. (Except Imran Khan. But hey, hey, he's got a tsunami...)

We may be socially conscious and productive members of society, but does that mean we can change or even survive the society we are becoming? Am I just sitting at a restaurant watching this spectacle (with me in it) unravel? What if my reader was right? What if we're all just documenting and archiving some Great Demise?

Jesus. And here I thought I was sending out some nice bathroom reading every Friday.

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