It Starts With a WhatsApp Message
Someone you know has died. You find out the way you find out about most things in Pakistan now — not from a relative arriving at your door with that specific expression, not from the slow terrible gathering of family that used to precede the news itself. You find out because a message dropped into the family group chat, which sixty-three people are in, which was eleven minutes ago debating whether the nikah date should move to avoid clashing with someone’s O-levels.
Now it has a name. And an “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.” And then immediately seventeen more *“Inna lillahi”*s from relatives who are not entirely sure what has happened but understand that this is the correct response and are deploying it with speed and sincerity simultaneously.
Your phone will not stop buzzing for four hours. Pakistan does not process death quietly.
The Story With a Timer
Before the ghusal has been arranged, before half the family has been informed, someone has posted an Instagram story. A photo. A caption half in Urdu, half in English, because code-switching does not pause for bereavement. “Fly high ️” — a phrase imported wholesale from Western grief culture and now fully Pakistani, the way many things become fully Pakistani: rapidly, thoroughly, and with their own particular inflection.
And now it is a story. With a timer. Twenty-four hours. The same countdown given to a photo of someone’s nihari.
The comment section fills. “Inna lillahi ”. “Allah jannat mein jagah de ”. “Yaar I can’t process this.” Someone’s mother has commented — longer than everyone else’s, entirely in Urdu, no emoji, a period at the start for reasons nobody understands. It is by far the most moving thing in the section. Someone’s good morning uncle has also commented. He has sent a flower graphic. He did not read the previous messages. He is having a pleasant morning.
The algorithm, meanwhile, has moved on. There are Reels to serve. The app was not consulted on whether it was ready for this. It was not. It is fine.
The Infrastructure Instagram Cannot Hold
Here is what the story cannot capture: the system.
Within hours, a community materialises. Not metaphorically. Physically. People arrive without being called, because being called is not necessary, because this is understood. The kitchen is taken over. Chai is made, assessed, and remade. Food appears from neighbours, from the aunty three streets away who always knows before anyone tells her and arrives already having cooked.
The janaza brings the neighbourhood. Men in rows, prayers in Arabic spoken by people who have known these words since childhood and will know them until their own janaza. Women inside, together, crying that makes no attempt to be composed. Memories shared almost immediately, because grief in Pakistan was never meant to be private — it belongs to everyone who loved them and everyone who loved the people who loved them and honestly most of the street.
And then, inevitably, someone tells a funny story about the person who is gone. The room laughs, surprised by the laugh, not guilty about it. In Pakistan, grief and laughter have always been allowed in the same room. Instagram has no format for this. Instagram has a story and a heart react and a comment section. Pakistan has an entire civilisation of loss management, and it is much better.
The Algorithm Wishes Them Eid Mubarak
The machine keeps going. It was not informed. It does not have a category for this.
Their last Eid photo gets served as a memory. Their birthday arrives and Facebook — always Facebook, committed to this specific flavour of cruelty — has prepared a banner. Facebook would like you to write on their wall. Facebook does not know. Facebook is a website.
Pakistan has two Eids. On both of them, the platform will surface the dead. Their Eid Mubarak messages from two years ago will arrive as notifications. The app does not understand that Eid without them has a different texture now, that seeing them in white shalwar kameez on Eid morning is an ambush that takes a long time to recover from.
The app has active and inactive. The entire universe of human loss that lives between those two words is not something any algorithm has figured out. Neither, honestly, have we. We are all doing our best.
The Stone, Unchanged
Despite the sixty-three member group chat. Despite the timer. Despite the birthday banner. Despite the aunties monitoring the comment section for inappropriate emoji usage.
The grief is the same grief it has always been.
The “yaar I can’t believe it” typed at 2am is the same disbelief felt since the first person lost the first person they loved. The looking for them at Eid, the instinct to call them with news, the second before you remember — that is ancient. That predates every app and every platform and every notification.
Pakistan has been burying its dead for thousands of years and has built, over those years, an extraordinary apparatus for doing so — the community, the food, the prayers, the collective holding of the people left behind. That apparatus still works. It is still better than anything a phone can offer.
The Instagram story lasts twenty-four hours. The “Allah unhe jannat mein jagah de” — said quietly, meant completely, by sixty-three people in a WhatsApp group and two hundred at the janaza and a hundred more who couldn’t come but are saying it anyway — has no expiry.
The story disappears. The dua doesn’t.