The thing Sara JK does every morning is to ensure that the 30 cats and 12 dogs living with her are well taken care of. Not only should they have enough food, they should also get sufficient time, space and human company to exercise their bodies and play around.

Sarah has named one of the cats, a white Persian, as Wobbles. It was abandoned as a kitten due to a neurological disorder that has unsteadied its walk. It trembles, and often trips, as it moves along. It also needs to be cleaned by a helper every time it relieves itself.

Sarah got her first pet, a German Shepherd, when she was very young and was heartbroken when it was stolen. “I then decided that I would not keep a dog that can be taken from me,” she says. So, since the age of eight, she has been adopting dogs from the streets.

Now 35, she quit her advertising job a few years ago to devote herself to her animal shelter. Between 5:30 pm and early morning, she looks after it all alone, though she has a small staff to help her during the day. She often skips family dinners and weddings to stay with the animals.

Sarah also spends a lot of money from her own pocket on the shelter. At times, her expenses exceed 100,000 rupees a month. “I then approach people for donations.”  

An even bigger challenge is to deal with people who despise animals. “One of my neighbours once complained to the Cantonment Board Clifton (CBC) that I keep stray animals at home. The next thing I knew was that CBC officials were at my door with guns. They wanted to kill my dogs.”

She told them off, insisting that they did not have the right to enter her house.

Hafsa Arshad is the general secretary of Innocent Pets Shelter Welfare Society. A medical student, she spends her free time at a shelter the organisation runs in Saharanpur Cooperative Housing Society near Karachi’s Malir Cantt area.

Set up in 2017, the shelter is small – only 150 square yards – but it is brimful of cats, meowing in cages that reach up to the ceiling. Water is sprinkled on them every now and then to protect them from the summer heat. The dogs living here peacefully sleep in the open. An injured purebred lies at the entrance with a puppy cuddled next to it. “These animals are either wounded or abandoned,” says Hafsa.

The main problem the shelter faces is a shortage of money. Its staff often gets its salaries late and recently it cut another expense as well. “We had engaged a van on a monthly rent of 20,000 to rescue animals but we could not afford its rent,” says Hafsa. The transport is now arranged only as and when needed.

Ayesha Chundrigar was working as a journalist in London before she came back to Pakistan to fulfill her childhood dream of helping homeless animals. Using her savings and donations from family and friends, she set up a foundation and initially rented a property from Edhi Foundation on the northwestern outskirts of Karachi to build an animal shelter.

Since then, the shelter has switched locations four times, mainly due to the hostility of people living close by. “They pulled guns at our vets, locked our gates from outside and threw in poisoned meat to kill our dogs,” says Ayesha.

In 2016, the shelter shifted to its current premises — a 4,500 square yards facility in Malir. It houses 500 animals, including dogs, cats, donkeys and eagles. Many of them have missing limbs; others are badly injured.

Run entirely on donations, the shelter has 40 employees and two rescue vans. “We do not focus on saving animals alone. We want to help the environment too,” Ayesha says as she reveals that dog leashes in the shelter are produced with discarded fishing nets retrieved from the sea.

The toughest part of her work, according to Ayesha, is to see animals die. She describes how someone threw acid at two cats recently. One of them died instantly but the other writhed and wriggled with pain for three days before it was euthanised, she says. “The cat’s skin and insides were melting like ice cream.”

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

This article was published in the Herald's June 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

No neon signs or billboards indicate that an apartment building in Karachi’s Defence area houses a tattoo studio. The entrance to a flat on the first floor offers the first indication of that: it is painted bright yellow, the same colour as the studio’s logo. Inside, walls have a grey brick pattern — with wooden alcoves decorated with knick-knacks such as vinyl records, small speakers, clocks and comic book figurines.

In one of the rooms here, Rameez Arif makes tattoos on his client’s bodies. The walls of his studio are decorated with numerous tattoo designs — enough to distract anyone going through the painful process of getting one themselves.

Arif started working as a tattoo artist nine years ago — almost by default. His wife wanted to get a tattoo, but he could not find anyone in Karachi who could make an attractive design while also ensuring that she did not get an infection. So, he decided to do it himself.

He imported the required equipment from the United States and started researching on how to make a tattoo. The first tattoo he ever created was on his own leg. After rehearsing for a year, he finally inked his wife’s body.

Today, Arif is a known tattoo artist in Karachi, with a large and rich clientele. He charges 18,000 rupees for a three-square-inch tattoo. Any other studio would do that for half the price. “I use organic ink and sterilised equipment imported from the United States [to avoid the danger of tattoos becoming infected]”, he says, explaining why his rates are high.

Asif Raza, too, runs a tattoo studio in Defence, Karachi. His workplace, on the fourth floor of an apartment building, also looks like any other residence in the neighbourhood — until you get in.

The waiting room of his studio has ivory walls and a wooden floor. On a wall behind a table, a board carries a number of tattoo designs. Inside a small room at the farther end of the waiting room, a client is getting a tattoo. His feet can be seen and the buzzing sound of the tattoo gun can be heard through a glass door. He twitches his feet every time the tattoo needle scratches his skin.

Raza has been working as a tattoo artist for the past 11 years and creates conceptual designs which can be permanent as well as temporary. “Some people want the names of their love interests inked on their bodies, especially on Valentine’s Day,” he says. “Many of them return to get the names modified after a breakup.”

Raza is passionate about his work but he occasionally receives threats that leave him nervous. “I receive threatening phone calls sometimes,” he says. The callers tell him to shut down his studio because “tattoos are not permissible in Islam.”

Ghulam Mustafa developed an interest in tattooing at the age of 17. He rigged a tattoo machine by attaching a needle and a motor to a toy gun and learnt the art of tattooing from an older mentor.

Soon, he found a large clientele among Hindu men and women. “They believe they will not get married if they do not get tattoos. They have had this tradition [for centuries],” he says. He would charge people 100 rupees for tattooing someone’s name on themselves.

However, Mustafa’s family and friends did not like his work. They insisted that making tattoos on human bodies was un-Islamic. In 2017, 10 years after first tattoo venture, he decided to quit. He now does Islamic calligraphy on rice grains, turns them into jewellery and key chains, and sells them at an amusement park in Karachi.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

The article was published in the Herald's May 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Against the historic backdrop of Hyderabad’s historic Talpur Mir mausoleum, Rizwan Beyg presents ‘Pearlessence’, a collection that pays ode to the three decades – that he completes this year – as Pakistan’s pioneering designer. This is couture in its true essence, painstakingly crafted by hand, reflective of Rizwan’s eye for detail and the impeccable finesse of his construction.

It is also a collection that is synonymous with the designer’s long-standing passion for seeking out and reviving indigenous craft techniques, translating them into sustainable designs and seamlessly transporting them from a rural setting to the runway.

True to its name, ‘Pearlessence’ is dominated by a retinue of assorted pearls with dainty thread embroideries and sequins wound about them. These embellishments have been hancrafted by artisans living in Southern Punjab, working under the directions of BUNYAAD, a project founded by Rizwan which is dedicated to following the guideline, ‘Changing lives … one stitch at a time’.

The embroideries are splayed out a monochromatic ivory canvas, with silhouettes flitting between traditional and modern: lehngas, fitted bodices splaying downwards into mermaid skirts, hybrids of the trouser, the eternally classy kurta and the exquisitely tailored button-down shirt with oversized pockets.

Far from the commercially gaudy realms of modern-day apparel, there is a refined elegance to ‘Pearlessence’. It is a collection that refrains from following the latest fads, dedicated instead to timeless heirloom pieces meant to be worn with love and cherished forever. Quintessential Rizwan Beyg.

‘Pearlessence’ is featured on the catwalk of this year’s HUM Showcase.

This article was published in the Herald's April 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Izween Jamot, a 27-year-old Karachi resident, looked at herself in the mirror and detested what she saw. Weighing 194 kilogrammes, she felt depressed and suicidal. That is when she first slashed her arm. Ten minutes later, she drowned her despair in a big bowl of ice cream.

“I could not sleep at night,” she says. “My doctor told me if I did not lose some weight soon, I could kiss my life goodbye,” she goes on, swallowing a lump in her throat.

Izween’s cycle of grief followed by excessive eating continued for another six years and came to a halt early last year when her friend, a chef, came up with a diet plan for her. The diet consisted of two high protein meals and two high carb ones and it helped Izween shed 50 kilogrammes in a span of five months. This was enough for her to get off the couch and register for a full-body workout routine. “Look at me now. I am running. I am jumping. I am breathing.”

Izween is not the only one in the city to have travelled the distance from self-harm to self-love. Thousands of people like her rush to their nearest gyms – early in the morning or after work hours – on a daily basis in the hope of losing a few extra inches from their bodies.

For some, the motivation is to just look good. For others, like Izween, the impetus comes simply from the need to stay alive.

Fitness was an acquired taste in Pakistan until recently. A handful of people from the local elites, with premium club memberships, would populate a few fitness spaces available in big cities such as Karachi and Lahore. Those who could not afford such luxury would flock to public parks and walk around while their children played on the nearby swings. Housewives, on the other hand, would lock themselves up in their bedrooms and break into yoga poses they had seen in magazines and books.

Now, with gyms popping up all around us, fitness has become a required taste. You cannot escape it even if you want to. But figuring out where to start is often a struggle.

For such beginners, Nusrat Hidayatullah offers a high-intensity fitness programme called The Forty-Two Day Challenge. When she launched it in early 2013, it immediately attracted a large number of people. At one point, it had more than a hundred people taking part in each of its 42-day long sessions. The programme has received mixed reviews since then but has branched out to other cities and places from its original venue — a cricket ground on the eastern edge of Karachi’s Defence neighbourhood.

On any workday, you will find people doing various exercises on the ground opposite Creek Vista apartments. From a distance, their moves look like a well-choreographed performance by a large group of professional dancers. Trainers wearing microphones can be seen jumping on and off a raised platform, doing different kinds of exercises. Their images are projected on a giant screen so that the trainees can all follow them as perfectly as they must. Some trainers can also be seen going around and cheering everyone on. Up-close things are a little less organised: some people at the back look like they have no clue what they are supposed to be doing.

Asra Tanveer, a medical student, lauds the programme as the only thing that has worked for her. “I am doing the challenge for the second time because it proved super effective for me,” she says as she bends down into a squat during a recent session. “I have a hectic personal schedule so I am always looking for a quick fix and this challenge provides that with its diet plans and high-intensity training.”

Kamran Farooq, a gym owner in Karachi, also swears by the efficacy of short but intense exercise regimes — like the one offered by The Forty-Two Day Challenge. In 2008, he suffered an accident that left him bedridden and depressed. Two years later, he shifted to South Africa where he enrolled himself in various CrossFit fitness programmes. This, he says, pulled him out of his depression.

If there is one change that he would like to make in the short-term workout boot camps in Pakistan, it would not be in their format but in their emphasis. They need to change their focus from cosmetic appearance to physical fitness, he says.

His business partner at the gym, Muhammad Usman Saad, has worked as a trainer with The Forty-Two Day Challenge in the past. He is critical of the programme’s very format. “You have 18-year-olds and 50-year-olds training alike,” he says. This, according to him, may cause injuries to some of them.

Saad also believes trainees often have misplaced expectations. “Many people enrol into these fitness programmes thinking that they can make the effort for 30 days or 42 days and then go back to their prior lifestyles. That is not how it works,” he says. “Consistent effort and functional training is what it takes to have a sustainable healthy lifestyle.”

Navaid Hussain, a certified personal trainer, also finds it appalling that many beginners opt for rigorous fitness regimes without first finding out whether these will work for them or not. “Basic know-how of your overall physical mechanisms is imperative before you jump onto the bandwagon,” he says. “Fitness needs to be customised. Fitness fads, especially boot camps and challenges, are anything but.”

Izween happily walks into her Xfit class on a recent February day. Doing a burpee here and a lunge there, she keeps going without ever letting the smile vanish from her face. Half an hour into the session and drenched in sweat, she screams out in pain as she struggles to hold a body plank for 60 seconds. “Hold it,” her trainer shouts from a distance. “Yes, a 100 kilogrammes more to lose,” she tells herself.

The writer is a graduate in media studies from Szabist and a founding member of Cutacut, a digital media platform.

This was originally published in the Herald's March 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Muhammad Chaman was accustomed to his father bringing dead animals home. As a 10-year-old, he would silently observe as the animals were gutted and then resurrected — as if by magic. At times, an animal brought in would have been dead long enough for maggots to have infested it. Chaman would wear a face mask to help his father take its guts out. The smell of rotting flesh would still assail his senses, making him throw up.

Such was his early life as the son of a taxidermist.

Now, 50 years later, Chaman runs a shop in Karachi’s Saddar area where he sells bodies of animals preserved through taxidermy. His 28-year-old son does for him what he used to do for his father — gutting dead animals.

After the guts are removed, empty hides are salted and kept in a freezer to stop their decay, says Chaman. Then a mannequin is created either with dried and chopped wheat stalks, plaster of Paris, fibre or wood and the animal hide is then pasted on it. “The eyes are recreated using marble or glass,” he says.

His shop – no more than six feet wide and six feet long – is located at the end of an old shopping arcade in Karachi and is crammed with a variety of animals and birds. Not a single shelf is empty inside it. Chaman has even placed a few deer and goats on the foothpath outside.

Three blue and gold macaws hanging upside down are the first to catch a visitor’s attention. “These macaws are from [the owner of Bahria Town] Malik Riaz‘s zoo that caught fire [nearly a month ago],” says Chaman. “The birds (still in a retrievable condition) were sent [to us] for restoration.” Riaz, he says, will display them in a museum of taxidermy that he is building.

Birds, according to Chaman, are tough to recreate since their feathers get destroyed easily and their skin is as thin as paper. He picks up a scarlet macaw and holds it upright. “I have fixed its feathers but I am yet to put life into it. He is going to sit on a branch, holding a guava in its claws,” he says. “I will make it look alive.”

Next to the macaws hangs a crocodile. Glass shelves display other animals — monkeys, a wild cat, water snakes and deer. Parrots of different types have a pride of place in the shop that reeks of chemicals. “The bodies of animals are sent to us from zoos and by people who have either hunted them or kept them as pets,” says Chaman.

His clientele also includes science colleges and museums but his earnings depend mostly on consignments from trophy hunters. “Our income is never stable,” he says. “Sometimes we earn 20,000 rupees [in a month] and sometimes 50,000 rupees. It is all a matter of luck.”

Chaman has obtained an official permit – required for all taxidermists to operate legally – and denies using illegal means to obtain dead animals. According to a 2009 news report, however, he was arrested after 31 hides of different protected animals – including those of a zebra, a lion, dozens of otters, squirrels, falcons and pelicans – were recovered from his shop.

“I recovered a truckload of animals from Chaman’s store but he still managed to avoid jail owing to his political connections,” says Bashir Ahmed Sheikh, an inspector working with the Sindh Wildlife Department. “It is a crime to stuff animals that have been hunted illegally,” he says. Unfortunately, he adds, taxidermists often violate this provision.

As a preservation technique, taxidermy has existed since ancient times. In Egypt many centuries ago, these techniques were used for the mummification of dead pharaohs. Today, it is mostly used for preserving and displaying dead animals.

In Pakistan, taxidermy itself requires preservation. Those engaged in it complain of a lack of demand and a drastic decline in earnings. Chaman and his family are among the few who are still left in the business.

As are Muhammad Asif Raza Awan and his family. He has been pursuing alternative medicine and taxidermy simultaneously since the age of 13, after having learnt them from his father. Taxidermy, he says, is not a means to earn a livelihood for him, but an art form passed down to him through generations. “Most of my high-profile taxidermy work with deer, tigers and elephants can be found at the Sind Club museum,” he says proudly.

A life-size tiger dummy welcomes visitors outside Awan’s shop-cum-clinic situated opposite St Patrick’s Cathedral in Saddar, Karachi. Awan’s practice of alternative medicine is his main source of income but, according to him, animals too have a close association with it. “We use falcon fat to create ointments,” he says pointing to a taxidermied figurine of a falcon in a glass case next to him. “We use their wings, claws and other body parts too [in alternative medicine].”

Awan sometimes receives bodies of animals killed by natural disasters from the forest department. He has a contract with the Karachi Zoo as well for receiving dead animals.

Sometimes customers also approach Awan to purchase animal skins, wings and nails to use in sorcery and black magic. “They come to me and ask for odd objects like the tongue of some animal,” he says. “None of them openly declare that they want to use animal parts for black magic but what else will they do with them?”

A government officer, his sons and friends hunt black partridges every Sunday from November till January. Equipped with a government permit for hunting and carrying guns, they drive in four-wheelers from Karachi to a desert near Tando Adam, located more than 200 kilometres towards the north-east.

Shots are fired as soon as the partridges take flight. As a bullet hits a bird, it leaves a burst of feathers in the sky. The hunters enjoy a meal prepared with the hunted birds. Their skin and feathers are later handed over to a taxidermist for the restoration of their bodies.

The officer is fastidious about how his hunt undergoes taxidermy. “Perfection in taxidermy depends upon your taxidermist,” he says. “The taxidermist I go to has learnt the art from Canada and charges a lot for his services.”

The officer also explains how the body of dead animals used to be recreated with plaster of Paris but, of late, new and better techniques have emerged. He taps on the body of a blackbuck — illegal to hunt without a licence. It is hollow inside, making it easy to lift and transport.

Performed with new techniques and materials, taxidermied animals can last many years but they still require regular maintenance. Phenyl tablets, for instance, have to be placed in their ears to kill insects that may eat into their bodies.

A pair of black partridges – placed inside a glass box – decorate the lounge of the officer’s residence in Karachi’s Defence area. The walls of the lounge are mounted with many animals or their parts, including the heads of a hog deer, an ibex and a markhor. A glass casing contains a houbara bustard with its neck slightly tilted and eyes wide open.

Only some of these animals were hunted legally. Others, particularly the houbara and the hog deer, were hunted without official permission.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

This article was originally published in the Herald's February 2019 issue under the headline 'Still life'. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Vendors at the Karachi Farmers Market sit calmly in front of their stock of organic vegetables stacked neatly on tables. Customers stroll by, trying to gauge which table has the best produce. Men are dressed comfortably in shorts and jeans while women look casual yet stylish with their branded bags tucked under their arms and their sunglasses perched on top of their heads. Laughter of children running around can be heard over soothing music playing in the background. With omelettes being made at some stalls and some vendors selling fresh juices, the market looks like a food festival.

This is how a small group of people, who have switched to consuming organic food, spend their Sunday mornings. They believe organic vegetables will reduce the health risks non-organic ones expose them to. Most importantly, they are willing to pay extra.

Noorul Amin is the manager of a two-and-a-half acre organic farm near Dumlotti wells, a British-era water supply scheme situated on the north-eastern outskirts of Karachi. The plants at the farm are tiny and sparse and their yield measly. During an early morning inspection in November, he picks an eggplant. It has no sheen, its skin is not smooth and its size is small.

Amin has to ensure the vegetables being grown at the farm survive ants, pests and other blights. Three other workers help him tend to the crops. He has trained them in organic methods to protect the produce without using chemicals.

By midday, Amin will head to a conventional farm of his own. The 18-acre piece of land is blooming with cauliflowers and eggplants ready to be plucked. The vegetables are glistening under the sun — looking like a still life painting. No ants, bees or any insects are in sight.

Industrially-produced and chemical-based fertilisers that give plants the nutrients they need to grow faster and bigger are an essential ingredient at inorganic farms. “[These] fertilisers to plants are what hormonal injections are to chickens,” Amin explains. And they can also be as dangerous as steroids.

A study conducted in 2015 by the American-Eurasian Journal of Toxicological Sciences in Algeria on 34 farmers revealed that the use of fertilisers led to high nitrate contents in food which, when consumed over a long period of time, created toxicity in blood. It also caused respiratory ailments, headaches and skin rashes among farmers.

Organic farmers, therefore, avoid using fertilisers. “Even the manure we use in organic farming comes from animals who are not given hormonal injections,” says Amin.

Still there are things he cannot control. The same tractors that plough non-organic farms are used at organic farms. “We wash them before using them but it is still likely that some chemicals stuck in tractor wheels get transferred to organic crops,” Amin says.

Buying a tractor, costing as much as 1.2 million rupees, for exclusive use at a small organic farm does not make economic sense.

