““Can you imagine? Fourteen-hundred-year-old views of history determining how neighbors interacted in the twentieth century? No. You can't. Because history here is a dead thing. Something captured in books that schoolchildren have to endure and which they forget about the moment the books are closed. In Pakistan, every conversation, however personal, is punctuated by the raspy, decrepit gasps of the past breathing down your neck; every generation has to fight out all the old arguments that have been fought before.””
