By Muhammad Mohsin Iqbal
There is a particular quality to a story told at bedtime. It is a space apart from the clamor of the day, a deliberate dimming of the lights where hard lessons are softened by the cadence of a familiar voice. In this imagined scene from the year 2060, a grandmother employs that ancient ritual not to lull a child into forgetfulness, but to sharpen her conscience. It is a story about power, but told as a ghost story—a genre, one might argue, that has always been the most honest way to write about politics.
The figure who emerges from the shadows of this narrative is immediately recognizable, not by the name the grandmother withholds, but by his conduct. He is a portrait of a certain kind of leader for whom the self is not a fixed point but a wardrobe of costumes, each donned for a different audience. One day a peacemaker, the next a global guardian, he understands instinctively that in the theatre of power, the mask is not a disguise but the main event. The story’s central tragedy is not his cruelty—that would be too simple—but his eloquence. For a time, the world wanted to believe him. It is a sobering reminder that confidence, when projected with sufficient theatrical force, is often mistaken for conviction.
The grandmother’s telling is gentle, but her diagnosis is precise. She traces the arc of a deterioration that begins not with a bang, but with a subtle, creeping shift. The man who once quoted treaties as if they were sacred vows begins to find reasons to sidestep them. His positions, once anchored in the language of diplomacy, begin to spin. One morning, dialogue is strength; by evening, it is weakness. The consequence, as the grandmother notes with the wisdom of hindsight, is a particular kind of chaos: allies confused, adversaries fearful, and smaller nations left to navigate a world where the rules change with the weather.
It is here that the story performs its most delicate and devastating turn. To describe this behavior, the grandmother reaches not for a political science textbook, but for the vernacular of everyday life. She likens the leader to the stereotypical ‘Massi’ of the neighborhood—the woman who inserts herself into every affair, convinced that no household matter can proceed without her supervision. The metaphor is jarring, but its effect is profound. It strips the figure of his global grandeur and reveals him for what he has become: a busybody with bombs. What was once presented as concern is revealed as control. What was offered as help is unmasked as the compulsion to intrude.
In a single, homely image, the story collapses the distance between the corridors of power and the street corner, reminding us that the seeds of tyranny are often sown in the soil of unchecked nosiness. The story’s moral center, however, lies not in its depiction of the leader’s descent, but in the child’s question and the grandmother’s answer. “Did people stop him?” the girl asks. And the grandmother’s reply is the one that will land heaviest for any reader living through the present age: “Some tried. But many applauded him. They confused force with courage and speed with wisdom.” It is a line that cuts to the bone.
It suggests that the deeper damage is not done by the tyrant alone, but by the crowd that mistakes his restlessness for strength and his volatility for decisiveness. By the story’s end, the grandmother has distilled her wisdom into a quiet, uncompromising lesson. It is a lesson that feels, in the context of a newspaper’s pages, almost unbearably radical in its simplicity. A leader who changes principles by the day cannot be trusted. When interference becomes a habit, peace becomes a performance. And when the doctrine of “might is right” replaces the slow, imperfect labor of justice, the world does not just lose its way—it loses its moral compass.
The granddaughter, we are told, drifts into sleep. But the reader is left wide awake. The story is, of course, a fable. Its setting is the future, but its subject is the eternal present. It reminds us that the purpose of such tales is not to predict what will happen, but to inoculate us against forgetting what has already happened. It asks us to be vigilant, not only for the leader who wears many masks, but for our own temptation to applaud the performance. For in the grandmother’s quiet room, the most profound truth is spoken not in a shout, but in a whisper passed from one generation to the next: that peace is proven by restraint, not by slogans; and that history, for all its noise, never forgets those who wore the mask of peace while practicing the language of force.
(The writer is a parliamentary expert with decades of experience in legislative research and media affairs, leading policy support initiatives for lawmakers on complex national and international issues, and can be reached at editorial@metro-Morning.com)