Muzammil Niazi’s farm has been operating in Karachi’s Malir area for the past 10 years and is spread out over six acres. He grows vegetables and salads such as rocket leaves, coriander, green onion, radish and eggplant. He also raises goats and chickens on organic feed.

“We do not say we are 100 per cent organic,” he says. “Our label instead states that we grow our vegetables organically.” There is an inorganic farm right next to his — nothing separating the two except a few feet of land. “If pesticides are sprayed on the other farm, they are likely to reach my crops in small amounts.”

Niazi, who is in his seventies, lives on his farm with his wife Rabia Khan. The vegetables they grow are sold in many super markets in Karachi as well as online. The two are also the founders of the Karachi Farmers Market.

Niazi’s farms differ in many ways from neighbouring ones that use sewage water for irrigation. Niazi, on the other hand, irrigates his vegetables with fresh water extracted from the ground and sends water samples to a lab every four months to check if there are any harmful pathogens or germs in it.

He also uses certified organic seeds, often procured from abroad, manure and natural pesticides. “We spray our own pesticides on the crops,” he explains. These contain chillies and garlic, that blind insects, and tobacco, that makes them faint. He also uses insect-eating plants.

“These methods do not hurt the human body,” Niazi says. “Bottles of chemical pesticides, on the other hand, have human skulls drawn on them. What does that tell? That those substances are lethal.”

The World Health Organisation (WHO) verifies this. According to a recent report, around three million cases of pesticide poisoning occur globally each year, leading to nearly 220,000 deaths in developing countries.

Crop rotation also distinguishes organic farming from conventional farming. “If we have spinach on one plot today, we will have some other vegetable in that plot in the next crop cycle,” says Niazi. Such rotation gives soil the time it needs to recuperate. “If the current crop is taking iron from the soil, the next crop should take fibre instead,” Niazi explains.

The practices he follows at his farm are mandatory for any farmer wishing to sell their produce at the Karachi Farmers Market. Since there is no government authority in Pakistan to certify a produce as organic or otherwise, those operating the market every Sunday regulate it on their own.

[“T]here are about 5,000 small organic farms in Pakistan,” says Qasim Tareen, one of the founders of the Pakistan Organic Association (POA), that is yet to be registered. The organisation was formed nearly two months ago to protect and promote organic farming in the country. “We need the government to support these farms,” he says.

This is an important cause, Tareen argues, because organic farming has noticeable benefits for the environment. It reduces the use of fossil fuels for the production of fertilisers and pesticides and it also consumes less water. “Primary nutrients in chemical fertilisers require ten times more water than organic ones,” according to Tareen. “If we switch to organic farming, we will not have a shortage of water.”

He also believes there are ways and means to increase crop yields without using fertilisers and pesticides. However, he says, that will first and foremost need lands not already polluted by chemicals. Such lands are available aplenty, he says, in mountainous areas in the north of the country and also along the Pak-Afghan border.

And many existing small organic farms are already showing what can be possible. “They are producing four to eight tonnes of produce every month.”

These farms are located either in Sindh or Hunza (in Gilgit-Baltistan) but “most of their produce never reaches the domestic market”. Almost all of it is exported.

Tareen’s organisation is currently working on devising a government-led system of certification for organic products being grown in Pakistan. It has approached the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council, a government entity that once had a division by the name of the National Institute of Organic Agriculture. The council so far has shown no interest in devising a certification process, he alleges.

However, an official at the council states that the institute of organic agriculture shut down long ago. He also does not have any knowledge of a certification regime being set up.

Imagine picking an eggplant that looks bright and beautiful. As you cut it to cook, you find an insect nestled inside. Disgusted, you throw the whole thing away. No one wants to eat pest-infested vegetables.

Rabia Khan believes a pest in a vegetable does not make it inedible. The produce can be consumed after the insect is removed, she says. “Agricultural industries have brainwashed people into believing that vegetables and fruits have to be perfect. It is natural for them to have blemishes,” she says.

Sitting on a charpoy on a recent weekday, Rabia Khan is wearing a hat and branded running shoes. With a pink digital watch adorning her wrist, she looks like someone who means business.

Organic farmers, she says, have a number of disadvantages. For one, according to her, they have to pay more for irrigating their crops with uncontaminated water. “The government can fix the problem by creating a farm sprinkler system fund.” A sprinkler large enough to irrigate an acre of land costs 200,000 rupees and is not affordable for a small farmer without help from the government, she adds.

Organic crops also take longer to mature. A mint plant grown inorganically is ready for harvesting in 40 days but it will take almost two months when produced organically. “Sometimes we are unable to control pests so a whole crop goes to waste,” says Niazi.

“Organic vegetables are expensive because they are difficult to grow.”

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

This article was published in the Herald's December 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Bahar Ali was five years old when his older brother and uncle started training him to become a street performer. “They would massage my muscles with oil and make me do different exercises so that my body became flexible,” he says sitting on a charpoy in a large slum off Multan Road on the southern edge of Lahore.

He has just finished a performance and his white kurta is drenched in sweat. His voice is low – barely audible – and he is so tired that he just wants to go home and sleep. “As you get older you want things to become simple,” he says.

On the contrary, this particular performance has been extremely arduous. Bahar Ali, who appears to be in his sixties, had to do tricks that he had not performed for 15 years. Together with his son and a nephew, he tried to pass through a steel ring about one foot in diameter but the trick did not go as planned. The performers got stuck in the ring and managed to get out only with help from the audience members.

There is consensus among Bahar Ali’s gypsy community – known commonly as qalandars (mendicants) or baazigars (tricksters) – that passing through the ring is one of the hardest tricks to perform. It is usually the final act in a performance — other tricks being a build-up to it.

Yet, it is just one of the many body-contorting tasks their forefathers used to perform routinely — such as making a human tower.

No longer as supple and skilled as their ancestors, many of them have started using monkeys and goats in their street shows. Bahar Ali did the same but all his monkeys died three years ago and he had no option but to go back to performing himself. By that time, two of his sons were too old to learn body-bending tricks so he started training his youngest son, Ahmed Ali, to perform along with him — rather reluctantly because the boy had to be taken out of school. “He had to make a sacrifice for the sake of his family,” says Bahar Ali, looking at his 13-year-old son.

It took Ahmed Ali around three years to train. He has been performing for around five years now. His favourite trick – that gets him the loudest applause – is one in which he stands on two metal stools, bends over, arching his back like a suspension bridge, and picks up a 10 rupee note from the ground with his mouth.

The training for the trick was long and hard.

When Ahmed Ali was a little child, his father would make him bend backwards while standing on a charpoy. Then he proceeded to standing on two bricks to do the bending and finally came the small wiry stools.

The father-son duo build-up a lot of anticipation among their audience before they perform the trick. Bahar Ali asks a child – usually of the same height and age as Ahmed Ali – from among the viewers to come forward and stand on the stools. The child tries to balance himself but fails because the rickety stools are not balanced well on the uneven ground.

Bahar Ali asks him if he will try to pick up the currency note from the ground with his mouth.

The child answers emphatically: “No.”

Bahar Ali remarks: “Yes, this is a difficult task.” Then he points to Ahmed Ali and says: “But this boy here will show you how it is done.”

Ahmed Ali immediately gets onto the stools.

“How will you pick this 10 rupee note from the ground, with your hand or with your mouth?” the father asks the son.

“With my mouth,” replies the son.

“This will be a difficult task,” the father warns.

“I will do it,” the son responds confidently, looking intently at the ground.

Ahmed Ali flexes his shoulders, getting ready for the task. As another performer beats a drum, he begins to arch his back – bending over and over and over – but fails to reach the ground. He gets back up with a jerk.

“I told you this will be difficult,” Bahar Ali says to him.

“It is worth doing again if it is difficult,” says Ahmed Ali before he makes another attempt.

The drum beats. The audience looks on with mouths agape and eyes fixed on the young performer. The boy bends his body backwards, sweat dripping from his forehead. Muscles on his face become taut with strain — and here he goes, reaching the ground, picking up the note with his mouth and coming back up on the stools in one seamless motion.

The audience applauds and throws more money on the ground. The man beating the drum gets up and collects it.

When Ahmed Ali first tried the trick at a mela – a public fair – in Faisalabad district’s Jaranwala town, he fell over and hurt his head but he finds it amusing now. “I find the trick enjoyable, almost relaxing,” he says with the hint of a smile.

The mela in Jaranwala, held every spring, is a highlight on Bahar Ali’s annual calendar. Performers from many parts of Punjab get together there and exchange their expertise and experiences. “There is plenty of water to drink and bathe,” says Ahmed Ali as he explains what he likes the most about the mela.

Until recently, qalandars and baazigars used to roam around the whole of central Punjab, setting up camp in open spaces and performing a variety of acts — doing gymnastics, spitting fire and creating optical illusions. Most of them have settled down in cities and towns now, mainly because they want to educate their children.

Mananwala, a small town near Sheikhupura, has a large settlement of qalandars who have given up their nomadic lifestyle. Some of them live in temporary huts made from old cloth stretched over a wooden scaffolding. Others, who saved money when times were good for them, live in brick-and-mortar houses.

Raqib Ali and his family are among the second group. His muscular body suggests that he has been through some serious physical exercises. He can easily walk on his hands, legs lifted straight up in the air. He can also balance a man on his head, another on his thighs and yet another on his shoulders.

“These are relatively less dangerous tricks than what my father and his father used to do,” says Raqib Ali who is in his late twenties. Due to a lost appetite to learn harder acts, younger performers do not have the skills their ancestors had perfected over centuries. “We have no idea how to go about those,” says Raqib Ali.

Some other acts are no longer performed because there is not enough space available. Jumping through burning metal hoops or doing acrobatics mid-air on a tight rope require large empty spaces which have been taken over by crops in villages and by roads and commercial and industrial activities in towns and cities.

Raqib Ali’s family used to run its own small circus but they had to shut it down around a decade ago. His brothers have shifted to Lahore where they work as construction labourers. He himself does odd jobs throughout the year, performing only in schools or at melas — and, that too, if he is specially invited to perform.

He cites security reasons for having to draw curtains on the circus.

“We are often treated as a security threat,” says Khalid Husnain, another performer in Mananwala. Even reaching out to influential politicians in advance does not guarantee that authorities will allow a performance to go ahead, he says.

Husnain, in his thirties, is one of the few qalandars who still maintain an itinerant work routine. Along with his son, he travels from village to village and mela to mela entertaining people.

While on tour, his son is always scared of getting arrested. “My father was once arrested on charges of making my son do child labour so whenever my son sees a policeman, he becomes very afraid, fearing that they may arrest me,” says Husnain.

He believes the shutting down of travelling circuses and religious and administrative restrictions on melas are major reasons why his profession is in a decline.

Bahar Ali points to another factor: modern technology. Cell phones and cable television, he says, have completely changed the idea of public entertainment. People can now entertain themselves in the comfort of their homes or, perhaps even more conveniently, with their handheld smart phones — whenever and wherever they like.

Bahar Ali, however, is determined to carry on. “We will continue to perform as long as there are people who applaud for us.”

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

This article was published in the Herald's October 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Mohanas (fishermen) have lived along Manchar Lake for generations. Their mud houses with dirt floors and cracking walls suggest that they have not done well over all this time. Their small villages, dotted along the lake’s banks, do not know such luxuries as toilets and tap water. Sewage meanders through them and garbage is dumped everywhere.

Male Mohanas leave their homes at 4 am to fish in the lake. They come back at 5 pm. All they get for a 13-hour work day is a few hundred rupees each, paid strictly in accordance with the amount of fish they have caught. No fish, no money.

They work for contractors who have purchased fishing leases from the government. Mohanas give all their catch to the contractors who auction some of it at local markets and send the rest to Karachi.

“Around two decades ago, each Mohana would catch so much fish that he would earn a decent amount of money every day,” says Shahnawaz, a swarthy-faced, middle-aged fisherman in crumpled brown clothes. “Now they will count themselves lucky if their daily catch fetches them 250 rupees each.”

A source in Sehwan confirms this drastic decrease in the catch. Only 200 kilogrammes of fish caught from Manchar Lake is making it to Karachi these days, he says.

And the variety of fish has also dwindled alarmingly — from as many as 200 type of fish in the 1980s to just one: Pomfret.

Manchar Lake is stretched over a tract of land that starts a few kilometres west of Sehwan – where the famous 12th century Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar is buried – and extends in the northwest to reach the foot of the Kirthar mountain range. It was once Asia’s largest shallow fresh water reservoir, recharged by streams running down from Kirthar as well as by natural drains that link it with the Indus river in the east.

The amount of water flowing into the lake from the former source is heavily dependent on rain. Next to no rain over the last few years in the Kirthar mountains has reduced the lake to only 60 square kilometres – just one fourth of what it would be if it was all full of water. Low river flows for most months of the year have meant that the Indus, too, does not have enough water to recharge the lake.

The shortage of river water flowing into the lake has also had a negative impact on the growth of fish. Local Mohanas talk nostalgically about 1976, the year a heavy flood in the Indus brought in so many fish of so many varieties that nobody complained of a low catch for the next 20 years or so.

Some fishing contractors became so rich then that they would literally burn cash. According to a popular local legend, their favourite way to celebrate an event such as a wedding was to stuff a wad of currency notes at the end of a gun’s barrel and then shoot the gun so money was sent flying in the air.

Goth Haji Khair Din Mallah, a village where Shahnawaz lives with many other Mohanas, is located around 35 kilometres to the west of Sehwan. A fish market and some shops selling groceries, medicine and other daily use items are situated close to it.

The place where most Mohanas enter the lake is also close by. Marked by a cement pillar used as a water gauge and a few flights of stairs to climb down from the bank into the lake, it has clear signs that a lot of water once flowed here. Today, the pillar stands amid dry land and the stairs descend into a shallow water course wide enough for a small canoe to move through it.

A vast patch of cracked brown mud, criss-crossed by narrow channels of heavily polluted water, stretches to the southeast from this entry point as far as one can see. Until a few weeks ago, the channels were so narrow and shallow that Mohanas could not use them to row even their small canoes to the shore. They had to wade through slush for many kilometres before they could reach the canoes in the mornings, coming back the same way in the evenings along with their catch. This changed only a few weeks ago when Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah had those channels dredged in the wake of the July 25 general elections.

An abandoned construction site is visible further west from the village. Called Zero Point and reachable by a bridge built over a drain, it was damaged badly in the 2010 floods. Various machines and tools are rusting in humid air. These are remnants of a government project called the Right Bank Outfall Drain (RBOD).

One of the main objectives of the project was to carry saline water from Sindh’s canal-irrigated northwestern areas all the way to the sea in the south. It was also meant to absorb hill torrents from Kirthar and recharge Manchar Lake and other natural water reservoirs in the area with non-saline water.

The first phase of the project was meant to link a pumping station in Miro Khan town of Qambar Shahdad Kot district – roughly 185 kilometres to the north of Manchar Lake – with Sehwan. Its construction started in July 1994 and was originally scheduled to be completed at the end of June 1998. That deadline was never met. The phase remains incomplete even today, with the latest revised date for its completion being November 30, 2019. Its cost, in the meanwhile, has escalated from 4.395 billion rupees to 17.505 billion rupees.

The 273-kilometre long second phase of the project was to start in Sehwan and end up at the sea. Work on it has been stalled for many years due to differences between the federal and Sindh governments over its financing.

Since RBOD’s first phase is still incomplete and the second one has not even started, the project has resulted in an unregulated flow of saline water – contaminated with salts and chemicals dangerous for aquatic, vegetative and even human life – into Manchar Lake. Those dependent on the lake for their livelihood have filed court petitions, organised protest rallies, involved non-governmental organisations in their efforts and submitted appeals to politicians and government officials. These efforts have yielded little results beyond a few news items in the media, some research papers by academics and environmentalists and a report by an inquiry commission set up by the Supreme Court of Pakistan that last year urged the provincial government of Sindh to address the problem immediately.

As a follow up to the commission’s recommendations, Chief Justice Saqib Nisar came to visit the lake late June this year. People lined up near Goth Haji Khair Din Mallah in the blistering heat to see him, with the expectation that he would listen to their grievances and address them urgently. He could not stop for long though. He made a quick round of the lake’s shore and went off to attend a dinner with lawyers in Larkana.

A canoe takes around 15 minutes from Goth Haji Khair Din Mallah to reach a few dozen boathouses deep in the middle of Manchar Lake. These belong to members of the Shaikh caste — a well-off community that possesses fishing leases.

Made of solid wood with intricate floral patterns carved in planks that mark its perimeter, each boathouse costs as much as two million rupees. It is a complete residential unit, with multiple compartments for various purposes. One corner is used as a kitchen, another area is reserved for children to play and a third part is meant to store clothes and other valuables. There are no rooms and doors in the boathouses though. Everyone sleeps in the open.

Life on a boathouse is not much different from what it is in nearby villages. Boys go to schools in Sehwan. Girls usually stay at home to help their mothers in domestic chores. The provincial government has provided solar power panels to each boathouse to power a couple of lights, a fan and, in some cases, a television set that receives signals through a dish antenna. Many families have migratory Siberian birds as their pets. Perched on small wooden boards that float on the lake, these birds are usually tied to the boathouses.

Atta Muhammad lives in one of the boathouses with his extended family. Dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez with his black hair slicked backwards, he has the air of someone with authority.

The residents of the boathouses use the lake’s water for all kinds of purposes — cooking, washing and bathing. They bring drinking water in large plastic cans from villages on the shore where the government has installed reverse osmosis filtration plants – including one at Goth Haji Khair Din Mallah – after the 2010 floods. When their water supply runs out, sometimes they also drink from the lake.

Muhammad married his wife, Rukhsana, back in 1986, when the lake’s water sparkled and fish abounded in it. “There was a time I could make 5,000 [rupees] per day,” he says. Now the water’s colour is metallic brown, mixed with corrosive salts that cause a lot of damage to boathouses, and poisonous chemicals that do not allow fish to grow.

As Rukhsana prepares a meal in the kitchen, Muhammad explains how these problems have forced hundreds of families of his community to shift outside the lake. About 14 years ago, he says, there were around 2,000 boathouses in the lake. Now there are only 50 or so left, he says.

One day, even these will be gone.

Mohanas, however, do not have the resources to move. So, they will still stay. As long as there is water in Manchar Lake. As long as there are fish in that water. It does not matter if the lake is drying and the fish in its depleting water are growing on poisonous chemicals.

The writer was a staffer at the Herald.

This article was published in the Herald's September 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The hulks have gone quiet. Now that the thumping beat of their mechanical hearts is dead, the call for Friday prayer echoes more loudly in the old locomotive shed at Peshawar than it did before. Walk past them and their bodies radiate heat, parts ticking as they cool down. For now, they sleep over the tracks, their bulky presence intimidating for the sheer power it exudes, the air around them thick with the odour of diesel and lube oil — musk for the machines.

Khalid Khan, an engine fitter, emerges out of a gloomy pit under an engine and blinks at the bright wide world. He has been inspecting the locomotive’s ‘under-gear’ system where dust and smoke get sucked in copious quantities, leaving an oily layer of black tar that only washes off the hands with a solvent. The sight of a frail, bearded man working beneath a juggernaut, all 105 tonnes of it, is unnerving but Khan seems inured to the looming locomotives, having grown old working with them. Every morning he is here at eight to restore exhausted engines back to health, sending them off to another journey to another place.

All this running around, up and down the country, means that even a 2,000-horsepower engine needs regular maintenance. When it finally comes to a stop here, its parts wobbly and clanking, its entrails – pipes, pinions and pistons – laced with gunk formed by diesel and dust, it is Khan’s job to fix it. In doing this, he is not alone.

To the ordinary person, train stations are the face of railways, crowded settings for journeys beginning or ending. But beyond warm welcomes and sad goodbyes, there are locomotive sheds where engines are not chugging along the tracks, whistling to announce an imminent arrival or departure. Here they come to be serviced. “Where stations deal with railway operations, we are all about the maintenance of locomotives and the response to emergencies, such as derailments, on a daily basis,” says Daud-ur-Rehman, a loco foreman who has been working at the locomotive shed in Peshawar for 17 years.

He has 70 men working under him, deputed for three shifts of eight hours each. His office in the shed is a mini-museum of railway memorabilia. He sits in the gloom of a high-roof room behind a teak wood table, perhaps as old as the building itself, covered with green felt. Replicas of the legendary Khyber Steam Safari, that once ran between Peshawar and Khyber Agency, and powered models of locomotives rest on the mantelshelf of a big fireplace in the corner of the room.

