Year 2018: Unresolved questions.

Recap of the year in the land of mysteries If the US is the land of opportunity and Japan is the land of the rising sun, Pakistan is the land of mysteries, mostly of the perpetually unresolved variety. Year 2018 was no exception: Khadim Rizvi was arrested, and no djinns came to his rescue Dr Shahid Masood was taken into custody, and it failed to trigger the Judgment Day (to name but two).

But we are probably getting ahead of ourselves. Let's begin at the beginning.

The year kicked off in fine style. The very first mystery of the year was so early that had it come any sooner, it would have been the last mystery of 2017. According to Umar Cheema, the foremost investigative journalist in the country since Kamran Khan, Imran Khan's third valiant attempt at finding matrimonial bliss took place on the 1st of January, as opposed to the 18th of February as later officially announced.

The discrepancy assumed earth-shattering importance since it pertained to the matter of iddah. As to whether the iddah was violated, and when the wedding really took place, we are still none the wiser twelve (or eleven) months after the fact.

Asif Zardari, who being a modest man dislikes advertising his love for the downtrodden, chose 2018 to explicitly put into words what shrewd observers had suspected all along. That his blood boiled when he heard about somebody wronging the poor.

The N-Leaguers, who were never averse to listing instances of their undying commitment to democracy, were even more vocal this year about their sacrifices for the constitution and the rule of law. With such champions of the masses and such jealous defenders of democracy and democratic practices in the two major parties that have run Pakistan since as far back as most can remember, one wonders how the nation ever got into the mess it finds itself in: mountains of foreign and internal debt, a dysfunctional health infrastructure, education sector in a mess, the list goes on.

A mystery if ever there was one. Some issues are mysterious only to one group of people while everybody else sees nothing mysterious about them whatsoever.

However, when that group is as large as to comprise a major political party of the country, those mysteries' can't just be ignored. The Sharifs and their many undying supporters have consistently been demanding to know exactly what its leaders are accused of.

Although year 2018 inherited the innocent question from last year, it failed to answer it to the satisfaction of...