The children don't stop playing, they take advantage of the empty streets.
Games of cricket are set up in every other empty alley and street. The sounds of laughter, cheers, makeshift cricket bats whacking makeshift balls echo off the closed facades. These activities are not representative to the events of the last 12 hours.
Not far from Saddar Bazaar and ten minutes from our hotel, Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's famours liberal ex-primeminister, was assassinated after a political meeting in a public park.
When news spread quickly yesterday evening, the flurry which ensued was frantic. Shops closed, families rushed home from their evening stroll, restaurants dragged their equipment and food to the back of the store and lights were extinguished across the city.
Within one and a half hours of the assassination the streets were cleared. Like a ghost town; a post apocalyptic waste town. Only an odd man walking through the street, walking swiftly and wrapped tightly in his blanket to keep off the chill which had suddenly arrived.
The evening was quiet, only the sounds of a low helicopter woke us... and the morning call to prayer.
But kids keep playing cricket in the streets, keep flying kites on the rooftops, the muezzin keeps calling and the city waits...