Outside, the shed’s interior is dappled with sunlight streaming in from the tall wide arches of its colonial facade. High above, a roof of corrugated, galvanised iron is held aloft by a web of steel shafts. This place, with its Raj-era furniture, cool shadows, blue-grey and white paint, is frozen in time. The shed was built in 1919 — as is mentioned on a water tower with square metal tanks outside the shed.

Until recently, two broad-gauge steam engines were parked by the tower. Together, they pulled and pushed the safari train — the touristic revival of a passenger service that started in 1925, but was stopped in 1982. Those engines are gone now, replaced by two vintage narrow-gauge steam locomotives rusting amidst wild vegetation — museum pieces with no protection from the elements.

Daily readying of the safari train was a lot of work, says Rashid Ahmad, a clerk at the shed. The staff had to come in at 2 am to fill up its engines with furnace oil and light them up. The engines would roll out for the railway station by six in the morning, ready to journey to Khyber Agency. Tourists, both local and foreigners, would leave from the cantonment station or were picked up from Jamrud or Shahgai Station in Khyber Agency.

Only the lucky few got into the safari train due to limited space inside it and its infrequent trips. It ran through Peshawar airport’s runway – a major tourist attraction – 34 mountain tunnels and 92 bridges dating back to the British Raj for what the Time magazine called “a journey through time and history”.

But this was when the railway track was in working condition and Landi Kotal was safe to travel to.

These days, the shed operations are all about maintaining hybrid (electric-diesel) engines and keeping a red relief train with multiple carriages ready for emergency response to accidents. Locomotives coming in from the railway station are turned around on a turntable on wheels, an amazing feat involving a single man pushing around the many tonnes of a locomotive as if it were a die-cast toy.

Figures for 2017 show that Pakistan Railway has a fleet of 448 diesel-electric locomotives. Many of them have been imported from the United States. In recent years, China has donated many engines, seeking to bolster Pakistan Railway’s capacity for transporting goods through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Pakistan also manufactures its own locomotives at Risalpur in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, incorporating technology acquired from locomotives designed by foreign companies.

The shed in Peshawar maybe small compared to those in Rohri, Lahore, Karachi and Rawalpindi. Its routine, however, is daunting all the same.

Shed-man Mukhtiar Ahmad has to write a report for every incoming and outgoing locomotive. He has to keep everyone informed in the control room at the railway station in Peshawar and onwards at the central control room in Lahore about locomotives serviced and set in motion, drivers assigned and emergencies handled. Jan Mohammad, a mechanical supervisor, has to be there to oversee the maintenance of every engine’s air-brake system, cooling system and turbocharger, making sure there are no water or oil leakages. “The mechanical work is the heaviest,” he says.

On an average workday, the staff here services and refuels 10 locomotives, spending about three hours on each. “A typical day at the shed starts at 6 am,” says Abdul Jabbar Shah, an electrical supervisor who has been working at the shed for 10 years. “The supervisors and the shed-man have to be here before everyone else to plan the day’s schedule.”

After marking attendance, they hold a meeting to discuss the distribution for the day’s work. By the time the first locomotive rolls in, they are already set to work on it.

Khan, the fitter, knocks the engine’s cowcatcher with his wrench, tightens a nut here, oiling a bolt there. He cleans dust and grime from a jumble of complex body parts using a rag. A cleaning master gets busy wiping the glass of the driver’s cabin.

Hour after hour, the staff here fuss over engines. With their soiled clothes and grime-encrusted hands. These are the ‘prime movers’ who keep Pakistan Railway on track.

This article was published in the Herald's August 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

I follow the faint traces of a river, stretched across a barren and rocky yet captivating landscape. Winding along the river and skirting around the mountains, I travel by a road that could be one of the most treacherous in the country. By the time I arrive in Bamboret, I have been tossed from one side of my vehicle to the other an infinite number of times.

Bamboret is one of three major valleys in Kalash, where the Kalash community has been living for millennia. The legend goes that they are descendants of Greek soldiers who came here as part of Alexander the Great’s Indian campaign in 326 BC — although the validity of this claim is disputed.

When I reach a village in the valley, it is already evening and almost pitch-dark except for some lights in a few distant windows sprinkled across the valley. There are no streetlights here. In fact, there are no streets. The houses are scattered and it is difficult for outsiders to move around. Without help from a guide or local resident, one would easily become lost in the maze of hilly paths. Or worse: those not accustomed to the terrain may find it hazardous to walk.

The following morning, a continuous thumping of drums echoes across the valley. I follow the sound and approach a small gathering halfway up a mountain. A few children, gathered around a drum player, are singing and dancing. Their elders are watching and guiding them. Clad in colourful costumes and elaborate headdresses, they seem to be part of an extended family. They put their arms around each other and move their legs back and forth with the beat of the drum, singing songs in a local dialect.

Moments later another small group joins them, and then another. The crowd gets bigger and bigger. Soon, scores of men and women of all ages are partaking in the singing and dancing. By noon, they move to another venue. Their seemingly unceasing, repetitive dance and song routines are part of an annual Kalash festival, called Chilam Joshi. It is meant to celebrate the arrival of spring.

An even larger crowd, roughly 1,000 people, gathers to watch them, pushing past each other to get the best view. The onlookers are equipped with selfie sticks and cameras, taking an infinite stream of photos and tagging them on their social media accounts.

Many visitors then move to the nearby Kalasha Dur Museum, constructed by Greek volunteers (2002-2004) with help from the local community. It is built exactly like a traditional Kalash home, using only traditional materials such as wood, rock and mud.

Akram Hussain, its director and chief guide, is a local Kalash. He started working with the Greeks back in 2001, overseeing construction of the building and putting together artefacts. He patiently walks the tourists through thousands of years of Kalash history manifested in various artefacts on display at the museum.

The Kalash have withstood much persecution through the ages. At one point, they feared total annihilation at the hands of other communities, so they abandoned their villages and moved into caves for an unspecified period of time.

Weather has been their other big enemy. Winter is unforgiving in the high mountainous valleys of Chitral. The cold is worsened by incessant rain and landslides that force everyone indoors for months.

Tough physical conditions are only a part of the problems that local residents face. Healthcare facilities are non-existent and children walk on foot for many kilometres to attend school. They mostly survive on subsistence farming and livestock-rearing, but the two activities suffered a severe jolt due to heavy floods in 2010. The impact of the disaster is still visible in the shape of destroyed irrigation facilities and smashed bridges across streams.

Hussian says he has seen his valley change over the years. Roads, admittedly narrow and often dilapidated, have linked the Kalash region with the rest of Chitral and nearby districts of Dir, and then onwards to Peshawar and Islamabad. The availability of motor transport has allowed the Kalash to move to big cities, both for education and work. Their numbers in their own land, therefore, have been dwindling rapidly — from 50,000 or so back in the 1990s to around 4,100 now.

Electricity became a problem after the 2015 flood, which washed away the local power plant. A new one has been constructed near Ayun that delivers sufficient power to the villages. There is another in the works as well. And many local residents have mobile phones, connected to the rest of the world just like anywhere else.

With these modern amenities have come a lot of outsiders. The bulk ascend to the valleys from the plains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab during the three days of the Chilam Joshi festival, moving from one village to another, following festivities around the valley. Visitors often do not have any knowledge or awareness of local customs, traditions and history. They treat the festival – essentially a centuries-old religious ritual – as a show put together for their entertainment. Many of them behave insensitively towards the Kalash people, particularly towards young women who are seen as legitimate targets of ogling and, in worse cases, harassment.

Imran Kabir, a Kalash man who represents his community in Chitral’s elected district council, says outsiders often ask him questions about his religious beliefs. Many want to know why he looks different from them. He handles these queries with charm and wit, not wasting any opportunity to demolish the wrongly held perceptions about his community.

Some other outsiders have been even more hostile.

Chitral is just across the border from Afghanistan’s province of Nuristan, a stronghold of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban for years. Their influence in the area has forced many Kalash families to either hide their non-Muslim identity or, as in most cases, convert to Islam. In September 2009, a Greek volunteer, Athanassios Lerounis, who had been working on the local museum for the previous 15 years, was kidnapped by a group of masked men associated with the Taliban. He was reportedly taken to Nuristan where he was kept for months before his release, a result of a deal between his kidnappers and Pakistani authorities.

The security situation remains fragile even today. At times, there seems to be more security personnel in a village than local residents.

After the festival ends, villagers come together to pick up trash left behind by tourists. Many of them believe tourism can benefit their region but they also point out that it needs to be managed better.

Tourists spend a lot of money on boarding, lodging, meals and transport besides requiring local guides and drivers. Their increasing presence in recent years has given a spurt to construction activities in the valleys.

Most of the money thus generated, however, seems to bypass the Kalash community. A lot of it ends up in the pockets of tour companies based in big cities as well as the owners of hotel and inns, who mostly happen to be non-Kalash.

The Kalash suffer the burden of the trouble outsiders bring with them, yet reap few of the benefits that come with tourism.

The writer is a graduate of Oxford Brookes University where he studied film, photography and architecture.

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of the Herald. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

The rain is a spoilsport. Literally.

This May, men thronged the polo stadium in Chitral city for days, dressed in their best for a tournament that had the commoner as excited as the aristocrat with princely lineage. Youth strutted around in feather-crested woolen caps, the pakol — the kind they made a shy Diana, that goddess with a pensive gaze, wear when she came visiting in 1991. As is often the case, flights to northern Pakistan had been cancelled the day of her visit due to inclement weather. The princess surprised everyone by turning up in a private plane.

Diana is long gone. And to life in northern Pakistan, polo is as much of a constant as the mountains. But this year has thrown up a surprise. The annual District Polo Tournament played in May has been rechristened “Mulki”, the local word for the British political agent who traditionally organised the game in Chitral, the princely state, under the Raj. Even though polo tournaments are annually held in the district, the original “Mulki Tournament” was discontinued after 1969 when Chitral, and the neighbouring Dir and Swat in the north, became part of Pakistan.

Every year in May, polo tournaments in the district have local teams competing to qualify for “Polo at the Peak” — the big game at Shandur in July, where teams from Chitral and the neighbouring Gilgit-Baltistan battle for polo-primacy. For days now, the final game of the Mulki Tournament – on whose outcome hinged that qualification – has been cancelled as day after day, the sky darkens and the drizzle threatens to become a downpour. Crowds leave the stadium crestfallen.

Then comes Friday and the sun. Folks in streets and offices wrap up the day’s business early in anticipation of the game after prayers. Above the maples and the mountains, the blue sky is still piebald with cumulus clouds but the sun – with some help from favourable winds – seems determined to resist their billowing advance. The outlook for the final game is shiny!

At 2 pm in the afternoon, all roads lead to the district polo ground. It hums, this hive of people jostling for space on seats and stairs along the edge of the stadium. Across the ground, facing the club-seating for the police and district officials, and the Mehtar, the Prince of Chitral, are two stalls with the scoreboard between them. There sit the bands with trumpets and dhols — cheerleaders for the two teams playing today, the Chitral Police versus the Chitral Scouts form the Frontier Corps. Above the stalls flutter the flags – Pakistan, the Police and the Frontier Corps – with Tirchmir in the backdrop, in all its charcoal glory. At the far edge of the ground, players and their ponies stand in loose knots, bodies tense in anticipation of the imminent game, like ranks of soldiers quietly priming themselves for an assault.

And then with the strike of the mallets from players, the game gets underway. Amid a frenzy of galloping motion, the dusty air aquiver with the rumble of horse-hooves, the pitch turns into a battleground with players and ponies striving to outpace each other to get close to the ball. Not long into the game and the Chitral Scouts earn a drumroll. And soon another on scoring a second goal. The scoreboard for the police team stays bleakly blank. Arms strain to swing mallets, riders teeter to position their chargers to drive the ball from end to end in an equestrian frenzy of rearing and racing. Ponies sprint off the pitch, coming alarmingly close to the ground’s edge at times, narrowly missing to graze the spectators sitting there. The applause from the crowd surge and fall, as does the music from the two bands as they take rounds to cheer on their teams.

And then a collective “oooohhhh” from the crowd! Amidst the clamour of riders racing to reach the ball, a horse stumbles and fall, taking down the player even as he tries to hit the ball falling down. He gets us dusting himself, mounts the steed and is back in the game as if nothing happened.

Few rules govern the traditional Mulki game, a free-style polo. This year, around 50 local teams including those from villages in Chitral and other districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa entered the game. But only the government-sponsored teams – the Frontier Corps’ Chitral Scouts and the Chitral Police – made it to the final game. Much time, effort and money goes into training a team, which is probably the reason why these teams win year after year because they have resources.

By the time the game breaks after the first half, the Chitral Scouts have an edge with four goals. The police is still at zero. The FC band playing pipes and drums parade cheerfully past the review post in full regalia, the stiff crests of pakols worn by the band-members and their crisp uniform suggesting a military pride in their victory. As it leaves the ground, the police band comes in. Band members in white suits and green and red waistcoats prance with swords in hands and former players of the team join in the dance to buoy-up the team’s spirit.

In come the officers of the two teams on horsebacks, putting up a show of camaraderie by playing a friendly game against each other during the break. The Deputy Commissioner Irshad Sodhar, who has spearheaded the effort to revive traditional games and festivals in the district, makes his horse rear to boast his equestrian skills before the guests-stand and wins applause from the crowd.

Throughout the second half of the game, the Scouts maintain their winning streak. Even though the police has made it to the final after defeating several local teams, they are no match for the “arch-rivals”, the Chitral Scouts.

The riveting game, its dizzying pace on ground, is such that before you know it, it is over. Spectators spill over from the periphery into the ground. Dust clouds the stadium. Organizers from the Scouts and the police cordon the tight space where players and their supporters gather to perform the traditional dance, arms stretched skywards. The crowd thickens to have a better view, heaving and closing in on the ceremony at the end where local dignitaries are called upon to handover prizes.

As the ceremony approaches the end, clouds drift over the stadium and the sky darkens ever so slightly. There is a faint rumble of thunder beyond the mountains, drowned by the driving, jubilant beat of the drums. It seems in the face of enthusiasm from the players and the spectators, even forces of nature have retreated. That night it will rain but for now, the game is over and the Scouts triumphant with nine goals. And not one from the police!

“Did someone cast a hex over the police team?” a spectator wonders loudly as he leaves the stadium.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Peshawar.

Nestled within a small room located in a dusty old part of Faisalabad, two middle-aged men sit crouched on looms made of wood and metal. For the last seven months, each of them has meticulously tied knots of Ghazni wool, row after row, through a tightly suspended grid of cotton thread known as tana bana or warp and weft.

They are an endangered breed — Punjabi carpet weavers trained in tying the Persian knot. They are perhaps among the few who have not yet abandoned a profession that offers only a bleak future to its practitioners. In other small-scale carpet weaving setups in and around Faisalabad, the textile hub of Pakistan, most have switched to manufacturing machine-made carpets that take half the time and make double the profit. This, however, shows in the craft and quality of their products.

Casually strewn aside with the weavers’ comb, a tool used to beat down the warp in order to secure the knots, one can see a graph sheet with patterns digitally charted out. Rang bastaas, the original design charts of Persian carpets, have already been translated into a ‘carpet code’ named Taalim, a script that has been passed down through generations and is coveted by weavers all over our region. The focus of these patterns is the knots’ density; the more the knots per square inch, the more valuable the carpet.

Once each knot is tied, it almost becomes etched in stone. A mistake cannot be reversed.

It is common knowledge among carpet connoisseurs that ‘no two carpets are the same’; steeped in tradition, the weaving process is likened to art that cannot easily be replicated. But the wages paid to weavers do not reflect the amount of time and effort they invest in their craft.

The older of the two weavers, a spectacled gentleman who was taught the knotting technique by his father, works up to ten hours a day. “I get 500 rupees a day, the same as a man who oversees machine-made carpet manufacturing,” he says. He will not be passing on his skill to his children. “Why should I teach my son this trade? He sells fruits and makes more in a month than I make in six months. Our craft is given no value.”

Wool from flocks of sheep that have grazed on high altitude pastures is usually used in handwoven rugs, mainly because it is soft, durable and retains colour.

In Pakistan, Ghazni wool is bought by weavers from local wholesale markets. Finer quality Australian and Belgian wool is imported by carpet companies and distributed among weavers; other materials, often used in combination with wool, are silk, cotton and jute. But before the wool is used, it has to be thoroughly washed, carded and spun into yarn. The quality of the yarn is further enriched in the dying process.

Traditionally, only natural dyes were used in carpet making. Transient materials in nature like flowers and vegetables were used to create muted colours that have the diversity and sheen of a natural palette and are often prepared on open fire. But traditional methods are now being replaced by the use of chemical-based dyes to achieve hues that are bright and vivid. A good colourist employs both techniques even today.

Once the weavers have finished knotting the dyed yarn through tana bana, coarse carpets are collected in an open vessel run on electricity. The vessel is better known among manufacturers as dhol and is used to vacuum out flecks of mud and dust embedded in the wool. The carpets are then sheared using a specially designed ‘carpet shaver’. The surface of the carpet has to be trimmed and polished evenly to make the pattern sharp and the colours bright.

The carpets are then laundered using water and bleach. They are washed and rinsed a number of times in order to take the remaining wool, dust and grease out of them.

In the penultimate stage, the carpets are stretched and nailed in the sun for the yarn to dry and the knots to soften. A solution of chemicals and herbs is applied to their surface so that it retains its shine, colour and texture. This process can take up to several days.

The manufacturing comes to an end with the final finishing touches: the edges are given an additional yarn border; the yarn ends are either tied or cut.

The carpets are now a finished product ready to be sold to a wholesaler.

Back in Lahore, one of the main export hubs for handmade carpets, business is not as brisk as it used to be.

Remarkably, there is little or no demand for handmade carpets in the local market; 95 per cent of them are exported to the United States, and there too only to the East Coast and California, for triple the production cost. Europe and Japan are their other destinations.

Fluctuations in the purchasing power of the Western cliental after the economic crisis of 2008 has deeply affected the handmade carpet industry in Pakistan. Many manufacturers had to close down their businesses.

“As a result of changing social and economic habits of our cliental outside Pakistan, like the shift to smaller houses and a need to redecorate those smaller houses with modern but temporary artefacts, very few become interested in buying an antique or luxury item like a carpet,” says Mujahid Mir, a former carpet exporter. “While the demand had been falling for years, the economic crash in the 2000s almost crashed the industry here too. Since then, I believe only 30 per cent of the industry is now operational in Pakistan.”

The decision to repatriate Afghan refugees has delivered another blow to an already crumbling industry. The Afghan weaver is well versed and is unrivalled by any Punjabi, Sindhi or Baloch carpet weavers in knotting skills.

Moreover, Afghan rugs would previously go to the rest of the world through Pakistan to avail a Pakistan government subsidy that barely functions now. Afghan manufacturers are now able to sell their carpets directly in the international market, bypassing their neighbour and thus shifting the profit margins to their own country.

Yet in an industry that is highly disorganised and scattered in pockets all across the country, carpet manufacturers have utilised traditional techniques and modern innovations to try to produce carpets that are affordable and look the part of a modern home. Through the use of chemical dyes, bright and vibrant colours like turquoise, blue and yellow and even tie-dye techniques, they are producing carpets that look both sleek and contemporary. Some carpets are even trimmed unevenly to give them a plush texture. Others incorporate patterns and designs from various regions to cater to changing tastes.

These initiatives may not save the industry. But they may enable future generations to sustain a craft that combines the work of many for the pleasure of a few.

This was originally published in Herald's May 2018 issue under the headline 'A knot in time'. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

As dust blows across the horizon, the golden light of the evening sun shines through a green flag. The rumble of beating drums and thumping feet on the chalky floor can be heard from a distance. Welcoming smiles invite strangers to participate in the celebration. Next to the revellers are men, women and children sitting together, drinking tea.

One of them is walking around with a large tray carrying many cups, offering them to curious onlookers who sit on and around the hill, observing from a distance, perhaps unwilling to join in the festivities in Karachi’s Manghopir neighbourhood at the shrine of 13th century saint Hazrat Khawaja Hassan Sakhi Sultan. It is only the second year that the mela is happening, after a long hiatus imposed by Taliban-inspired religious militants.

