It was Ramadan, and the whole country was fasting. Before dawn, families had gathered for sehri — the pre-fasting meal — followed by Fajr prayers. Then came that familiar silence after sunrise, when people lay down again for a few hours of rest.
I was in Peshawar that morning, half-asleep, when the world suddenly began to roar. The ground shook with a force I had never felt before. The walls groaned, glass shattered, and the fan above swayed like a pendulum gone mad. We ran out into the courtyard — my wife, my parents, my brothers, their families — all barefoot, stunned.
But the tremors only grew stronger. The earth was not just shaking; it was heaving. I grabbed my wife’s hand tightly; certain this was the end of our lives. The sound was terrifying — a deep rumble rising from beneath the ground, as if the buildings were crying out. And then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. For a moment, there was only silence — birds, dogs, people — everything frozen. Then the wails began, echoing across the neighborhood.
Into the devastation
By noon, reports began to trickle in — something catastrophic had happened to the north. The phone lines were dead, the news uncertain. That same day, Irushed to my office, where the newsroom was in chaos — editors shouting, cameramen loading equipment, correspondents charting routes. My assignment: Balakot and its surrounding valleys in Hazara, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The road north twisted through landslides and broken bridges. As we crossed into the mountains, the destruction became clearer. Entire villages had vanished. Houses lay in heaps of mud and concrete. Families sat beside what had once been their homes, staring into space. They had lost everything — their children, their livestock, their clothes, their memories.
We stopped briefly at a roadside hamlet. Survivors thought we were rescuers. A woman holding an infant rushed to us, asking if we had food. I gave her the last packet of biscuits from my bag.
Balakot — a city turned to dust
When we finally reached Balakot, it was unrecognizable. The once-bustling town had become a graveyard. The school where hundreds of students had been attending classes that morning was now a mass of crushed concrete and twisted iron. Mothers sat beside the ruins, calling out their children’s names. Some had been waiting for days, hoping someone would still be alive beneath the debris.
Foreign rescue teams had also begun arriving. They worked with quiet urgency, but their drills were too small for the heavy slabs of concrete. Every few hours, someone would shout, “We found one!” But too often, it was a body, not a survivor.
We tried to file our reports using a satellite phone at a fuel station — the only standing structure in the area. Nearby, young men from local charities worked tirelessly, pulling out survivors, burying the dead, feeding the living. Their courage and faith were the only light in that darkness.
The night of fear
That night, we parked our vehicle on the edge of town. The air was cold, the silence broken only by the distant cries of people searching for loved ones.
The aftershocks that followed were worse in a way. Every few minutes, the earth quivered again, and our hearts raced with the fear that the real one was yet to come.
Each one a cruel reminder of the morning’s horror. We dared not sleep inside any building. Instead, we lay under the open sky, wrapped in sleeping bags, counting the stars — and the seconds between tremors.
At dawn, the valley looked heartbreakingly serene. Mist floated over the river, birds circled the shattered hills, and the call to prayer echoed faintly through what was left of the town. It was hard to believe that beneath this calm lay thousands of lives, silenced forever.
Twenty years later
The earthquake struck northern Pakistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir with a magnitude of 7.6, causing widespread devastation, leaving immense damage and a high death toll.
Its epicenter was near the city of Muzaffarabad, and tremors were felt across neighboring areas in India and Afghanistan.
It struck at 8:50 a.m. with its epicenter near Muzaffarabad, about 100 kilometers north of Islamabad.
More than 75,000 people were killed, including around 18,000 students, and an estimated 138,000 were injured. At least 3.5 million people were left homeless, as over 32,000 buildings, including many schools, collapsed.
The towns of Muzaffarabad and Balakot suffered the worst devastation, with several villages wiped out entirely. Triggered by the ongoing collision of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, the quake caused massive landslides, blocking mountain roads and severely hampering relief operations.
In the years that followed, Pakistan rebuilt — brick by brick, lesson by lesson. The disaster gave birth to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), stricter building codes, and earthquake-resistant schools. But in places like Balakot, many survivors still live with the physical and emotional scars of that morning.
I returned to Balakot years later. A teacher showed me the new school built where the old one had collapsed. “The walls are stronger now,” she said quietly, “but the memories still shake.”
Two decades on, the quake of October 8, 2005, remains more than a natural disaster. It was a moment when a nation realized how fragile life is — and how strong people can be when the ground beneath them gives way.
