Sand kicked into the air like a carpet whipped onto the floor. The smell of sand—dry, your tongue coated with a layer of fine dust, picked off empty land the water tanker cuts through every morning. Three individual drops of rain: cold, decisively humid. The sun disappears behind the sand, so much sand. 6:52pm. Twenty-six minutes to the Maghrib aazan, when the lamps turn on and the mosquitoes congregate around their fluorescent offerings as mothers guide their children home.
I walk back slowly, more sand slipping into my soles, sliding over and under my toes. It’s June in Islamabad, but it’s June in Islamabad in a world that is slowly dying, in a world where we can all tell that it’s dying. When the clouds first decompose, the smell of the rain is that of something burning. It’s been hot, hotter than one could imagine in June, in Islamabad. The only explanation is that the sun burnt the moisture, licked it dry, realised that it couldn't contain so much, not all at once.
Seven more drops of rain. The electricity doesn’t cut at ten like it does on nights that are particularly hot. Temperature is measured by how much privilege one has, and then whether one can protect it against the great equalising forces of a withering state.
I grew up in Karachi, and when I was seven and my sister four, we made shadow puppets at the back of candles that would make us sweat even faster, even longer, than the absence of the hum of copper wires hidden behind popcorn walls. Last summer, I would sleep on the carpet on days that were particularly hot. The sea breeze reached me by some miracle or magic, wresting its way through the jaali of the living room window to find me on the floor, my head resting on a single gao’n taqya.
Yesterday, I put my thighs against the floor and even that was hot. I opened the door and outside the mosquitoes swarmed my ankles, bit my calves, found the small place on the web between two fingers. The moon was partially present. The night possessed the silent hum of a sweltering, slumbering disquiet.
The bills have never been so expensive, the heat has never had so many friends. The property developers run amok—carving out plots from valleys, supplanting shisham with palm trees, clearing anything green to replace it with the bored grey of purposeful concrete. I check the weather, and then the date. It’s June in Islamabad.
The winter two years ago felt especially biting. My family doesn’t own any heaters, so we would wrap our feet in three layers and hope for the best. On nights that dipped below zero, I slept in that one hoodie that kept me warmest, hoping for the best.
The seasons operate in much the same way in Islamabad. It was too cold, then, to leave the house. On the motorcycle, inhaling mounds of dry, cooled dust, coagulated exhaust, and then firming my grip against those invisible shards of ice drilling into my finger-bones.
In summer, it’s just too hot.
But there’s eight weeks every year, now, that are left. Eight weeks where it’s tolerable enough to think about leaving the house. And then you remember the price of anything (or everything), and you swipe past another Instagram reel.
The delivery driver who comes by with another package, your only activity left because bohaut garmi hai yaar, is obviously invisible. To acknowledge him is to acknowledge your privilege within your disprivilege.
We pray for rain and then it rains and I wake up at seven in the morning and my feet, to my ankles, are submerged in water. An hour later, after making immediate rectifications as swiftly and precisely as possible, the culprit is found: a mitti ki plate, the potential, promised underside to a captive money-plant’s thirst roots, blocking the only drain and brought to it by the water looking to keep flowing, and flowing, and moving.
I spent the next few hours thinking about how Ma always says pray for what is good for you, not for what you want.
So many stories of water. Split on the floor, across the floor, over the floor. The balcony that cracked and fell three stories at the tail end of a Karachi monsoon. The time the car and then the rope and then the slow, slow drive back to the city from Sandspit. Memory after memory, the past a scrying bowl offering the reflection of yesterday’s evaporate.
Water comes in cycles, the heat comes as the interlude.
My mother would have a drawer of candlesticks and then she bought a rechargeable torch. And we would still make shadow puppets, but we would sweat less. Until the days the bijli went for hours and hours and the charge was insufficient and so I cradled the mom batiya before lining them in the middle of the room. I would watch the wax drip, little by little. I would try to catch it, scrape it off my fingertips once it hardened. How quickly it all happened. Time passed in ways always measured. The city lit into its next act, the interlude ending at the first turn of a fan’s wings, beckoning us to another kind of life.
In May last year, I went to the mountains and I watched, in Skardu, a friend spend a morning vomiting because he hadn't wrapped his stomach the night before like I’d told him to. Thand lag jaye gi, I’d tried to explain. He didn’t listen. But it was also May, and the incredulousness of a summer forestalled by a winding road we spent two days driving through. There was enough distance between us and Islamabad until there wasn’t. And then it was May in Islamabad, and a cold wind wrapped me the night before the heat began.
Time comes in cycles, water and heat as reminders of its potency. Things happen, and thus each moment has the power to determine, in some way, the next. I return to a city stripped of its lungs, an overbearing sun, the visage of hills in the far off distance crowning the horizon on clear days.
The passage of life becomes a political concern as easily as it has always been. The world provides us metaphors like it always has. I feel the cool sensation of a standing fan grazing my upturned feet. It’s a high of fourty-two tomorrow. Knowing this, I go to sleep.
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