A sense of community and camaraderie binds everyone present. No one is a stranger; everyone is family; everyone is a friend. Along with tea, there is an invitation for another gathering at midnight at the home of a community elder. It is to be a congregation that will most likely go on till the early hours of the morning. The elder sits solemnly on a mat with his back against a low wall, irritated by the only cameraman present.

The sun disappears behind the hills and the world fades into darkness. The shrine and its surroundings vanish into the inky black of the night.

Before Karachi awakens the following morning, the roads leading to Manghopir remain relatively empty. Fear of the militants seems to persist.

Only traditional devotees of the saint, descendants of African slaves, known as Sheedis, constitute the bulk of the crowd at the shrine. Their ancestors were brought to this part of the world by Arab traders centuries ago. They have built a community, mostly around the shrine, over the centuries.

The gathering is larger than it was yesterday but there is no music or dancing today. The carnival atmosphere does not seem to have carried through the night. People slowly gather at the shrine’s gate. The caretakers offer them tea and breakfast before they make their way up to the shrine to pay their respects and ask for their wishes to be fulfilled.

Parents, children, and more women than men are sitting in the compound of the shrine with their families, sharing popcorn and snacks. The rather low-key celebrations are an indication that the mela has lost its attraction for most citizens of Karachi, many who used to throng here in the past from all corners of the city.

The main ritual at the mela is feeding meat to the crocodiles, which are considered saintly. Children are hanging off iron bars, looking down at the activity in the pond. Others at the pond are feeding meat to these crocodiles. On the other side, a gathering of men bathe in almost neon green water. This water is believed to heal skin diseases.

Three boys, all less than 10 years old, have brought their baby brother Muhammad Hassan to look at the enormous confined creatures. Azhar Abbas, from the nearby Pakhtun community, is also spending the day with his three children at the pond. His daughter Tayaba has her face painted as a cat for the occasion. He says they visit the crocodiles every few months.

There are two entrances to the shrine. One appears beside stalls selling sweets and flowers. There is an awning next to this entrance, which opens into a covered market where children play hide and seek, husbands buy jewellery for their wives and families look through household goods.

The market stretches all the way up to the shrine, with myriad shops offering all types of paraphernalia.

A cool environment prevails, with a certain amount of nonchalance in the air: children play unsupervised everywhere. Curious onlookers are glued to the iron bars surrounding the pond as they stare at the crocodiles. Ahmed Ali, the crocodile handler, is welcoming and friendly. He opens up the inner cage for people to get a closer look at the 30 to 40 reptiles that swim or bask in the hot afternoon sun.

As the light begins to fade, people start making their way home, leaving behind a lively and welcoming place that has seen better days with much larger groups of devotees, revellers and onlookers. As the light disappears, the night again swallows up the shrine as if it had never been there. Only the vendors and the houses on the surrounding hills glow in the dark.

The writer and photographer is a graduate of Oxford Brookes University where he studied film, photography and architecture.

This was originally published in the Herald's April 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Muhammad Fyaz leads us up a narrow set of stairs to his workshop on the roof. He is 60 years old and climbs slowly but surely, careful not to slip on the glossy concrete. Unlatching the metal door, he welcomes us in with an apology. “I don’t have many parts right now,” he says, motioning to a hollowed out hemisphere resting on the table, surrounded by wood shavings. “In India, they use kaddu to make this, but here we just use wood.”

‘This’ is an unfinished sitar tumba drying in the winter sun that’s streaming through the windows. Fyaz is one of the last remaining sitar makers in Lahore, his hands carrying the muscle memory of an art that will soon be consigned to history. He is remarkably matter of fact about this. “If there’s no need for something then who will do it?”

It’s not much of a workshop — there’s a table and a drawer full of metal saws and various other tools. The space is cluttered with pieces of wood and bottles of spirits and polish. The sitars are made entirely by hand and each one takes about a month to complete. But Fyaz works slowly, mainly to keep himself occupied. “If there was demand for eight sitars a month then I could make eight sitars a month,” he says.

Sitar-making runs in the family. He was taught the craft by his father Muhammad Ramzan, who in turn was trained by his father, the legendary Sher Muhammad. The family’s legacy runs back to the Mughal era, the craft being handed down from father to son for generations.

Except now: Fyaz hasn’t taught his own sons how to make sitars. The generational rope stretching back centuries is fraying, with only a few threads left. He repeats the same phrase like a mantra: “If there’s no need for something then who will do it?”

In Lahore, other than Fyaz and his relatives, there is only 70-year-old Ziauddin and his son, who operate a separate sitar shop in Basaanwala Bazaar – a small market opposite the Mayo Hospital in Gawalmandi – and know the art of making these instruments. It wasn’t always like this — there used to be several sitar players in Pakistan.

Fyaz tells me about Ustad Ashraf Sharif Khan and Ustad Saleem Khan, renowned sitar players for whom he would provide instruments. “They have moved to Germany now,” he says. Other avenues of income have also dried up; art colleges don’t have as many sitar players and musical instrument shops have a low demand for sitars.

The picture is not as bleak throughout Pakistan. In Peshawar, for instance, interest in classical South Asian instruments has been steady. Abbas Jan, owner of a shop selling rebabs and other classical instruments in Peshawar, says business has been good over the last 35 years since they opened. They craft their rebabs and sitars in a private workshop and then export all over Pakistan.

But Prince Music Centre, also known affectionately as ‘Mamu’ and one of the oldest music shops in Karachi, has been witnessing a steady decline in the demand for classical instruments over the last 15 years.

People are still buying them, but on a much smaller scale than before. “The new generation prefers rock music,” says the owner. They take up guitars and drums rather than the tabla and sitar.

Back in Lahore, Fyaz tilts the hollowed kaddu into the sunlight, illuminating the wood inside that’s been scorched black after being licked by flames. Thin slices of wood are bent and then glued into this hemispherical shape before being dried with fire, creating the main body of the instrument.

Fyaz picks up a beautiful, finished sitar off the wall rack and begins playing softly, scattering notes here and there, the melody meandering. “You have to know how to play a little bit, if you want to make a sitar,” he says.

As Fyaz gets some photographs taken on the rooftop workshop, I move towards the open window to feel the sunlight. The house is tucked away down a spiral of alleyways near Lakshmi Chowk, the distant thrum of construction audible even from here.

Moments of silence are punctuated with the cries of street vendors and loud neighbours. The workshop feels like a sanctuary, a small remote island of tinkering. When I ask him if he feels sukoon working up here, any kind of mediative effects of his labour, he responds with a vague non-committal yes. “Aadat hai, bachpan se,” he says. Since the age of ten, he’s been practicing his craft.

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a videographer from Lahore. He holds a degree in English literature from Warwick University and runs a Pakistani music and culture blog called 'Mosiki'.

It is midnight in the middle of October. Large container trucks are speeding past smaller vehicles, negotiating a crumbling, potholed road with sudden bends. They are all in a hurry. Everyone wants to be at the auction before it begins.

This flurry of nightly activity takes place with clockwork regularity seven days a week, on the outskirts of Karachi on a road that veers off the Karachi-Hyderabad motorway – about 10 kilometres northeast of the Sohrab Goth neighbourhood – and leads to New Sabzi Mandi, the city’s wholesale vegetable and fruit market. The mandi’s site, announced by a big signboard with blue lettering, is sprawled over hundreds of acres of government land leased to traders and commission agents (known as arrhtis in local parlance). They operate around 2,000 shops and offices here, as well as about half a dozen cold storage warehouses.

The mandi has two entrances. One grants access to the area where vegetables, and related products such as pesticides, are on display for sale; the other leads to the section where fruit is sold.

Between the two entrances lies a checkpoint manned by officials from the police and the paramilitary Rangers force. Everyone entering the mandi must show their national identity cards to the officials, and prove that they are either buyers, sellers or transporters. In some instances, containers and vehicles are physically checked to ensure that they do not carry any contraband such as weapons or explosives.

The checkpoint was set up after a long struggle by local traders who wanted the government to do something about rampant robberies and other law and order problems near the mandi. By 2008, news reports were calling the area a ‘mini-Bajaur’ or ‘Waziristan’, likening it to the almost ungovernable tribal areas on the Pak-Afghan border.

About 10 years ago, the mandi shifted to its current location from a congested site near Central Jail on University Road, but it still lacks any emergency services to tackle accidents and other disasters. This is in spite of the fact that in 2013 a fire gutted hundreds of its offices and shops. If the provincial government had put in place sufficient fire extinguishing and rescue arrangements, it might not have needed to pay a huge amount of money in compensation to the traders affected by the fire.

Auctioneers take over as soon as consignments are unloaded from trucks at the mandi. The vegetable auction begins at 12:30 am, starting with the most delicate produce, and continues till 5:30 am when the fruit auction starts.

The exercise follows a strict schedule: only one type of vegetable or fruit is auctioned within a particular slot of time. Auctions for different types of goods going on simultaneously, say market insiders, would create chaos. It would be impossible for buyers to be present at all the auctions at once.

The way auctions take place is rather old-fashioned. An auctioneer, who is usually the employee of an arrhti or middleman, stands next to a consignment with a megaphone in his hand. “Aik hazaar, aik hazaar das, aik hazaar bees,” shouts out one of them on this October morning as he auctions a 40-kilogramme bag of cucumbers. Buyers can glimpse the produce through a slit in the bag, which is eventually sold for 1,050 rupees. The buyer’s name is scribbled on it with a red marker before the auctioneer moves to the next lot.

Buyers who purchase vegetables in bulk from auctions are known as mashakhors in the mandi’s jargon. They then sell their purchase in smaller quantities to retail outlets, shopkeepers and pushcart vendors. At auctions, they conduct themselves in a discreet manner — poker-faced, giving away no signal of their eagerness to buy something, lest the sellers raise the price.

In order to keep prices artificially high, commission agents often deploy dummy mashakhors who are their own sub-agents. These mashakhors take part in the auction not in order to buy a consignment but to jack up the bids until the price reaches a level that is desirable for the commission agent, says Zulfiqar Ali, a government inspector working at the mandi.

The other major mechanism for bypassing the auction system is the direct delivery of goods by a commission agent to high-end buyers such as super stores, restaurants and hotels. Mehmood Khwaja, who appears to be around 60 years of age, procures vegetables and fruits from farmers and sells it directly to retailers. This distorts the market in two ways: first, farmers do not get the best price since they are selling their produce to a single buyer; second, the supply at the mandi decreases, driving prices up.

Tomato prices started soaring towards the end of September this year. By the 27th, they were selling at 250 rupees per kilogramme — more than three times higher than their normal market price. Rainfall during this monsoon season in Sindh both delayed and depressed the province’s tomato crop that was to be harvested in the latter part of September and early part of October, says an agriculture department official. The supplies that were coming in from Balochistan until then also decreased due to seasonal reasons, he adds. The market had far fewer tomatoes than buyers demanded.

The quickest way for the government to replenish supplies and bring down prices would have been to allow imports from neighbouring countries, but that could not happen due to a number of political and commercial impediments. Our hostile relations with India, for instance, make any imports from there a controversial issue. This gets further complicated by the strong resistance offered by farmers in Punjab to any vegetable imports from across our eastern border. In the west, our border with Afghanistan is often closed due to various problems including those related to bilateral trade. This has been even more so the case over the last six months or so.

And then there was another factor.

Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah told a meeting of the agriculture department a few weeks ago that commission agents were meddling with the supply of fresh tomatoes from Sajawal and Thatta districts. They were buying the vegetable directly from farmers and selling it to retailers, bypassing the mandi and its auction system altogether, he said.

A senior official of the Sindh agriculture department acknowledges that commission agents wield enormous power in determining vegetable prices. They have advanced and detailed knowledge of the demand and supply chain which helps them determine when to procure a commodity and at what price, thus allowing them to purchase it at a low price and sell it at a high one. They negotiate prices directly with farmers who generally have next to no information about market dynamics, and often end up selling their produce at much below the market rate.

One way to limit the power of commission agents is to set up more mandis. The government in Sindh has made plans to set up two more mandis in Karachi — one to be located at Ghagar Phatak for the produce coming in from the eastern districts of Thatta and Sajawal, and another along the Northern Bypass for vegetables coming in from Balochistan. Work on them started as far back as 2008, and they are expected to be in place by 2020. These new mandis may break the market stranglehold of the commission agents operating from New Sabzi Mandi, says Zulfiqar Ali, the government inspector working there.

Until then, buyers beware.

The article was originally published in the Herald's November 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

On a blistering Saturday afternoon in Lahore, throngs of children peer through iron bars, amusedly pointing and whistling at a sleeping lion. The massive African cat, also known as Panthera leo, is often referred to as the king of the jungle, but in this case its ‘jungle’ is an enclosure – with an approximate area of just 1,000 square metres – right next to one of the busiest parts of Lahore. Situated opposite the Avari Hotel on The Mall, the enclosure is part of the city’s British-era zoological gardens.

Spread over 25 acres of land and housing about 1,400 animals, the Lahore Zoo was set up in 1872. To ensure that the animals’ confined environs would not be too restricting or too close to the hustle and bustle of city life, its builders located it away from residential and commercial neighbourhoods and adjacent to Lawrence Gardens, the oldest public park in the city. This is true of other zoos in the country as well. Karachi’s zoo, for instance, was set up within a British-era garden and the one in Islamabad is part of a public park called Marghazar.

Over the decades, the three cities have expanded in such a way that their zoos are now located in, or near, their centres. This has not only restricted the space the animals require, it exposes them to urban noise and pollution too. Zoo managements sometimes take special measures to prevent the animals from running into nearby human settlements. These measures often take the shape of chains, cages and fortified enclosures.

Disease and death are rife in Pakistani zoos. Only in May this year, the lone elephant at the Lahore Zoo, Suzi, died allegedly due to the negligence of its keepers. Even earlier, there have been news reports of another elephant, Kavaan, being kept in chains at the zoo in Islamabad, without adequate protection from the elements.

Its plight led to demands by animal rights activists, non-government entities and even international celebrities for improving living conditions for zoo animals in Pakistan. Those making these demands point to the Pakistan Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1980, and urge zoo managements to maintain an environment that comes up to the provisions of this law. The stir they created has found Kavaan’s cause a renowned champion — American singer and actress Cher. Her associates are talking to Pakistani authorities on how she can help to ensure the elephant’s well-being.

How far Cher’s initiative will go to improve the treatment animals receive at Pakistan’s zoos is a matter of conjecture, but one sure way to do so is to improve how the zoos are managed. The lifestyle of the animals kept in a zoo is only as good as the management that oversees them, acknowledges Tanvir Ahmad Janjua, deputy director of the Lahore Zoo.

The zoo in Lahore has an autonomous management, consisting of a board of directors that includes veterinarians, zoologists and representatives of civil society, besides government officers. The management has the authority to spend the money generated through entry tickets on maintaining and improving the zoo’s infrastructure. With 3,000 to 4,000 people visiting the zoo everyday, the daily average revenue generated by these tickets is around 100,000 rupees. On special occasions, it balloons up many times: on Eid and other national holidays, the Lahore Zoo sees as many as 50,000 visitors a day, adding up to nearly 1.5 million rupees. Another source of its revenue is the fee that different vendors and contractors pay for running food stalls and recreational facilities on its premises.

The Lahore Zoo has 275 staff members. Out of these, two are veterinarians and 25 are keepers (or caretakers), each taking care of a specific group of animals. The rest are guards, gardeners, janitors and clerks. The management can also acquire the services of consultants from the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Lahore, if and when required. In its public statements, the incumbent board of directors claims it wants to maintain a healthy, happy and expanding animal population at the zoo. In practice, the treatment of the animals is far from ideal.

After entering the zoo’s premises from its Lawrence Road gate, the first thing one notices is a rolling green mound. Well-maintained and paved walkways meander from its top to different animal enclosures. Most paths are covered with Indian fig and mulberry trees, providing shade and offering a soothing walk even under the bright summer sun. The place looks like an ideal family picnic spot.

One can see signboards at regular intervals that caution visitors against feeding the animals and getting too close to them. The barriers at some enclosures, including structures to protect the animals from rain and sunshine, do not seem strong enough to prevent a physical interaction between human beings and beasts, but men in yellow safety jackets can also be seen nearby, ready to jump in as soon as an untoward situation emerges. Janjua stresses that the animals’ enclosures are also monitored by CCTV cameras to avoid any accidents.

This picture perfect situation starts changing as one gets closer to the enclosures. Most of the animals appear cramped for space — except perhaps the rhinoceros that seems to have plenty of space at its disposal, but then it is also one of the largest extant mammals on Earth. A large number of reptiles are confined between a concrete wall and a smudged glass screen that separates them from humans. A small alcove in the concrete wall is the only space available to them to rest. A wolf paces inside a small cage in a rather agitated manner. Its skinny body exposes its ribcage, visible even from a distance. A magnificent puma and several lion cubs also seem to be unhappy about the less than sufficient space allocated to them.

The zoo houses 20 lions of different ages but it does not seem to have enough space to accommodate all of them. The management says it is planning to sell some of them to overcome space constraints. The sale, in fact, is standard operating procedure. Whenever the population of an animal species exceeds the number the zoo can accommodate, the surplus animals are sold off.

On a mid-September day, some dead fish can be spotted on the premises of the zoo in Karachi’s Garden East area. They seem to have died less than a day ago — blood is splattered around their bodies. The management gives multiple explanations over the next two days for their death — each differing from the other. The level of cleanliness in the zoo is far from satisfactory and the state of the animals here is worrying if not downright pathetic.

The zoo has just one veterinarian and its management keeps complaining about the lack of both money and staff that it requires to keep it neat and tidy. Unlike the Lahore Zoo, it is under the direct administrative control of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC).

The zoo still attracts a large number of people every day. Approximately 30,000 people visit it every weekend. Officials say these large crowds are partly to blame for the lack of atisfactory sanitary conditions at the zoo. They freely litter everywhere, disregarding our instructions, says Salman Shamsi, the zoo’s director for culture, sports and recreation.

People perhaps do not realise that the zoo does not have sufficient sanitation staff to handle the waste they are throwing away. A large portion of its employees is nearing retirement age, but KMC has put a temporary ban on new hiring.

It is quite obvious that the Karachi zoo is being run only as well – or as badly – as the city itself.

Additional reporting by Namrah Zafar Moti

This was originally published in the Herald's October 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is currently in his sophomore year at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

All my years of travelling and wandering on a bicycle through different countries and regions since 2013 have turned me into a nomad — a citizen of nowhere and everywhere at once. I see border crossings as solitary places stranded between two countries; neither here nor there — an emblem of myself.

When crossing a border, I come across stories of rootedness and displacement, belonging and alienation. Hearing an echo of my own life, I feel like I am standing at the edge of two different worlds. Why borders resonate so strongly inside me may have something to do with where I come from.

I was born in Spain in a village on the border with Portugal and grew up in the Swiss city of Geneva that borders France. My adolescent years were a time when European Union’s member states were allowing their inhabitants free movement across their national borders. This is how my perception of borders was formed, giving me an early awareness of ‘the Other’, of those living on the other side of an invisible line on the land.

When I started my overland journey, I had little idea about the impersonal and bureaucratic purpose of the borders: they indicate what kind of agreements regulate the flow of transport, goods and people between different countries. The ease or difficulty to pass through a border can help you find out the state of relationship between your country and the country you are travelling to. Borders also show whether two neighbouring states are close to each other or whether they have bilateral tensions or mutual fears.

Borders work differently in different places and for different people. Some are heavily fortified and fenced frontiers. Others offer unrestricted passage. Still others are open for local inhabitants but are controlled, even closed, for the movement of foreigners. Passport holders of a few powerful nations trot the globe with effortless ease. On the other hand, a vast majority from other countries faces massive barriers to its entry into other countries.

Borders may be losing significance because money, goods and services can move across countries with the push of a button in the globalised economy of today. Yet their importance is increasing as more barriers are being created to keep out migrants and refugees forced out of their homelands.

Pakistan has a complex relationship with its borders. Once during a conversation with a young Kashmiri man about the conflict between India and Pakistan, I reluctantly expressed the opinion that the Partition and the subsequent sense of loss have a stronger impact on people’s hearts and minds in the latter than in the former. He instantly responded by saying that this is because Pakistan, as a nation state, is born out of a geographical and political split from India; it has formed its identity around the very idea of division of land.

This identity and the intricate political geography that Pakistan shares with its neighbouring countries have had a serious impact on how movement across various points on its international borders is regulated. Every border checkpoint has its own peculiar procedures, creating a patchwork of arrangements ranging from free passage to strictly controlled movement and everything in between.

