Daily Times newspaper has not paid its employees for at least a month.  The reporters and staff are suffering but for fear of losing their jobs have been unable to protest.

Dr Rubeena Kidwai tells me she is wrapping up her clinic at the Pakistan Association of Mental Health. The most appropriate reaction is panic – I have three months to become completely non-mad. Can you become codependent on your shrink?

I joined SAMAA TV as its website editor after I left Daily Times.  My direct boss is Amir Zia. He used to work at AP and Reuters, I think. He’s worked with Kathy Gannon, known as the Iron Lady in some journalism circles because she’s tough as nails and was the first journo allowed into Afghanistan when the Taliban took over.

I also work with Server Moosavee and Amir Jahangir and an incredibly bright Fatima Akhtar, who is the manager of the Interactive Solutions at SAMAA.

But all of that is by the way. This much I know; the media is changing and we’re trying to keep up. Sometimes I’m reminded of Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock.

I’m not sure why one should blog at all. Perhaps some people are fascinated in seeing their own words in ‘print’ or somewhere print-like. But don’t you have something to say – have some credible information – to be worth reading?

I point out to Abbas that after I revived this blog I realised that I was remembering Nisha February upon February.  She died in Feb 2007 when we did the stories on her. I wrote the blog briefly and then gave it up, only to pick up in Feb 2008. I then left it and after a year, now Feb 2009 , I go back to Khosa to ask about her death.

I think about her sometimes. It’s been two years since her death. What we keep wondering about, Abbas and I, is why she didn’t run out of the kitchen towards the front door? Why were there burn marks only in the kitchen, and that too in one corner?

When I mention it to Khosa, in his sterile white tiled office at the Arambagh police complex, he goes silent. If there had been anything, he says, he would have arrested the father. But his story had been corroborated by a shopkeeper, that he had been out to get something.

But then, I say to Khosa, what if he knew that she would go to make tea or something in the kitchen, leave the gas on and wait?

It is February 2009, two years since Nisha’s death. I quit my job at Daily Times after returning from a journalism fellowship. In the days when I am looking for a job, I decide to spend some time at Sachal police station. The thana is located at the end of University Road, in Safoora Goth, and to get there I have to pass NIPA chowrangi. I pass Ibn-e Sina Hospital. Each day, as I drive by I think of Nisha because one turn to the right would take me straight to the place where she died.

One day I decide I have to call SSP Niaz Ahmed Khosa up again.

I send out small messages into space – there is no guarrantee they will be received but perhaps that is not important.

Distance allows the imagination to expand and breathe, like a small animal with sharp eyes and a heaving chest.

Distance also perhaps allows space to expand; perhaps the limits of communication grow blurry, the boundaries breathe as well. It’s blank

I gave up writing but now I’m thinking of taking it up again. Things are so very different.

This was written by Farhan Ahmed, who joined us recently from The Nation. He covered the JPMC symposium on Sunday and filed this. I must add, however, that he is very hardworking and the boring doctors were at fault here: 

“The cervical cancer is very killing cancer and its mortality is very high and patients should be looked after and they need multi disciplinary approach and every patient should be diagnosed with the oncologist so that a treatment plan could be made,” said Dr. Nadeem Abbasi while giving presentation during plenary talks on the topic “Current practice and future trend in the management of cervical cancer”.

I marvel at how Zainab manages to communicate while simultaneously giggling and spluttering through the words. “How can they stay silent!” she squeaks. “We must speak to them.”

“Fareed!” I yelp and gesture wildly across two desks. Fareed, our mullah party reporter, looks up languidly and after a few moments realises that it’s not just enough for him to hear what we are about to say. He needs to get up, traverse the distance of two desks and come and stand next to me and Zainab.

“Fareed, this Zill-e-Huma murder…,” I begin and then jerk my head at Zainab giving her the cue to launch forth.

“All the maulvis will be saying their prayers,” he replies in answer to her request for the telephone numbers of the biggest, most important maulvis. “They all switch their phones off for Isha prayers.”

“I’ll talk to them! I’ll talk to them!” Zainab splutters and thus began Zainab and Urooj’s excellent adventure into mullah party reporting.

The speaker phone is hauled out from Resident Editor Sarfaraz Ahmed’s room after they cling to his door frame with pleading looks on their faces for 15 minutes. The bewildered telephone operator is given Mufti Munibur Rehman’s number and then they wait for the phone to ring back.

When I went through Nisha’s wastepaper basket I found many things but what keeps coming back to me are the several mini cans of Blue Lady deodorant spray. For me, these objects represent the essence of this case.

A family I know is really poor. They live in the centre of the city in a colony and I remember noticing in their bathroom how they never bought a bottle of shampoo but the tikki packs that you get from the corner store. Nisha’s use of the mini deodorant spray cans reminded me of this strange aspect of poverty.

Nisha had gone through at least three of the Blue Lady cans.