The blue marker squiggles across the two faces hid the kiss. But at the same time, they didn’t. An examination (lasting no more than 1.5 seconds) of the bizarre defacement revealed what the marker was trying to hide. In fact, the scribbly censorship looks so bad, so odd, that it actually drew attention to the full French face sucking.

My first reaction was, “Who graffitied my magazine?”

But after my initial split-second conclusion — that my local akhbarwala decided to test out his new indigo-coloured Sharpie on the fresh pages of the Tribune magazine — the tilted heads and intimately crushed faces popped off the film poster for Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and I knew what had happened.

Oh. My. Gawd. This is an 11th-hour attempt at censorship.

But who? The publisher? The newspaper editor? Did someone else in the vast chain at the publication see what the magazine editors finalised and sent to press, have a fit, and complain to management? “You can’t distribute that pornography!”

Did someone with a more cautious bent (and someone much more aware of the overly sensitive public — that public with a overt religious bent) than the young editorial-design team at the magazine see the open-mouth manoeuvre as something that would potentially cause a backlash and, as a result, go through thousands of copies of the magazine with a felt-tipped marker?

Or did some renegade, vigilante censor within the distribution chain take it upon his holier-than-thou self to “block” as much of the corrupting material as he could? Though, I would imagine that if it was a ‘morally superior’, ‘protector-of-the-public’ mullah-type, the whole page would have been ripped out and there would be breaking news by now of the Express Tribune offices under siege.

Besides the farce underlying my censored copy of the magazine, isn’t it just sad that out of all the things in life, here in Pakistan we choose to fear, hate and ban those things that cause the least pain, and because of apathy, corruption, greed and intolerance, we allow the most heinous acts, traditions and laws to remain?