The crossing between Attari (on the Indian side) and Wagah (on the Pakistani side near Lahore) is the only overland checkpoint between the two countries that has almost always remained open except during wars. A rather strange flag-lowering ceremony has become a major tourist attraction here. Sitting in stadium-style seats on both sides of the border, tourists get to see a frenzied display of aggressive physical gestures and bravado by both Pakistani and Indian border guards. Cheers, slogans and loud patriotic songs blare from the two camps as crowds clap and wave flags in a competition that no side wants to lose.

I am not sure about the objective of the pompous ceremony. Is it a full dress rehearsal for a war; is it meant to create patriotic fervour among its audience; is it aimed at bringing people within shouting distance from each other so that they can see, even converse with, each other? As I crossed from India into Pakistan through the Wagah-Attari checkpoint on a hot and humid morning in July last year, I could see no sign of the frenetic activity that had taken place here during the previous evening’s flag lowering.

I was the only foreigner crossing the border that day in the company of a theatre group returning to Lahore after a series of performances at the Theatre for Peace Festival in Delhi. After the process to check passports inside an immigration hall on the Pakistani side got interrupted by a power cut, some members of the group started singing and playing their instruments. There could have been no better way to wait for the checking to resume.

Passing through Pakistani Punjab on my bicycle, I could recognise how India and Pakistan are cut from the same cloth — even though subtle differences between them were not difficult to spot.

Nine months later, I reached another border crossing in Pakistan — this time for an exit to China. On Labour Day – May 1, 2017 – I arrived at the small town of Sost, on the edge of Khunjerab Pass. Most of the shops on the main street were shut. The border was closed for traffic.

At first sight, Sost did not come across anything like a gateway, or even a major signpost, for the multi-billion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Inside what appeared to be the town’s lone internet facility, a young man from the nearby Gojal Valley had been trying to send a business email for two hours. Before he succeeded, the power went out. He could do nothing but wait.

After I spent some time in Sost, I started to get the feel of the place’s newly emerging status as a commercial hub. The checkpoint is usually busy because Pakistanis from Gilgit-Baltistan can enter China’s Xinjiang province through it with just a border pass. Local residents seem to be doing well in education and trade. The town also attracts seasonal labour from those districts of Gilgit-Baltistan that do not directly benefit from the commercial and tourist traffic on the Karakoram Highway that connects Pakistan and China.

Before I crossed over to China, I stayed in Chapursan Valley’s Zuwudkhoon village that could be the last Pakistani settlement on this side of the border. Afghanistan is only 30 kilometres away.

Chapursan, a little more than 40 kilometres to the northwest of Sost, is perhaps the most isolated place in the entire country. Life carries on here in accordance with a centuries-old pattern based on subsistence farming and seasonal migration. ‘Live without borders’, read an inscription on the wall of a guestroom at the house of Alam Jan Dario, my host in Zuwudkhoon. An image of Afghan mountains also adorned the wall.

Dario has intimate knowledge of those living in the region — they are essentially Tajiks who are scattered in Chapursan Valley as well as in Afghanistan’s northeastern Wakhan strip on the other side of the border. “They are the same people,” he told me. They freely roam across the border in search of pastures for their livestock, he added.

Some semi-nomadic Kyrgyz tribes also live in Wakhan’s Pamir region, one of the highest and most inaccessible plateaus on the globe. Every year early fall, they travel from Afghanistan to Baba Ghundi shrine in Chapursan Valley along with their yaks, horses and other animals. They buy sugar, flour, kitchen utensils, and clothing from the locals in exchange for livestock.

After a long stay in Pakistan, I developed such a strong attachment to the country that I continued visiting Pak-China friendship shops during my first few days in Tashkurgan, a border town on the Chinese side. Many of these shops are run by Pakistani men from Gojal district in Gilgit-Baltistan.

Drinking chai – which for me will always have the taste of Pakistani hospitality – they would smile knowingly when I would tell them about all the small villages I had visited in their home district. It was in those moments that, I, who had just arrived in China, and they, who missed being back home, seemed to belong to the same place: an imaginary borderland between longing and belonging.

This was originally published in the Herald's August 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer, who was born in Spain but grew up in Switzerland, has traveled by cycle from Japan to Spain in 2013

Everything is in perfect order at the Sindh Horticulture Research Institute, Mirpurkhas, as Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah and his elaborate entourage are expected any minute. The convention hall is painted in the bright red and yellow hues of a mango variety called Gulab Khas.

At the entrance, young girls clad in traditional Sindhi dresses and caked in make-up have been made to stand in the oppressive heat holding welcome bouquets. Inside, 50-odd stalls, decorated with flashy confetti, paper buntings and panaflexes, exhibit over 150 varieties of mangoes.

The June 11, 2017 event marks the third and final day of the National Mango and Summer Fruits Festival, now in its 52nd year.

“We … treat our employees with dignity … providing safe, secure and healthy work environments,” reads a poster at a stall by Gondal Farms. Police officers throng the place not to verify this claim but because the cubicle has a room cooler. The owner, Tanvir Gondal, is a 44-year-old mechanical engineer who left a high-paying job in the automobile sector to join his late father Anwar Gondal’s agribusiness. His 925-acre estate is located along Khipro Road, 25 kilometres outside Mirpurkhas city. He grows 16 varieties of mangoes on 220 acres.

Mango farmers take the process of naming new varieties as seriously as they take the technique of grafting to create those varieties. Gondal points towards one variety, Begum Pasand — named so because the inventor’s wife loved it.

At a nearby stall, Abdul Hafeez Khaskheli poses for a selfie with his friends in front of a banner bearing the name of his farm. In his forties, he holds a bachelor’s degree from Sindh Agriculture University, Tandojam, and is the proprietor of a 50-acre orchard in Sindhri taluka of Mirpurkhas. A fourth-generation farmer, he was trained in mango cultivation by his late uncle after whom his farm is named: Raja Khaskheli Fruit Farm.

Standing close to a misting fan, he tries to explain in layman terms the difference between all 14 varieties on display at his stall. He seems pessimistic about the chances of his mangoes winning any award at the festival. “For people like us, water is a big problem. Those with bigger orchards … people of influence steal our water and that affects our yield,” he says softly. For him, participating in the event is less about winning or networking with industry bigwigs and more about carrying forward the legacy of his uncle who first brought him here in 2003.

The awards have already been decided by a panel of 15 agriculture experts based on the size, smell and taste of the fruits. When the chief minister finally arrives to deliver the awards, it creates a mini storm in the small convention hall, leaving the Kachelo Fruit Farms stall in tatters. In his speech delivered in Sindhi, Shah mouths clichés on how mangoes form the economic and cultural lifeline in this part of the world.

That is only partially true.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, Pakistan is the world’s sixth largest producer of mangoes. A sector brief by the Sindh Board of Investment states that Sindh produces 390,486 tonnes of mangoes a year — out of a total of 1.73 million tonnes produced in Pakistan as a whole. Almost all the rest are grown in Punjab.

When Elizabeth II was crowned as Queen of the United Kingdom on June 2, 1953 at London’s Westminster Abbey, Pakistan sent her mangoes as a coronation present. These were chosen from the farm of one Abdul Samad Kachelo in Mirpurkhas. The queen appreciated the gesture and, for several subsequent years, kept requesting for the same mangoes.

The story of Kachelo Fruit Farms predates this royal acknowledgment.

Sometime in the 19th century, Abdul Samad Kachelo’s father Haji Mohammad Kachelo laid the foundations of the family’s farm in Kot Ghulam Muhammad taluka of Mirpurkhas district. Over the next century, Abdul Samad Kachelo brought plants in trains from Lucknow, Indore and the former Indian state of Madras to put together a commercially viable mango orchard.

By the 1980s, the approximately 2,500-acre orchard was producing some 350 varieties.

This was also the time when celebrity chefs such as Michel Roux and Marco Pierre White would fly in to Karachi to cook for such families as the Kachelos. At Roux’s Le Gavroche, the UK’s first restaurant to win three Michelin stars, mangoes for dessert came from the Kachelo orchard.

As is the case with most of Pakistan’s landed elite, the Kachelo farmland has been split between Abdul Samad Kachelo’s descendants, dividing the orchard into smaller farms owned by many of his heirs. One of them, Zulfiqar Ali Kachelo, an enterprising 39-year-old farmer, grows mangoes on approximately 300 acres of land, situated along the 28-mile long Puran distributary, a water channel originating from Jamrao canal.

He relies heavily on corporate clientele for selling his premium quality mangoes — six-kilogramme boxes of Sindhri and Anwar Ratol mangoes from his farm are priced at 1,600 and 2,000 rupees, respectively. The protocols in place at his farm make his produce worth the premium pricing, he claims.

Yet there are certain elements that he cannot control. His mangoes received only two complete rounds of irrigation this year as opposed to the five they should have. Of late, he has ventured into medium-density plantation and is setting up a central pivot irrigation system to address the problem of water shortage.

Zulfiqar Ali Kachelo has also cut out the middlemen by reaching his consumers directly through social media, supermarkets and online delivery services; he has not exported mangoes since 2001. He employs 60-70 local farmers all year round for pruning, cleaning and irrigation of the orchard while as many as 150 seasonal labourers are brought in from Multan during the harvest season.

One of the labourers, Muhammad Ashiq, is wrapping the farm’s last consignment of Sindhri mangoes on a hot day in the middle of June. The consignment will go to the market in 12.5-kilogramme crates that, by rule, are not lined with carbide. Every crate carries its packing date, packer’s number, fruit’s grade and the orchard’s number.

Ashiq, along with his fellow labourers, has been travelling over 850 kilometres down south from a village in Multan to work at Kachelo Fruit Farms for the last 35 years. For approximately a month-long harvest, they are paid between 11,000 and 14,000 rupees per person, over and above the expense of food, transport, accommodation and even cigarettes.

On their return journey, they work at different estates till October before moving down south again in winter — this time to Hala Naka, near Hyderabad, to harvest bananas.

Zulfiqar Ali Kachelo’s orchard, like many others in Sindh, is at risk of sudden death — an unexplained disease that kills a tree within days. A dead tree impacts an entire orchard’s ecosystem as its neighbouring trees begin to receive more sunlight and wind than they had for decades, directly affecting their produce.

Cooling his heels under the shade of a jamun tree, 50-year-old Ghulam Muhammad draws unintelligible patterns on the soil with a stick. A manual labourer employed at the government-owned Sindh Horticulture Research Institute’s seed farm in Mirpurkhas, he does not have much to do these days other than keeping an eye on lifeless tree trunks that lie in the open close to where he is resting.

Muhammad grew up playing under the protective shade of gigantic fruit trees at the farm. His family has been working here for three generations.

The approximately 280-acre farm comprises several orchards, small farms and research facilities. Though it withstood the devastation of the 2011 floods, many of its age-old mango, jamun and sapodilla trees could not withstand the Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Township Scheme, a residential neighbourhood being set up by Sindh government for “the poorest of the poor”.

Trees are being removed from nearly 78 acres of land, which a 2012 summary – signed by the then chief minister Qaim Ali Shah and finance minister Murad Ali Shah – declared as “barren and unattended”. Felling of trees – being done with powerful excavators – has been punctuated with small protests by local farmers and agriculture department employees. Fruit can still be seen hanging onto some of the mango trees set to be removed for the township to be built.

Suleman Baloch, an ageing farmer with a henna-dyed beard, takes out a crumpled handwritten ‘contract’ from his pocket. The paper gives him the right to cultivate a part of the land allocated for the township. The contract is valid till 2018.

This was originally published in the Herald's July 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

At eight o’clock in the morning, Karachi’s City Courts look one with their surroundings. The morning breeze, untainted by the chaotic scents and scenes of the day to follow, flows past the colonnades and arches of the courts’ colonial-era sandstone structure. It also rustles through trees, pipals and neems, that take decades to get to their prime and provide a deep, cool shade. A koel calls out passionately from somewhere within them.

In this moment of quiet, there is a whiff of what Karachi once was — a colonial outpost with little life beyond the port and Saddar, the commercial neighbourhood where the courts now stand. Dogs roam around the place, leisurely and aimlessly. A deep sense of nostalgia pervades the atmosphere that makes one long for a time and a place one has never really known.

The courts seem to have imposed their own order on their surroundings. A bank, post office and a mosque are all lined by the left of the boundary wall. Food kiosks, stationery shops and bookstores are concentrated on the right.

As the day progresses, the past recedes and the present starts taking over. Order and organisation begin to give way to commotion and chaos. The grandeur of the courts’ structure is overtaken by the hustle and bustle of a judicial system full of reminders that it is not meant for the weak of the heart and the poor of the purse.

These reminders are everywhere: from the policemen who push away anxious family members of those being tried, to the judges who appear bored and exasperated before their job has even begun, to the conversations one overhears between lawyers and their clients — nervous, scared litigants being told “Aap toh baat samjhti hi nahin (You don’t even try to understand).”

The courts were originally built in 1847 as a prison and have six blocks — labelled alphabetically from A to F. Each block houses courtrooms for one of Karachi’s six districts. Each courtroom – which initially served as a barrack for prisoners – is usually not more than six-feet wide and 10-feet long.

People line up outside courtrooms, waiting for their cases to be heard. A court peon or pattaywala steps out of a courtroom every few minutes and calls out:

“Muhammad Iqbal aur waghaira”

“Saleem Ahmed aur waghaira”

Saleem Ahmad may be there but if waghaira – the others – are not, that will be all there is to the day’s proceedings. The case will be deferred to another day. So Saleem Ahmed – and countless other litigants like him – will have to come to the courts again and again, day after day, often for months, sometimes for years. Those who can afford to – thanks to their power and pelf – just send a lawyer.

In one courtroom in Block F, I witness proceedings in Abdullah’s case. He seems to be in his early twenties at the most. No lawyer is representing him. The judge calls him to the dock and tells him that his case has been disposed off, except that he has to provide a surety bond of 30,000 rupees.

By the look of his clothes, it is easy to tell that he will not be able to furnish the bond — certainly not for 30,000 rupees. I wonder if he even heard the judge right because the noise from the fans in the room absorbs much of what is said. But the courtroom is so intimidating a space and a sense of fear so tangible here that I know he will not say that he did not understand the order.

Now Abdullah’s case will become a file in a record room. There is one for each block. Cataloguing is a mystery here. It is remarkable how record keepers make sense of the files stacked one over the other.

The men working here say there is some method to this madness but the files have no date, year or any other mark of distinction. Kept in uncovered shelves, they all look the same. Insects have easy access to them and they are also not protected against general decay. Among these files must be many petitions by death row prisoners. On those petitions now rest empty, dirty cups of tea.

I see a man at the reception flipping through files. “Ye kya ho gaya hai, yeh kuch ghalat ho gaya hai (What is it that has happened here, something wrong has happened here),” he sings to himself. The lyrics and the tune are undoubtedly his own.

It is around 10 o’clock — an important time at the courts for this is when the ‘custody’ arrives. The term refers to under-trial prisoners who are brought into the courts in high-security vehicles from prisons or police stations. The vans look like deep blue graves on wheels.

A few inches below their ceilings, an opening – barely half-a-foot wide – runs along the entire length of their sides. Small vertical iron bars subdivide the opening, making it impossible for prisoners to get any part of their bodies out — except their fingers. Several hands, so many that it is difficult to distinguish one from the other, hold on to the bars from inside.

Each custody van is parked right outside a detention centre. One after the other the prisoners get off the van and get into the detention centre. The van is parked in such a way that no one can see those stepping out of it. Yet, family members of the prisoners continue to shove and shuffle in order to get a glimpse.

They stand outside, for hours, awaiting the peons to call out prisoners for appearance before judges. The detention centre is so ill-kept that it looks like a human zoo. People sit on the floor, their hands chained to one another with rusted, thick chains otherwise used for tethering livestock. In a few small barracks here, prisoners with mental illnesses are lodged. They must be kept behind bars at all times.

A sense of desperation is writ large on the faces of those detained here. One of them whispers to a visiting lawyer, asking for help, “Please take my mother’s number, call her.” He pleads that he has already served the maximum sentence for his crime. The only solace the place offers is a spiritual one: “Bismillah parh kay bahar niklain (Recite Allah’s name as you get out),” reads an inscription on the exit that leads to the courts.

After the prisoners get out of courtrooms, they are allowed a few brief moments with their families. As they walk into the open with their chains clanking and their locks dangling, their relatives rush towards them.

They seem to have not been here as much for the hearing as to have lunch with their imprisoned family members. A mother immediately takes out a plastic bag with chickpeas and a cold bottle of soft drink when she sees her son.

She selects a place in the shade by a staircase and sits there with her son — the rest of their relatives sitting in a circle beside them. Her son eats from the hand that is not chained. His family just watches him eat. Some people in other families take selfies with their imprisoned relative, marking moments spent together.

This article was originally published in the Herald's June 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer holds an MSc degree in comparative political thought from SOAS, University of London.

Balochistan is all about expanse — vast, inaccessible, inhospitable expanse. That partly explains why the rest of Pakistan sees it as a dangerous, even hostile, territory. Distance and remoteness have the ability to turn the usual into the unusual and the unfamiliar into the mysterious.

The case of Balochistan’s northern districts is even more curious. Cut off from most parts of the country by virtue of their high hilly terrain and almost no communication links, they have experienced less strife in recent times (compared to Pakhtun areas north of them and Baloch areas south of them). Yet, mentioning them does not evoke anything but a sense of ignorance and foreboding among Pakistanis living elsewhere.

Now that many of these districts find themselves dispersed along the western route of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), their inhabitants may expect meeting more outsiders than they did in the past. And the outsiders travelling along that route may find out that the people living here have the same concerns as everyone else in Pakistan — food, water, shelter, education, healthcare.

Local residents also have the same expectations from CPEC as people in other parts of the country have — that it will bring with it a turnaround in their fortunes. Imagine a cat’s cradle of roads running from Gwadar to Sukkur, Multan and Lahore as part of the eastern route of CPEC and from Gwadar to Quetta, Zhob and Dera Ismail Khan comprising its western alignment and what you have is the glittering image of an El Dorado in the making.

“Special economic zones along [these roads] can bring about a change for the better in our lives,” said Nizamuddin Kakar, a resident of Killa Saifullah district.

Last month, I took the N-50, a highway that forms part of CPEC’s western route and connects Dera Ismail Khan in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with Kuchlak in northwestern Balochistan. Large parts of it are still under construction.

Heavy yellow excavators burrow through the hilly terrain like machines from a futuristic movie invading an ancient biblical land. Apart from being a future trade route between Pakistan and China, the highway provides the long-demanded direct road link between the Pakhtun areas of the two provinces.

Dera Ismail Khan, where my journey started, was sizzling under the April sun. Long hours of power outages had only exacerbated the scorching weather. Roadside petrol stations were not operating due to electricity breakdowns but their operators had devised a smart solution: they would pump out fuel whenever they got electricity and stored it in jerry cans to sell it later.

Local modes of transportation were antique, if not entirely rudimentary. Four-wheel mini trucks dating back to 1970s, or perhaps earlier than that, were plying the roads, carrying human beings and cattle in their upper and lower compartments, respectively.

As I travelled westwards, the landscape did not change much for many kilometres. Yet, ethnic and cultural differences were too obvious to miss. Women covering their heads with light dupattas were as visible as bareheaded men in Dera Ismail Khan city and its adjoining Seraiki-speaking villages.

That started changing as I entered Dara Zinda town, home to a Pakhtun tribe called Sherani. Women’s presence in the public space not just became thinner here, they were also covering their heads and faces with more yards of cloth. With their eyes peering through narrow slits in their heavy chadors, they were carrying loads of fodder skilfully balanced on their heads.

Dara Zinda, part of a frontier region — an administrative buffer zone between South Waziristan Agency and Dera Ismail Khan district – is a gateway to Balochistan’s Sherani district. Everyone entering the district is required to register themselves at a security post manned by Frontier Corps personnel. Next, the visitors are welcomed by barren mountains jutting out of spacious plains.

Zhob is the first main town on the Balochistan side. It is the headquarters of an eponymous district that stretches over an area of 20,297 square kilometres (about 27 per cent of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province that has a total area of 74,521 square kilometres).

