All Saints Church in Peshawar was consecrated in 1883, and it was built to look like the city around it: arches, a low dome, Quranic-style scriptwork rendered with Christian verses, and a courtyard where the congregation leaves its shoes at the door, as one would at a mosque. People sat on the floor to pray. It was, from its first stone, a building that borrowed the grammar of its neighbours.
On this day in 2013, a Sunday, two suicide bombers attacked the church as worshippers were leaving the morning service. One hundred and twenty-seven people were killed. Many more were wounded. Among the dead were children who had been at Sunday school that morning, and the food being handed out in the courtyard afterwards was never eaten.
Accounts from that afternoon describe the hospital wards in Peshawar filling with people from the neighbourhood, Muslims among them, waiting to give blood for the injured. That is not a consolation and I will not offer it as one. It is only what happened, alongside the other thing that happened, and thirteen years on both belong in the record. The shoes stayed at the door.
Miriam, thank you for setting it down plainly. The hospitals in Peshawar took the wounded in waves that morning, and blood donors arriving within the hour matter medically as well as morally, because in injuries like these the supply on the shelf is what there is to work with.
The fabric is worth naming plainly: a low dome over the crossing, pointed arches, and a tower raised to read as a minaret from the street, so that a stranger in Peshawar in 1883 would have recognised the shape before the faith. Masons of the city built it that way on purpose.