Only 40 per cent of the land mass in Zhob district consists of plains. The rest comprises hills, covered in many parts with forests of pine, olive, cumin seed and heeng (asafoetida). People in the mountainous parts are less inclined towards agriculture. Those living in the plains mostly grow apples and grapes.

In Zhob city, I met Jan Muhammad, a dealer of naswar (snuff), a concoction manufactured locally and used widely for an intense immediate hit of nicotine. He is so popular in the city that the public square next to his shop has been named after him. “I was the first one to start a naswar shop here,” he told me. Zhob is a provincially administered tribal area. That allows people living here to own and drive vehicles brought into the country without the payment of import taxes.

Many local residents told me that import taxes for more than 90 per cent of the vehicles in their district were not paid. Most of them, however, have fake number plates, ostensibly issued from Karachi.

People living in Killa Saifullah, the next district along N-50, are mostly Kakar Pakhtuns. They have great love for education — particularly for the education of girls. Ten years ago they went to the deputy commissioner and requested him to permit their daughters and sisters to study at the college for boys in the evenings — to be taught by its all-male staff. Permission was granted.

Last year, the girls got a college of their own but even now they use science laboratories at the college for boys because their own institution does not have those facilities yet.

From Killa Saifullah, the road leads to Muslim Bagh and then reaches the town of Kuchlak (made famous by Shahbaz Taseer, slain Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer’s son who was abducted by militants affiliated with the Taliban in 2013; he had made a sudden appearance here in 2016 after his release from captivity).

Kuchlak, a part of Quetta district, is also famous for its fruit markets and dealers of earthenware that is imported from Sindh and Punjab. Its marketplaces were buzzing with activity when I arrived there last month.

Apple orchards and vineyards adorn long stretches of the 332-kilometre part of the road from Zhob to Quetta. These are irrigated from man-made ponds that store rainwater. These ponds appear along the road at regular intervals.

About 72 kilometres to the south of Killa Saifullah is the town of Loralai. It is the headquarters of Loralai district, one of the greenest areas between Balochistan’s northeastern and northwestern borders.

Ground water level here – at 500-600 feet – is higher than in its neighbouring districts where it is as deep as 1,000-1,200 feet. Local farmers have installed solar-run tube wells (each costing about 1.1 million rupees) to irrigate their lands.

Aroad from Kuchlak goes to Pishin district where snuff, locally known as shna naswar, is ground to a fine powdery form. More difficult to consume than other forms of naswar, it is known across Pakistan for its potency.

The same road then goes to Chaman, headquarters of Killa Abdullah district that once housed hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees in the camps of Saranan and Jungle Pir Alizai. Many of them now seem to have assimilated with the local population.

Chaman is a few kilometres to the east of the Pak-Afghan border. The city’s economy is mostly dependent on cross-border trade, both legal and illegal. Its markets are flooded with vehicles imported without the payment of any taxes, automobile spare parts and electronic equipment, among other things, mostly smuggled from Afghanistan and Iran.

Goods alone don’t move across the border here. Over 2,000 Pakistanis daily cross into Afghanistan to work during the day and come back home in the evening. That could well be one reason why it is one of the most difficult-to-man border posts in Pakistan.

This was originally published in the Herald's May 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a Herald reporter in Peshawar.

One of the biggest insights I have gained from traveling at a slow place overland is the certainty that ancient cultures have a lot to teach us. In this increasingly fast-paced global world, competing for monetary profit is the accepted prevailing model of development.

But while cycling across mountainous and remote regions of the Subcontinent, I came to notice how my exposure and experience in those distant areas, where people have lived self-reliantly in a hostile environment and harsh terrain for centuries, has sharpened my whole notion of progress, shaking the patterns of my own existence.

Does progress always have to be a one-dimensional movement imposed by the Western-style model of development and economic growth as we become more and more dependent on technology? Can we learn a deeper sense of development and accept the natural limitations of our environment? How do you trade tradition for modernity in the context of cultural transformation?

Change is coming swiftly, and as the world becomes smaller and more interconnected, previously isolated communities are being attracted by – and brought into – the great global trend. Certainly, its people should not be denied the benefits of modern development.

But I often wonder how modernity could possibly maintain a healthy balance between its benefits and its threats to indigenous cultures, where people have learned the skills to live to a great extent self-sufficiently – like they have been doing for centuries – without the need to be told from outsiders how they could do better or different.

And where some see only signs of backwardness and economic poverty in those rural and distant areas, I often see an admirable capacity to live frugally and make the most of the limited resources available, while existing in harmony with the seasons and land in a cycle of adaptive change and resilience.

Undeniably, change also brings conflicting effects as the traditional cultures try to integrate new patterns of life and cope with new aspirations. Connection with the ‘outside’ brings ease and cash, but external influences impose a whole new system of ideas about fashion, religious practices, life goals, leisure activities, and social interactions.

Change brings hopes, but also fears and uncertainties. Thus, preserving social unity and cohesion from the most aggressive and harmful forms of development seem to be an intricate challenge that traditional cultures have to face.

During a trek in the extreme north of Pakistan last October, I came to learn about the Wakhi people and their unique cultural heritage and way of life. Every year, hundreds of goats, sheep, and yaks scramble along the precipitous paths to and from the high pastures in their annual transhumance. The kuch, as they call it in Wakhi language, is a long tradition in their economy of self-subsistence.

Kuch literally means travelling in a caravan and in mid-May they migrate up to Shuijerab, the first summer pasture. The livestock is taken care of mostly by women and children and, in mid-June, the herds are taken across Shimshal Pass, at 4,735 metres, to Shuwert before returning to Shuijerab and back to Shimshal village in mid-October.

Shimshal, located 3,000 metres above sea level in the Gojal tehsil of Hunza district, is a group of villages of some 250 households nestled in the Pamir mountains of the Karakoram range among spectacular peaks and glaciers. It is home to a large majority of the Wakhi community – spread across the Wakhan corridor – that has traditionally made a living from herding, farming and migration work.

It has been one of the most inaccessible communities in Pakistan, and the opening of a link road cut through hard rock in 2003 – a result of the communal effort over almost two decades – connected its villagers to the Karakoram Highway. A journey that took days on foot some decades ago takes now less than five hours by jeep.

Accessibility brought prosperity, opportunities, and earnings; tourism and trekking are now a major source of income and porters are also celebrated mountaineers and climbers wearing high-altitude fashion and high-quality gear.

Every day, I am introduced to tall, lean and fit Shimshalis, who have climbed many of the highest peaks in Pakistan. Young women, too, take part in mountain expeditions and as more and more families have found opportunities to run successful businesses and send their children to school and college to the cities, the people of Shimshal had the clarity to anticipate the pressure that modern day development put on their traditional practices.

As a result, the Shimshal Nature Trust was founded in 1998. The trust is run by the community itself and focuses on environmental education, cultural programmes, active conservation of flora and fauna and management of tourism.

Our local guide, Niamat, a 32-year-old Shimshali, has participated in many national and international skiing and climbing expeditions. He juggles his life between his job in Islamabad and his social work and family obligations within the community.

He came to help his family during the kuch season. Upon reaching the settlement in Shuijerab, we are invited by his family to their stone hut. We sit on blue sheep and goat skins around a traditional cooking stove and are served chalpindokh, a substantial snack that combines layers of chapatis with layers of fresh yak cheese topped with large amounts of liquid ghee. We wash it down with salted tea before continuing and being invited by another family.

On our last day in the high settlement of Shuijerab and before returning to the village, hundreds of yaks are being regrouped in smaller herds to tackle the arduous way back. I follow Niamat inside the corral as we squeeze our way through the herds of yaks and, in no time, he has identified the two yaks he had been missing.

Back to the village of Shimshal after a seven-day trek, the youngsters and elders are outside dressed in their new clothes. They are welcoming their relatives who had been away for the summer months in the high pastures.

Even though the management of their transhumance has changed somewhat in recent years, the entire community seems to be engaged in the preservation of their herding traditions. It is not only a valuable source of income but, more significantly, the expression of their identity as a community and of their intimate knowledge of the environment; they know grazing pastures where the grass is believed to make the yak stronger so that it can be sold better.

Before our departure, Hasil Shah, the owner of one of the two tourist lodges in the village and a well-known mountaineer, invites us to his house for tea. The outer wall has been reinforced with cement, covering the beautiful traditional stone structure, still visible in the neighbours' houses.

The traditional bukhari has been removed from the center of the living room and he boils water on a Japanese gas stove. The traditional wood-burning stove is still used in the colder months to warm up the house, we are told.

As we drink tea, he explains that every year eight households out of the 250 are designated to send one tough man – called shpun in Wakhi – to guard the yaks in the high pastures for six months during winter.

Hasil Shah’s household has been designated this year, but is unable to send any man from his family — his two children study in Islamabad and he and his wife move out in winter. Shah thus had to hire a shepherd to comply with his obligations toward the community.

Constantly on the move and more familiar with what makes people leave, I came close to understand why people stay: strong social ties and a deep connection to their land. And what impacted me the most was the impressive levels of development – in the most genuine and human way – that seemed to coexist with a great sense of responsibility of taking care of each other and belonging to a close-knit community.

I felt Shimshalis had embraced the new trends of modernity with a strong sense of dignity and pride for their own culture and identity.

The case of Shimshal gives me hope that traditional communities have the strength to produce desirable efforts and be the guardians of their own heritage as they improve their socio-economic conditions. It gives me hope that progress could be not only a step forward into an uncertain future, but also a step backward into a renewed past.

The writer set out to cycle overland from Japan to Spain, stopping in Pakistan and other South Asian countries along the way.

When I was a child I would sit at a large table, surrounded by cousins, uncles and grandparents. They used to share jokes and tell stories about their ancestral lands and their fellow tribespeople in Kohlu agency [now district] of Balochistan. I listened quietly.

Over the years the table grew smaller. There were fewer people sitting around it, and fewer jokes and stories about life back in Kohlu were passed around amid meals. Soon, even that trickle of a conversation stopped as we all isolated ourselves in our private lives, barely talking to each other.

Some of the older occupants of the family table passed away, leaving little to no written records of the days and nights they had spent in Kohlu. The place now looked distant to me, both in time and space. It became an ever enticing mystery for me.

This spring I finally embarked on a journey to resolve that mystery. I wanted to discover the sources of all those jokes and stories that I had heard as a child. I wanted to track down my own roots within the land and the people of Kohlu.

I got up early to prepare for the long drive from Quetta to Kohlu. Driving through parts of Quetta that were empty 20 years ago, I was amazed to see them now overflowing with people who shifted here from neighbouring rural areas.

Previously you had to drive through Ziarat, pass just below Loralai and touch Duki before reaching Kohlu. Recently, the provincial government built a road on an old but abandoned route to connect Quetta with Kohlu via Sibi. This has cut down travelling time by half, from 12 hours to six and a half.

Not knowing what to expect in Kohlu – a small town with a few hundred people, or a large bustling city – I drove along. The landscape captivated me: mountain peaks in different colours, ranging from rust brown to purple and every shade in between; cliffs that changed shapes as one drove by them.

The road grew narrower as it arrived in Kohlu town and the human presence suddenly expanded. From barely seeing a soul for miles, other than fellow travellers on the road, I found myself in a flurry of human activity — people going about all kinds of routine activities.

Kohlu is a small town with a lone commercial street passing through it. A large number of shops and houses are stretched along the length of the street. Single-storey buildings jostle for space, jutting into each other, sometimes even protruding onto the road. Strange for a place surrounded by vast expanses of almost uninhabited space!

This does not mean that the town is a cramped place. It is spread over a large area with relatively long distances to travel between its neighbourhoods. A lot of construction is going on in Kohlu. Homes are being expanded and new shops are being built.

There is also a very active commercial life here. Local residents travel around the rest of Balochistan, and to southern Punjab, frequently for shopping trips — mostly bringing back construction materials and fast food. “Anything you need, we can get it for you within a few hours,” as my guide put it when asked about road networks in the area.

There isn’t much to do in Kohlu other than hiking and meeting people. There is also barely any cell phone coverage in certain parts. The air is clear of pollution and the atmosphere refreshing. (I am told that it tends to get very dusty and hot during the summer months.)

Kohlu’s population is anybody’s guess. The population of the whole of Kohlu district, which is many times bigger than the town, is said to be somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000. According to the 1998 census, however, the population is about 100,000. No one seems to agree on a specific figure. The ongoing national census may resolve that problem.

Kohlu district is a harsh landscape with bursts of beauty hidden deep inside it — beauty that needs patience but invites exploration and promises the joy of discovery.

The landscape also defies a simplistic description. It is not all naked brown mountains; it is not just valleys where crops and fruit trees grow as tall and thick as anywhere else in Balochistan; it is not limited to gorges and canyons where water streams out from mysterious sources.

It is all of that and then some – its people are toughened by their geographical isolation and made wary of outsiders due to their not-so-pleasant experiences of interacting with them.

Suppressed from the outside and exploited from within, they are gradually coming to grips with the social and economic realities of what is considered the modern way.

They want what everyone among us wants — a roof above their heads, food on the table and a prosperous, peaceful life. They appear willing to work with anyone who can guarantee those few things.

But when their culture is threatened, something that has been part of their lives for centuries, when their very existence is seen as a threat, what would they do? Of course, they would stand up and defend their tradition and territory. Who wouldn’t?

In Kohlu, I met a man named Rab Nawaz. He took it upon himself to be my guide, arranging trips in and outside Kohlu town. Some evenings we sat around a fire, exchanging our stories and experiences in the traditional Marri way — something, he pointed out, people do not seem to be doing any more.

I also heard many interesting stories from his very diverse life. Working though different professions, he has now become vice chairman of the Kohlu district council. He and his family have suffered a lot at the hands of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), a separatist group, for reasons he never clarified.

He lost many relatives to explosions and gunfire. One of his younger relatives, a keen photographer, lost an eye in a car bomb.

Nawaz is working to bridge the historic divide between the Marri tribe and the state of Pakistan. The divide goes as far back as the 1950s, when oil and gas reserves were first discovered in Kohlu. It intensified into an open war in 1973 after a provincial government, headed by Baloch nationalist leader Ataullah Mengal, was dismissed by the federal authorities. Thousands of Pakistan Army soldiers, aided with helicopters, raided Kohlu’s mountains and valleys to smoke out the Marri rebels bunkered there.

A natural mediator with extensive knowledge of tribal dynamics as well as of provincial politics, Nawaz has been helping both sides to forge better mutual understanding.

Being part of a generation that has seen the relationship between the Marris and the government change from hostility to cautious interaction, he has suffered as a result of injustices perpetrated by both sides. He seems well-suited to take the relationship to a new phase of coexistence and cooperation.

Most of us living in cities do not care about people like Nawaz. We see them as strangers if and when – and that is very rare – they are around us. We see them sticking to their archaic ways of life and see those ways as a danger to our social order that has a set of rules of its own.

People on the receiving end of this treatment are justified if they see us as brown heirs to the British Raj, comfortably sitting back in our drawing rooms, drinking Scotch and puffing at cigars in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Quetta.

As long as our glasses are full and cigar cases well-stocked, and as long as coal and gas keep flowing from such distant lands as Kohlu, do we really care about them?

This was originally published in the Herald's April 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a graduate of Oxford Brookes University where he studied film, photography and architecture.

When I first discovered cycle touring, I instantly knew I had found the mode of transport that best matched my travel personality. After my four-month tour of Japan in 2009, I was simply hooked by the sense of freedom, independence and efficiency that travelling long distances on a bicycle offered — I felt the whole world under my wheels. Three-and-a-half years have passed since I set out on my quiet adventure to cycle overland from Japan to Spain. I am still firmly convinced there is no better way for me to see the world than from the saddle, where the only luxury is my slow pace.

Unlike the fast traveller who jumps from one point to another, always trying to decide where to go next, the choices for the slow traveller are reduced by the demands of the mode of transport. Places automatically follow each other and, with every pedal stroke, you connect all the places between your point of departure and your point of arrival — places you would never stop at if you were travelling faster. You are exposed to absolutely everything and find a quiet joy in immersing yourself in the most ordinary ways of life. Travel becomes an authentic sensual experience: not only do you move through places but places move through you.

When I close my eyes, my mind rescues memories of people and landscapes. But it is my body that has retained the piercing fragments of life in constant movement, with its rewards but also challenges: the unpaved and treacherous roads, the arduous climbs and the congested cities. My body bears the marks of the freezing cold and gusty winds of the Himalayas, heavy rains and floods of Myanmar, steep gradients of north Laos, volcanic ash of Indonesia, dusty roads of Cambodia and fumes and deafening noises of trucks in India and Nepal. Most importantly, it bears the overwhelming goodness of the human company I have had in all these places.

Travelling slow is to persevere kilometres on kilometres of ascent and find a powerful feeling of resilience and gratitude in the strenuous effort to the top. It means stopping to catch your breath and being exalted by the power of your own self. It means staying with a local family in an unknown village, sleeping in a foreign bed and yet feeling at home. It means being in the present moment and existing out of time, free from schedules and itineraries. It means surrendering to the whims of the unexpected, believing that everything will be just fine.

Even slow travellers long for those moments when they can stand still — not only to maintain their sanity but also to revise and refine the first impressions of a place they have been through. At times, my slow travel too, takes the form of non-travel — that is, when I spend longer periods of time in one place. The country I am moving through becomes a temporary home. Days become less exciting than life always on the move yet they bring intricate nuances and new insights.

I recently spent three months with the Balti people — as one of them living in the mountains surrounded by breathtaking peaks. I rode from Astore through the Deosai plains towards Skardu, and then on to Hushe Valley in Khaplu district. I have experienced the culture of sufficiency in abundant doses, and the richness of those days contrasts sharply with the frugality of life in rural and neglected communities in the far reaches of the mountains.

While I reflect on the challenges of living amid extreme conditions, the same unsettling question arises in my mind again and again: how to explain that what I deem as luxuries during my travel (food, water and shelter), indeed showcase their poverty? What I do for a challenge, they do for survival.

A Balti friend was astonished: “Why is someone coming from Switzerland, a beautiful and prosperous land, willing to spend a cold winter in an isolated house perched at 3,000 metres [in Machulu village], accessible only on foot (after almost a three-hour hike) and without any comforts? We are stuck here, wanting to leave.”

The harsh conditions of life in Baltistan sound like fiction when I tell my friends in Karachi about all the skills it takes to survive there. The days of squatting in open dry toilets with majestic views. The time-consuming task of cooking on a portable kerosene stove, the occasional scoop shower taken from a washbasin or directly from the nullah in the middle of frozen November. Going without changing clothes for days, even weeks.

Hiking to the river to fetch water, not wasting a single drop. Maintaining the bukhari (a wood-and-cow-dung-fired room heater) during the evening hours. The confined space of the two-room mudhouse where even standing upright is barely possible. All that seems so far away, in space and time, after spending three months in Karachi.

Every day Karachi reminds me how easy it is to indulge in this other life of material comforts. I now waste cold water, waiting for hot water to run. I find myself spending entire days in franchise coffee shops and paying 400 rupees for a coffee, almost equivalent to my entire day’s budget on the road, while ignoring crowds of beggars on the streets.

My small assortment of used clothes does not suit a fashionable urban lifestyle, but I still resist spending money on new clothes that I will not be able to fit in my bags. On the road, my minimalist spending is dictated by what I need or by whatever little is available. Here in the big city, wants seem to hit me hard, especially after having experienced the joy of life with much less — less but enough.

These contradictions are also a reflection of what Pakistan really is: a country of entrenched, and often absurd, disparities. The north and the south, the mountains and the sea, the numbing cold of the hills and the suffocating heat of the plains, the scarce resources and abundance of opportunities, the inefficiency of public education and ludicrous business of private schools, the poor serving the rich.

The extremes meet each other in the seasonal flow of people between north and south — though for different reasons. While the Karachiite going north is a tourist, looking to enjoy the mountains and a cool summer in Baltistan, the Balti travelling south is a migrant in winter, in search of better employment and/or education. I feel I have somehow experienced both worlds in Pakistan, with the privilege of being the flexible wanderer not caged by either of them.

The power of slow travel lies in this simple, and yet difficult, task — of being able to listen to what the world has to say to us.

This article was originally published in the Herald's March 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer, who was born in Spain but grew up in Switzerland, has traveled by cycle from Japan to Spain in 2013

The Quaid landed in Karachi on August 7, 1947, from Delhi, a week before the Partition of the subcontinent became official. He was greeted by a jubilant crowd anxious to get a glimpse of the great leader who had given them the gift of freedom. Cries of fealty to Pakistan rose like waves, ebbing and flowing, never betraying the horrors facing millions of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs who found themselves in Pakistan.

A week later, Punjab was ablaze. Village after village was plundered; Hindus and Sikhs were killed by Muslim mobs and Muslims by Sikh and Hindus hordes. Railway platforms in Lahore were littered with bodies, lying in pools of blood — congealed, hosed down by railway staff.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s own stay in Karachi would be short lived. He died just over a year later at his residence in the city.

His was the first of many arrivals that have generated much hope and celebration but have led only to much bigger gloom and despair in 70 years of Pakistan’s existence. Statesmen, military rulers, politicians — several of them have landed in the country either from exile, imposed and otherwise, or from landmark visits abroad over these seven decades. Almost always, they returned bringing promises of a better tomorrow. Regime changes, diplomatic breakthroughs and political revolutions — all kinds of transformations have been anticipated from these homecomings. And almost always, the aftermath of these arrivals has panned out differently.

Liaquat Ali Khan’s return from the United States in May 1950 set the tone for Pakistan’s foreign policy, marking the beginning of a checkered history of diplomacy and deception, friendship and mutual frustration between the two countries. American President Harry S Truman is said to have warmly welcomed our prime minister; the American press, buoyed by Khan’s decision to shun an invitation from Moscow in favour of Washington, was also congenial to him. The New York Times described his anti-communist statements as “heartwarming”.

Back home, though, Khan’s decision to visit America before visiting any Muslim states did not go unnoticed. Pakistan-America relations also experienced an immediate downward spiral due to our reluctance to assist them in the Korean War and our resentment over their refusal to help solve the Kashmir dispute. The optimism with which Khan had flown across the seas to make new friends – shopping lists for military hardware and requests for aid in hand – began to wane. America’s refusal to side explicitly with Pakistan in the Kashmir dispute, along with Khan’s assassination at a public rally in Rawalpindi the following year, all but soured the Pakistan-America intimacy that Khan had hoped for.

The Tashkent Declaration signed between President Ayub Khan and Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in January 1966 was an unexpected conclusion to a war that Pakistanis were told they had won comprehensively. Why, then, did Ayub Khan assent to hand over Indian territory that Pakistan had occupied, without any mention of a plebiscite in Kashmir or a promise of its future settlement? Everyone expected a public explanation from him upon his return to Pakistan from Tashkent. His silence only aggravated public misgivings. Soon people were on the streets, showing their anger against him for losing a war on the table that Pakistan had won in the battlefield.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s resignation as foreign minister would deeply hurt Ayub Khan’s regime. Along with many other factors, it eventually led to his stepping down from the presidency in March 1969 — just ahead of a civil war that would create another country out of the eastern part of Pakistan.

A 32-year-old Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan, from exile in Europe, seven years after her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged and nine years after his government was overthrown in a military coup by General Ziaul Haq. When she landed in Lahore on, April 10, 1986, hundreds of thousands of supporters of her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) received her, anticipating a revolution they thought she was bringing with her. It was “a bad year for dictators,” she told the sea of people who came to welcome her, referring to Ferdinand Marcos’s ouster from power in the Philippines.

Around two-and-a-half years later, Haq’s military aircraft exploded in mid-air and Benazir Bhutto became Pakistan’s – and the Muslim world’s – first female prime minister following the general elections of 1988.

Her second return to Pakistan on October 18, 2007 – after another eight years of living abroad – turned out to be dramatic in a different way. Her image as a champion of democracy was tainted by the memory of her two earlier stints in power – marked by mismanagement and embezzlement of public funds – and President Pervez Musharraf’s National Reconciliation Ordinance, which had granted her amnesty from trial on corruption charges. Still, a large number of PPP supporters flanked her motorcade as it slowly made its way from Karachi airport to the Quaid’s mausoleum. It was after midnight – when the swelling rally had reached Karsaz – that two explosions ripped through it, killing around 150 people and injuring countless others.

Benazir Bhutto herself would be killed a couple of months later in a terrorist attack at Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh, named after Pakistan’s first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan, who was also assassinated there. To this day, both murders remain unsolved.

Nawaz Sharif’s return to Lahore from exile in 2007 – together with Benazir Bhutto’s arrival in Karachi a month earlier – signalled the twilight of Musharraf’s reign. Under pressure from the Saudi government, which has close ties with the Sharif family and had hosted them during their years in exile, Musharraf could no longer prevent his homecoming. Sharif’s party would soon regain power in its traditional stronghold of Punjab after the 2008 general elections, paving the way for him to become prime minister following the polls in 2013.

Since then he has struggled to retain his grip on power. A military unwilling to cede ground on national security and foreign policy and an opposition perpetually on the streets, accusing him of poll rigging, corruption, money laundering and lying, have not let him savour his unprecedented third stint as the prime minister of Pakistan.

There was much speculation over Musharraf’s popularity before he arrived in Karachi from abroad in March 2013. His aides and supporters were expecting a rousing welcome even when security concerns had dampened their plans of a mass rally. In the end, he was received by a handful of supporters.

Soon after his arrival, he was engulfed in prolonged courtroom dramas over his involvement in Nawab Akbar Bugti’s murder in 2006 and the Lal Masjid siege the year after. His trials reached a crescendo when a special tribunal started trying him on charges of high treason for imposing emergency rule in 2007.

Three years of courtroom appearances and multiple sick reports later, he would win a judicial reprieve to travel abroad. He is nowhere close to another return home.

Asif Ali Zardari’s return home, late last year, from what is widely believed to be an 18-month-long hiding abroad is a significant development for him. After making some harsh comments about the military establishment in the summer of 2015, he was known to have run away from Pakistan to avoid trial over charges of corruption he had allegedly committed during his five-year stint as the president of Pakistan.

His return was also significant for his PPP, which is struggling to shore up support in Punjab where it has been trying to win elections on its own for the last three decades. He hoped to give a fillip to the party’s fortunes with his legendary deal-making skills.

But while his return has not led to his immediate arrest and trial as many had anticipated, even his own supporters have questioned the wisdom of his involvement in parliamentary politics. Senior PPP leaders like Aitzaz Ahsan have argued that his decision to contest in the next elections and become a member of the National Assembly will keep the party under pressure over corruption charges against him and will, thus, undermine efforts by his son Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari to mobilise the party’s rank and file in Punjab. Zardari, it seems, is already having second thoughts.

This was originally published in the Herald's February 2017 issue as part of the '70 years of Pakistan' series. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

Throughout the year, Uchhali Lake gives the image of a peaceful, receptive mass of water nestled between wild vegetation in the midst of a salt range. But with a perceptible drop in temperatures, the monotone calm is transposed into a symphonic chorus that is a treat for the ears. With the arrival of the first flock of transient avian beauties, the lake turns into an oasis of waterfowls of different hues and colours.

This is the Uchhali Complex of Khushab district’s Soon Valley, a grouping of the Uchhali, Khabikki and Jahlar lakes. Its sub-tropical and hilly terrain, with a maximum height of over 5,000 feet above sea level, is typified by a less-pronounced monsoon influence, experiencing some winter showers with regular frost and a rather hot and dry summer, more akin to Mediterranean climate.

These lakes welcome migratory birds that arrive for their winter sojourn from distant lands. Covering as much as 4,500 kilometres via the International Migratory Bird Route Number 4, these animals escape the harsh winters of Siberia and Central Asian counties to seek refuge in the valley.

Skeins of geese and flamboyant flamingos with their brilliant pink feathers and gangly necks stand elegantly in the brackish waters; red-beaked, black-bodied coots splatter on the surface, spraying water into the air.

Any birdwatcher witnessing this sight can truly understand the following lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Birds of Passage:

They are the throngs

Of the poet’s songs,

Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs,

The sound of winged words.

Around 50 species of migratory birds have flocked to the country this season. As they frolic in the water, one cannot help but think of their exhausting journey that sees them battle exhaustion and starvation, crossing hostile territories full of airborne predators. While these birds are hardwired to overcome these natural obstacles, they are helpless in front of anthropogenic challenges. According to a 2013 research conducted by Birdlife International, at least 45%, and up to 88%, of 370 species of migratory birds of Asia will have no place to go to in the coming years. The question then is: can we turn a deaf ear to their cries?

When it seems all has been lost, passionate individuals and organisations such as WWF-Pakistan are still working to contain the damage, if not reverse it. Authorities concerned should also evince interest in protecting these hardy birds and their habitat.

With the sun dipping behind the hills, calmness returns to Uchhali Lake. As the rays bounce off the brackish water, for a split second they transform it into gold. The avian beauties huddle together for a long winter night and with a sigh we leave the lake and its guests, promising to return next year, with words from Andrew Downing’s Winter Birds ringing in our heads:

Little you care for the riot and rattle–

Little you heed – let the mercury fall!

Brave little fighters, go on with your battle–

Here is a friend who will welcome you all!

Fly to my window – I'll feed every comer–

Hail to the comrades that constancy show

Loving and loyal, in winter and summer–

With us, alike, in the heat and the snow!

The writer is a freelance contributor.

A raja once asked his two sons: “How much do you love me?” The elder one replied: “More than anything in the world.” The raja liked the reply. The younger one said: “I love you as much as I love chillies.” The raja was offended. He kicked the younger one out of his palace. Years later, the banished son invited his father to dinner but disguised himself as someone else. When the raja sat down to eat, he saw all sorts of curries in front of him. He tasted them one by one but found taste in none. He shouted: “Why are there no chillies in them?” His son came out of his disguise and replied: “When I told you I love you like I love chillies, this is what I meant — that my life is tasteless without you.”

Younis Malkani, a school teacher, tells the tale and laughs. For many in his village called Madave Solanki, in Sindh’s Umerkot district, life without chillies is not just a matter of taste but also of survival.

Parsaan, 45, has just come back from her field after picking chillies on a sun-drenched October day. It is getting late for lunch and her husband is asking for food. She quickly prepares two dishes — one of fried green chillies and the other of fried and crushed red chillies. Her husband eats the two dishes along with roti, washing the meal down with lassi.

Most families here eat fried, curried or pickled chillies throughout the year. Vegetables are rarely available and when they are, people usually do not have money to buy them.

Chillies, indeed, are a way of life here.

Most traders in Umerkot town, some 300 kilometres to the north-east of Karachi, string together seven fresh chillies and a lemon, and hang them at the entrance of their shops. “We do not want the goddess of misfortune to get in,” says Gowardhan, who runs a flower stall in the town’s main bazaar. “[The goddess] loves hot, sour and pungent things. If she visits my shop, she will eat the chillies and the lemon and will go away.”

Each chilli-lemon set is left hanging for seven days. After that it is thrown away where four paths meet, Gowardhan says, “so that people walk on it and crush the evil spirits it has captured”.

Parsaan also uses chillies to detain evil spirits in them. When her grandson, Sahil, was born last year and people visited her house to congratulate her on his birth, she “had to remove the effects of evil eyes on the boy twice each day” — first at sunrise, then at sunset.

Also read: Punjab's fields of change

She would take seven dried chillies, seven small pieces of coal and seven small pieces of rock salt in her fist and move them over her grandson’s entire body seven times while reciting a prayer. She would then throw the chillies in the fire. They would make cracking sounds and produce smoke. She knew the boy was afflicted but would be cured because “the fire goddess burns evil eyes caught in the chillies.”

Her 24-year-old daughter-in-law, Lilavati, recalls the night when her three-year-old son Kishore woke up screaming. “I knew some evil spirit was disturbing him,” she says.

The next day at dusk, she poured water into a stainless steel plate. She put seven pieces of dried chillies, coal and rock salt in a small aluminium vase, added two burning coals to the mix and covered the vase with a piece of cloth. “I moved the pot seven times over Kishore’s head and prayed for the evil spirit to go away,” she says.

Lilavati then took away the cloth, inverted the vase on to the plate full of water, placed an upturned shoe and a sharp iron knife on top of the upside down vase and placed the entire contraption, which made bubbling sounds, under Kishore’s cot. In the morning, she took it out and threw away the contents at a juncture of four paths so people would walk over the evil spirits and destroy them. “I had to repeat it seven nights to save my child from nightmares.”

Kunri, a taluka (tehsil) in Umerkot district, grows around 55 per cent of all red chillies produced in Sindh, according to an online “sector brief” by the Sindh Board of Investment. The province, the brief reads, produces around 85,000 tonnes of red chillies a year — roughly 85 per cent of Pakistan’s total annual red chilli production.

Chilli is sown in March and April in and around Kunri. Its picking season starts as early as June and continues well into December. Harvesting reaches its peak during October.

Also read: Neelum Valley- The sapphire trial

The main chilli variety sown locally is called longi dandi kat. It does not have a stalk and is round in shape. Sanam is another variety favoured by local farmers. Shaped like a long and progressively narrowing tube closed at both ends, it is harvested and sold with the stem intact.

Local farmers started growing chilli decades ago, says 68-year-old Karimdad, a resident of Kunri town. “My father used to cultivate cotton and maize but I shifted to chilli because it is a profitable cash crop,” he says.

Mojan, 58, is sporting a shocking pink dupatta over a red blouse and blue long skirt. Under the scorching desert sun, she is picking chillies at her small family farm in Madave Solanki village along with her daughter, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. They have tied their dupattas in the shape of baskets to collect chillies in.

Mojan dries the picked chillies at least four days before using, selling or storing them. Each day, she spreads them in her sun-soaked courtyard and turns them over at least twice.

Mojan’s 12-year-old granddaughter is looking forward to the day these chillies will go to the market. She will meticulously collect the shredded chillies left behind during packing. Nothing tastes sweeter to her than the sugar candy she acquires by bartering those leftover chillies with a shopkeeper.

This article was originally published in the Herald's November 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

All photographs are by the author, who is a travel writer and photographer.

A white, unmarked food cart stands next to a shiny kiosk selling burgers along the service lane that runs parallel to Karachi’s Sharae Faisal road. It’s lunch time. The cart vendor – an old man in his sixties – doles out ladles full of rice, lentils and other curries onto white paper plates and hands them out to his customers standing around his stall. He set up his stall two years ago and it has been earning him a steady income since.

The area where he runs his business is called Nursery. No saplings are sold here though. Instead, the place is known for housing a busy furniture market. The service lane is lined with shady trees that cover the entire length of the footpath.

His customers are people working in nearby shops and other business concerns. They sit on stools, chairs and benches, laid on the footpath to have their meal. The cart vendor operates right under the shade of a neem tree — its cool, soothing shade could be one reason why his business is doing so well.

Food sellers and their patrons are not the only ones to benefit from the shade. Van drivers, waiting to be hired by furniture buyers, park their vehicles next to Sharae Faisal and rest under the trees.

The Nursery area has always been a popular spot for those wanting to take a break from their day’s work. People can be seen here relaxing in different ways, under the trees. On a recent September day, one man is taking a nap on a makeshift bed while two others sit and chat on a worn down sofa a little further down the road.

The comfort of a tree’s shade is one luxury that the residents of Karachi do not have to pay for. In a city where water is sold by the gallons, such priceless comfort is a rare facility available to all and sundry for free.

Consider when – and where – this facility is not available. During the summer of 2015, an unusual heatwave killed 1,300 people in different parts of Karachi. Experts are unable to single out the most important factor behind those deaths but anecdotal evidence suggests that most of them took place in areas where protection from the sun – in the form of a tree or man-made shade – was not available.

Tofiq Pasha Mooraj, a senior horticulturist in Karachi, emphasises the all too well-known benefits of trees. Other than providing shade, he says, trees bring down temperatures by cooling down the breeze that passes through their leaves. They also offset the impact of heat absorbed by concrete buildings which is then released slowly into the atmosphere even after the sun is down, he adds.

Alarmed by last year’s deadly heatwave, the government acknowledged the importance of trees and announced plans to plant three million of them in Karachi. So far, however, not a single tree has been planted under the plan.

The comfort of a tree’s shade is one luxury that the residents of Karachi do not have to pay for.

On the other hand, thousands of trees have been cut down to make way for infrastructure development in different parts of the city. Salman Karim Khan of the private landscaping firm, AK Khan Associates, says that a single project – the Green Line Bus Rapid Transit System – has cost the city 6,000 trees that have been cut down from areas that fall between Nagan Chowrangi and Hyderi. Furthermore, approximately 2,000 trees have been felled in Nazimabad area for the same project.

Yet, according to Mooraj, Karachi is greener than it was ever before. Will the city continue to add to its greenery? Signs are it may not.

Public spaces available for plantation continue to shrink. Lack of proper planning in government-run plantation campaigns is another reason why the number of trees in Karachi is projected to go down in the future. Official campaigns are carried out in an ad hoc manner, says Komal Shahid, a landscape architect. The government takes decisions without carrying out any research and analysis, she says.

The consequences of such decision-making can be best illustrated by the introduction of eucalyptus – and more recently, corynocarpus – trees in Karachi. Eucalyptus was brought to Karachi from Sri Lanka during General Ziaul Haq’s regime (in the 1980s). The species quickly became a common feature in the city’s landscaping projects. A fast-growing tree, it allowed officials to claim credit for quickly making Karachi green.

Also read: The coast is clear- The vanishing mongrove forest of Karachi

By the 1990s, however, it had become obvious that the eucalyptus was not suitable for Karachi’s environment. Its invasive roots were causing damage to the city’s sewage lines, it required huge amounts of water that was simply not available and its pollen resulted in an increase in different kinds of allergies among city residents.

In 2008, the city government began large-scale plantation of corynocarpus trees — mainly all along Sharae Faisal. Its impacts became noticeable quite quickly: corynocarpus was found to be as harmful for the city as the eucalyptus has been and for the same reasons. Still, it continues to be planted in landscape projects and housing schemes all over Karachi.

Corynocarpus trees are particularly ubiquitous near the sea. They grow quickly and can develop in saline water. That is why they are popular in private homes in the Defence Housing Authority. Footpaths and parks in the neighbourhood are also replete with them.

In Hilal Park, corynocarpus trees stand right next to such indigenous varieties as burna and neem. They are pruned and well kept and look beautiful. If left unattended, however, they can grow really large and unwieldy. Their roots can spread far and dry out the surrounding soil, making it difficult to grow grass or shrubbery around them.

Mooraj, however, says corynocarpus does not need to be completely discouraged; only indigenous trees such as burna and neem should not be neglected because of it. Corynocarpus trees should not be unnecessarily planted in areas where other, indigenous species can easily flourish, he explains.

Mohammad Sarfraz, who works at a private nursery in Korangi, confirms that many people who want to plant trees in their homes do just that — preferring corynocarpus over indigenous trees.

Mooraj says there is a woeful lack of trees in the city’s existing parks and public spaces. Consider the gardens at Frere Hall, for instance, which have small clusters of trees that line the pathways and grace the corners. “At least 70 per cent of a park’s area should be covered in trees,” he says.

Architect Komal Shahid, similarly, argues that water flowing from our kitchens and bathroom sinks can be recycled and used in plantation projects. All the government needs to do is set up water treatment plants for making waste water reusable, she says. In the absence of these plants, all that water is instead draining out into the Arabian Sea.

Khan, who is also a senior member of the Horticultural Society of Pakistan, explains that Karachi already had a wide variety of indigenous trees by 1947. The city’s two biggest gardens, Burns Garden and Gandhi Garden, had many trees of jungle jalebi, neem, amaltaas and burna among others. The city’s coastal areas were covered in lush and sprawling mangrove forests. Several species of fruit trees, including tamarind, mango, almond and guava, could also be found in Karachi at the time. A large number of government-owned nurseries then dotted different parts of the city, selling seeds and saplings of mostly indigenous trees.

Also Read: Baltistan- The apricot bloom

According to Khan, there is no lack of privately-owned nurseries in Karachi these days, but they aim to maximise their profits by selling imported trees. They are least bothered about preserving and promoting indigenous species, he says.

Khan adds that the lack of attention towards local trees is not just prevalent among nursery owners, but also among people who want to plant trees in their lawns and other privately-owned spaces. Customers prefer expensive trees that have been brought in from abroad. Sometimes, he says, they even prefer imported seeds for plants that can be easily found locally — such as the bougainvillea. Khan sees this as a wasteful use of foreign exchange and a threat to indigenous trees.

Thousands of trees have been cut down to make way for infrastructure development in different parts of the city.

Palm trees have been the biggest beneficiaries of this shift in the demand and supply for trees in the city. The roundabout just outside Quaid-e-Azam’s mausoleum, for instance, is lined with tall palm trees with their smooth trunks painted white. While aesthetically pleasing, their leaves – growing only at the top of the tree – provide little shade.

The number of trees with foreign-sounding names is certainly increasing in the city, although local species have not disappeared altogether. Old neem trees still provide shade on Amir Khusro Road, with their drooping branches as it links Shaheed-e-Millat Expressway with Karsaz. Burna trees grace the road passing through Patel Para with their pale green leaves and winding branches. Similar trees can be found in many other localities of the older parts of Karachi.

These local trees are only outnumbered by the foreign ones in the posh and new neighbourhoods. But then everything in these neighbourhoods – from architecture to interior decoration – looks more foreign than local.

This article was originally published in the Herald's October 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

Much like going to the cinema, we Karachiites flock to cafes and restaurants for a break from the daily grind. Unlike cinemas in the city, the options for eateries are plentiful. We have food hubs in the city, where you will come upon a string of cafes sandwiched together. Lanes and streets in the upscale parts of Defence and Clifton house such a plenitude of cafes, that foodies are spoilt for choice. The appeal is that each eatery opens its doors to a nook of comfort, tasteful environs and, naturally, food at your beck and call. From décor and ambience to cuisine, every new place that pops up gains popularity for its signature dishes. The name of the restaurant does the rounds in social circles and the place picks up crowds of customers. “Have you had the steak at x? I love the Korean beef bowl at y!”

A few build a regular customer base which doesn’t wane over time — customer loyalty centred around the restaurant’s specialities. Some phase out in memory, because the food is forgettable, unlike the madeleine moment for Proust. For regulars at these joints, it is the owners who become ambassadors of their bustling business. The reason also being that most owners are hands-on with creating and evolving the menu and supervising the affairs of the kitchens. But, of course, there are chefs working magic inside these kitchens who produce the mouth-watering plates of food brought to our tables.

Okra, which mainly has Mediterranean gourmet on offer, makes this connection to its small open kitchen immediately; as you enter, you can peek inside a small turquoise window to its white brick kitchen. Often, you can see Ayaz Khan, the owner, overseeing the activities of the chefs. You will also spot Mukesh Devtani, pristine in his black and white striped apron and black chef’s hat. As neat as the spick and span kitchen that has the stoves and oven fired, and the unending orders rolling in. Devtani has been with Okra for the last 15 years, so it is safe to say that he is well versed with the kinds of flavour and quality that the restaurant aims to put up. A particular dish is perfected after going through a few stages, as he and Khan work on it, sampling it and retrying twice or thrice until it’s just right. He says, “Khan sets the menu and then trains me on how to perfect the dish.”

Also read: What's on my plate — A history of food safety and regulation

Devtani did not opt to be a chef because it was a calling for him, but rather out of necessity and for the sake of livelihood. He had his parents, wife and two sons to look after. He mentions though that in his long career he has been lucky to have found two great teachers. Before joining Khan at Okra, he worked for Wong Catering where he picked up a vast number of culinary skills from the owner. He would work for the latter in the morning and start his shift at Okra in the evenings.

Schooled only till the sixth grade, he entered the culinary profession as it helped make decent money — enough to “upgrade my family”, says the soft-spoken chef. When you draw customers for the food you plate up, ensuring that they keep coming back for more is paramount. For this reason, Devtani says that customers’ preference is an important guide to creating a dish that hits the spot. Okra entertains the well-heeled and a multitude of foreign visitors. “I read up a little bit about what goras like,” he says. For example, by he understands that they have a very light palette — spice is not what piques their taste.

Haydar Acik does his research on the Internet when looking for ideas to present a dish. He is not a proponent of fusion cuisine in his kitchen; the only fusion allowed is the mixing of Turkish, Urdu and choppy English. The burly chef at Clifton’s Lale-i-Rumi comes across as a patriotic Turk. He’s there to welcome the guests to a feast of Turkish cuisine at the restaurant, glowing in the dim kaleidoscope of Turkish lamps and plush with wall hangings, rugs and mirrors. Acik came to Karachi from Istanbul and worked as a chef at Sölen Istanbul, touted as the first Turkish restaurant in Pakistan. This was three years ago, when he came with his wife and daughter to the metropolis, but his training in culinary arts goes back over 20 years. His mentor was a restaurant chef in Istanbul, named Yusuf, from whom he learned the ropes — of grilling succulent Adana kebabs and making cheesy Künefe desserts.

Adapting dishes accordingly is the trick to keeping people coming back for more

Acik comes across as a no-nonsense, even taciturn, man who manages his team, but there is also an ease and familiarity when he is communicating with his colleagues. There isn’t much difference in what he gets paid here to what he could make back home in Istanbul, so he claims he works only to promote the cuisine of his land and its culture. “Allah made me come to Karachi,” is how he explains this trade of countries.

For Abdul Samad, head chef at Pantry – a cafe located on Zamzama – it was his brothers who inspired him to join the food industry. One of his brothers works as a chef in New York and the other works in Washington DC. Samad has been trained at Karachi’s Pakistan Institute of Training and Hotel Management, referred to as PITHM in the culinary circle. According to the owner of Pantry, Mohammad Ali Teli, PITHM sends many trained cooks that are recruited in the city’s restaurants.

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The kitchen at Pantry – a go-to cafe for comfort food – is crowded with a team of cooks, all busy chopping and cutting, tossing and drizzling, grilling and baking. Samad says it is a challenge indeed to manage two teams of chefs, who work the morning and evening shifts. Although he has been cooking for 16 years now, he reiterates responding to the regular customers’ suggestions; adapting dishes accordingly is the trick to keeping people coming back for more. Teli tries to also reinvent the menu every three to five months in order to keep things fresh.

The cooks are a motley crew, as they come from various backgrounds: a chef who works in the cold kitchen, mostly responsible for making salads, ran away from the army and has been at Pantry for two and a half years. Yasir, who comes from a family of fisherfolk, is the young chef in charge, who started out doing kitchen duty here. He says he only goes on a boat for “enjoyment” now, but his family doesn’t understand the kind of food he has learnt to cook here.

As Devtani explains: “They say if someone is involved with a certain skill or profession, it is around them and before them daily. So you can’t help but learn new things about the subject.”

This article was originally published in the Herald's September 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

Very few of us have explored the country we live in; our knowledge of the world outside our hometowns is usually limited to places where the top 10 hotels are situated. What lies out there beyond the reach of modern amenities is largely unexplored. Ensconced within the confines of our homes, we also tend to see almost everything outside as being hostile.

My travel to Gharo, to the east of Karachi on the Arabian Sea coast, in the middle of June 2016 was instructive on both counts.

The road to Gharo was anything but smooth. By the time I reached there, I felt like I had been rolled down Mount Everest in a barrel. The wind was so intense on the way that at times it felt like there was someone about to flip over my car. If I could put a sail on the car, I could have flown across the coast. That would have been a far better option than have my innards all shaken by the uneven road.

You know you are moving towards the coast when the residential buildings start changing from concrete blocks to adobe straw huts. The landscape changed along with it – from lush green to bone dry – till it got drowned into the sea.

The day ended abruptly in Gharo; there was no evening, no sunset. It was day one moment and then in the next it was night, probably because the sky was overcast. Yet it was not all dark. Everything – people, objects and places – had a soft glow around it.

Also read: The coast is clear- The vanishing mangrove forest of Karachi

And the local residents were friendly and courteous, not hostile.

It was almost the middle of the fasting month of Ramzan but many people in and around Gharo did not seem to be fasting. The eateries were open and it was business as usual for food vendors. Most people I met offered me tea and asked me to partake in their meals, mostly made with the catch of the day. Some asked me if I wanted to travel out to the sea with them.

There was a sense of openness, of freedom — something the cities laden with concrete and asphalt don’t seem to have. How long will this last? Dirt roads are being paved slowly and someone will soon realise how close the area is to Karachi, making it lucrative real estate to be sold for extending the cities laden with concrete and asphalt to these rather unspoiled natural environs.

The second day was darker. It looked like the clouds could crack any minute and send down a heavy downpour. And while I was thinking of rain, it seemed as if someone flipped a switch and suddenly the sun was out with all its blazing glory.

In Makli, the city of ancient tombs just outside Karachi, there seemed to be a macabre fascination with enshrining and exalting those who had passed away long ago. People here go to ask the dead for favours most likely because the living have let them down repeatedly.

Back to the trek. The other major pit stops to the east of Karachi are Sujawal, a densely populated, overcrowded town, and Chuhar Jamali, a big trade town, with a lot of vans transporting passengers and/or goods.

It was exciting to arrive at the Keti Bandar wildlife sanctuary after having visited ill-planned and ill-kempt old and new human settlements along the coast, but the reserve turned out to be too vast to cover in half a day. It was also jealously guarded by the protectors of our naval borders.

Don’t you wish you could just keep travelling forever, not knowing what tomorrow will bring, not bothering about security, not worrying about comfort zones — just living and experiencing the world? No borders, no boundaries. Where you come from and who you are stop mattering and the only thing to think about is where you are going next.

Also read: Train to Balochistan-Following the railway tracks in Southern Pakistan

I knew where I was headed next. Having driven along the coastal areas east of Karachi, I was going to take a long drive along the ones lying west of the metropolis.

At the beginning of the third day of my exploration, I saw a crow pick at the remains of a cat’s carcass on the side of a road leading out of Karachi. A few feet away, traffic police had rounded up several bikers and there was an argument going on between the two sides. Smoke rose from a pile of garbage a little further ahead. This was Rais Goth, a semi-urban locality situated on the road that links Karachi with Balochistan’s industrial town of Hub with Gadani, a village that houses ship-breaking yards.

Gwadar has expanded a lot in recent times. Yet, fortunately, so far it is nothing like the knock-off version of Dubai that it is projected to become in the near future

In Gadani, too, a woeful lack of civic amenities was creating huge public resentment. Local residents were on the streets, protesting against the absence of electricity. Half of the town, where workers from the shipyards live, had been without electricity since the beginning of Ramzan. There, however, were other signs of progress. A huge construction site could be seen along the highway as I left Gadani for the coastal towns further west. The signboard said a cement factory was being built there. Industry seems to be spreading along Balochistan’s coast. There are more walled compounds with barbed wire fences and guard posts here than there are on the eastern part of the coast.

Those driving on the coastal highway encounter a dust storm around noon almost every day of the summer. On that particular June day, I could barely see more than five feet ahead of me while driving through the storm. Only a sliver of the road appeared out of a greyish beige world around me. Driving into the unknown for four hours, I found no working fuel stations along the way to refuel the vehicle and hide myself from the storm. By the time I found one outside Pasni, the fuel tank was almost empty.

Getting into Gwadar, one could see a skeleton of the megacity that this port town is supposed to become. Dusty roads and low stone walls marked the various residential and commercial projects being planned here. Elsewhere, a few grand entrances to proposed new neighbourhoods led to nothing behind them.

Also read: Risky environs- Here's why we should care about climate change

The heart of Gwadar is contained within a labyrinth of criss-crossing roads which keep getting narrower the further you travel down them. When I last visited the town in 2013, the coast was still visible from far away but this is no longer the case as Gwadar has expanded a lot in recent times. Yet, fortunately, so far it is nothing like the knock-off version of Dubai that it is projected to become in the near future.

Upon the hill overlooking the town sits a five-star hotel opened years ago to cater to the swarm of bureaucrats and investors that the construction of the deep-sea port was expected to bring in its wake. The expectations of that boom vaporised as fast as Pervez Musharraf’s political career dissolved into multiple controversies. As the Chinese are now set to take over Gwadar, it comes as no surprise that the first few channels on the hotel television cable are in Chinese language.

Gwadar is a town with a wonderful sense of ease and self-confidence about it. A walk with a camera through the streets or a stroll across its impressive beaches does not arouse any unwarranted curiosity. Nothing here makes you feel that you are unwelcome. My fear is that this may change as more development projects and, along with them, more outsiders show up in the town which is already reeling under a number of civic problems. Electricity supply is erratic, water shortages are chronic and roads are in various stages of disrepair. To a certain extent, this combination of influx of people and dearth of amenities is exactly what lies at the bottom of the ethnic, political and law and order problems in Karachi.

One thing that seems to have improved in Gwadar and its nearby areas recently is security. Protected by various departments of the armed forces, the region is heavily fortified and appears well guarded.

The last place I visited was Jiwani, the farthest western town on Pakistan’s coast, right next to the Iranian border. Local residents told me it took only 20 minutes by boat to go to Iran and on a clear day one could see Iranian settlements across the mountains lining the sea. Jiwani is a little town with a lot of ugly architecture nestled in beautiful natural surroundings. Its land is being rapidly eroded by the sea. The Balochistan irrigation department has recently built a protection wall for houses located next to the sea.

On the way back to Karachi from Jiwani, I got caught in an accident caused by sandstorms between Pasni and Ormara. I got hurt when my car collided with a bus coming from Karachi. In three other similar accidents the same day and in the same area, two people lost their lives and many others were injured.

As I was recovering from my injuries in a foreign land, my grief over these accidents was overshadowed by something much bigger — all the loss of life in recent weeks in places such as France, the United States, Turkey, Kashmir and Pakistan. Inflicted upon us under the various flimsy excuses of religion, liberation and (both personal and national) honour, death certainly has become the biggest equaliser.

This was originally published in the Herald's August 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Kohi Marri is a graduate of Oxford school of architecture, Oxford Brookes University. He works as a freelance photographer doing commercial, editorial and personal projects.

Once upon a time, Narayanpura, a neighbourhood by Ranchore Line in Karachi’s Saddar area had eight entrances. During Christmas, Hindu and Sikh residents joined their Christian neighbours to sing carols and decorated the alleys with lights and candles. On Holi and Diwali, everyone participated in the celebrations regardless of their faith.

But when, in 1992, Hindutva activists demolished Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, India, Narayanpura was set ablaze. Since then, four of its entrances have been closed for security reasons. Yet, as one of Karachi’s most religiously diverse neighbourhoods, the locality still thrives on what the locals call bhai chara, or brotherhood.

With an estimated population of 10,000, according to its residents, Narayanpura has been home to Sikhs, Christians and Hindus since around 1824. Its three main Hindu temples, three main churches and a Sikh gurdwara have existed side by side since the early part of the 20th century.

On an evening in April, Amar Singh* and Santosh Kumar* walk through garbage piled up in the narrow lanes of Narayanpura. Singh was born and raised near the 105-year-old gurdwara that is being given a wash on that sweltering day. Only the caretakers can enter. Two old men sit on the stairs leading to its heavy bronze door that is partially open. Children are out playing cricket in the nearby streets; their fathers stand on the balconies, fanning themselves with newspapers while watching the game. No outsider can tell who belongs to which faith — the only resident who stands out is a little Sikh boy who can be spotted in a red turban. He drags a heavy cricket bat behind him as he stomps towards the other players.

The gurdwara has a courtyard with marble flooring. The noise of traffic outside and the Muslim call to prayer pervade the air and the spire of a Hindu temple looms large over its boundary wall. A small shrine on a raised platform in one corner of the courtyard is dedicated to Granth Sahib, the Sikh scripture.

Also read: A train to Balochistan

Singh repeats the word bhai chara. Without it, he says, they would all be displaced. Kumar, standing next to Singh, nods in agreement. The two explain that each community within Narayanpura has a committee — Kumar being a member of the Hindu committee. If anyone needs space or resources, the members of the committees join hands to arrange that.

Kumar points to a church built recently in the place of an abandoned house. In another church around the corner, built on the second storey of a house, a middle-aged man is setting up curtains and tables for Sunday’s morning mass. He found faith three years ago, after spending years as a drunkard, and shifted to Narayanapura because of the love and support he and his family receive here.

The sense of brotherhood, though, has failed to address many other problems. When asked about the heaps of garbage outside the neighborhood entrances, Kumar says an empty plot of land reserved for waste disposal has recently been purchased by someone politically connected. He stares at the mess, rubs his eyes and his hands move up to massage his temple. He looks worried. “This is our identity now,” he says.

**Lyari is a** kaleidoscope of colour and shapes. One second you pass by the freshly painted brick-red walls of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University where the Sindh Rangers roam the campus and the next moment you move along the congested Chakiwara Road lined with crumbling lower-middle class apartment buildings — once perhaps a pristine white but now a dull shade of grey.

The neighbourhood is home to a large number of adherents of the Zikri Muslim sect. They have about half a dozen places of worship, known as zikr khanas, here.

It is Friday afternoon and worshippers can be seen scurrying to their zikr khanas. One zikr khana is situated on the street where Fazal Habib*, a local social worker about 50 years of age, lives. It is divided into two sections — one for men and the other for women.

Habib points to a brick wall, a fading strawberry pink. “This is the men’s section and over there to the right is the women’s.” About 10 steps away is a house painted in shades of brown, with an iron gate marking the entrance. It is hard to tell it apart from the rest of the buildings on the street. Inside, it is just a large empty room with polished floor and no furniture — only a bookshelf built into the wall contains several copies of the Quran. This is the women’s section.

Also read: Are Ahmadis just as persecuted in other Muslim-majority countries?

In another street nearby, a recently renovated zikr khana is slowly filling up with men. In 10 minutes, the men will begin their zikr which is performed five times a day. The neighbourhood will echo with their rhythmic chants; it will only get louder when the women join in from the other side of the street.

Jhimpir, about 112 kilometres to the east of Karachi, has many distinctions to boast of: it is the location of Pakistan’s first wind power plant; it is endowed with dolomite, an essential ingredient of steel-making; and it is the site of Keenjhar Lake, one of the country’s largest freshwater reservoirs. It also houses one of the oldest Ismaili jamaat khanas in Sindh.

Members of the Ismaili sect living in Karachi visit the place in large numbers every month. Luxury buses, with Bollywood music blaring from their sound systems, are parked along a road winding around the lake. Men in their Reebok shorts and Polo shirts can be seen spreading out bed sheets and towels in front of the huts normally occupied by local villagers who number just about 100.

The road ends at a gated courtyard with a white marble floor. A low wooden door in a shaded part of the courtyard opens into a cavernous structure with a very low ceiling. It is furnished with glittering cots and is adorned with colourful upholstery. “This is a natural structure. We only added a few things to it to keep it cool,” explains a caretaker.

The cave at the bottom of a hill is full of mysteries — one of them being a small opening into a tunnel. The caretaker narrates: some people say the tunnel goes to Karbala; others say an imam would say the afternoon prayer in Jhimpir and would use this tunnel to offer the evening prayer in Medina. “People say these kinds of things all the time,” he adds with a laugh.

Also read: Republic of fear—by Asma Jahangir

A mosque reportedly built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan is located at the top of the hill. The stairs that go up to the mosque appear quite old. Away from the ruinous stairs is a massive hall that works as the jamaat khana. A man sits on its floor on an early May day – crouched over cooking utensils – next to a portrait of Aga Khan IV, hung on the main wall.

The lack of communication and transport facilities has helped the Ismailis to keep the place little known. As a minority religious community, says the caretaker, “we have to be cautious”.

**Two fires have** been burning for more than a century in the heart of Karachi – one in Saddar and the other near Pakistan Chowk – at two temples. These Zoroastrian places of worship have existed for over 140 years.

Sheltered from the outside world, the fires are kept alive by feeding sandalwood to them. The fire condenses the sandalwood to ash which, the Zoroastrians say, cannot be further disintegrated and is, thus, the purist form of matter. If you get close enough, you can smell the scent enveloping the temples. By religious law, however, non-Zoroastrians are not allowed to enter them.

An old priest dressed in customary white sits on a plastic chair at the entrance of one temple. A 16-foot space separates him from the gates of the temple. If you are not a Zoroastrian, you cannot move beyond the point where the priest is sitting.

Zoroastrians have always kept a low profile in Karachi and have significantly shrunk in size over the last few decades. By one estimate, there are just 1,300 of them living in Karachi. By another estimate, their number is as low as 800. Many of the young members of the community are moving abroad for higher studies; others are focusing on their professional careers in different parts of the world rather than settling down in the city.

One wonders what will happen to the fire in the temples once there are no Zoroastrians around.

**The names of residents have been changed to protect their identity*

This was originally published in Herald's June 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald

Opening photo: The inside of a mosque's dome dating back to the 16th century in Jhimpir, Sindh | Tahir Jamal, White Star