Living 20 miles from reality

Lahoris live in a bubble – and they’re in for a rude awakening

The Ring Road, Lahore’s finest orbital highway, circles the city over an 85 km circumference. It is the epitome of development; the current government boasts of its advanced structure, the way it seamlessly resembles one of those highways you’d find upon exiting Heathrow or JFK. The road’s “salient features” beam through its somewhat meagrely-written Wikipedia page – of how our regional and national budgets, with time, became more and more concentrated towards its six lanes, raised concrete structure and unique variations of junctions and separators.

The Road is the single largest semblance of modernity our city has (arguably, in second place to the brilliant Lahori skyline) and goes on to create the illusion that we indeed, as a nation are making progress. A broadly defined term, this progress is. Oftentimes, our very own government officials are unable to differentiate between what is this term, and mere cosmetic change. Our people too, are receding into the facade that our endless, mangled masses of roads have continued to create, and as the regime continues to pour grey barrels of cement over the ground we stand on, the cracks in our foundation become increasingly concealed. Beyond roads and their wonders, beyond the housing societies laden with property that has the perfect market value, beyond the momentary impressed grimace a foreigner might give to the land surrounding the airport upon entering what should’ve been a slum, lies an apparent contradiction.

In our quest to conceal the flaws in our structures, we’ve overlooked the people who keep our institutions in tact; prioritising our assimilation into the culture of the developed world has morphed Lahore into a gigantic, disgusting paradox. Our metropolitan hub has its share of the elite; we tout our industrialists, our entrepreneurs (some of them are even rich enough to bathe in mineral water!) our sports cars and opulent lifestyles. We also have the darker side of the city; the gaping obstacles to a beautiful Lahore- the squatters, the beggars, the occasional homeless man camping on a roundabout on some busy street.  Yet, we pride ourselves in the opinion that when contrasted to the other parts of Pakistan, the Balochis with their barren wastelands, the Sindhis with their vigilante ghost towns, we are relatively better off.

I thought this as I too, one day, drove down the very same far stretching Ring Road that we shield ourselves behind. I gazed at the open sky, the grass, the fields bordering the wide lanes and marvelled at how far we had come. Lahore has immense amounts of its own culture; buildings, heritage, its own sense of urban scenic beauty, if you will. A few miles down, and  I had even noticed that we were blessed with natural scenery; not far off from the airport, towards a small abaadi, I saw mountains towering over our city. I was pleased at how the government, in their quest for constant development, managed to leave such grand natural landmarks untouched.

Like most things in Pakistan, everything seems pleasant from a distance; the closer I moved towards the ‘mountains’, the more evident the grisly details in their own structure became. They were mountains indeed, but not ones formed through millions of years of weathering and erosion. Municipal waste heaps almost as high as the Margalla Hills in Islamabad stood against the town houses on the other side of the airport. On it, what I had previously mistaken for trees, seemed to be people living inside of the mounds.

You see, living in a country like ours, one often thinks they’d be accustomed to the times they’d been taken for a ride, or blatantly deceived. This time, I had no clue as to what I had just seen. Within the pungent odour, within the towering piles of scrap metal, cow dung and an amalgamation of human and industrial waste, there were the actual living, breathing people of Mahmoodboothi. Lahore’s dumpsters are their homes. This is our urban castle. If the Karachiites don’t have water, neither do they. If the Balochis live in a barren wasteland, we sport a population that lives in an actual wasteland. In Lahore – the pride of Pakistan.

Authorities such as the World Health Organisation and the Centre for Disease Control have both conducted extensive studies exploring the inextricable link between human development and the environments they dwell in. Our lower classes are fortunate enough to benefit from Lahore’s exceptional urban planning; when slums are plowed down to make way for mediocre housing, and when that mediocre housing simply doesn’t have enough room to accommodate the population, and when roundabouts fill and pavements overflow, there are the far off corners of the city, invisible to the human eye, where joonghian (small squatter settlements) and your local dumpsters become one.

Straight off the biggest roads in Lahore, the community thrives on nothing but fumes and emissions of sulphur. There’s a school on the other side of the abaadi (town); a decrepit building made of bricks that barely hold together. Government owned. No concrete. Every year, the government also sends a team of developmental workers who issue vaccines to children living in this small ‘town’ of 500. The irony is, these vaccines arrive in amounts much smaller to the garbage shipments that people are made to confront almost every day.

The conditions themselves are disconcerting. What’s more disconcerting is that people are made to believe that they are being facilitated with enough.

In Pakistan as a whole, people are continually pacified with menial schemes and projects to create the impression that their needs are being met. It is how the poor stay as the poor for the rest of their lives; how their numbers keep on growing. It’s how ‘school se nikal diya tha kyun ke kaam chalana hai’ (I pulled my child out of school to ensure my business was profitable) becomes a lifestyle; it’s how ‘injection toh lagatay hain, toh kachra humein kuch nahi kar sakta’ (We’ve been vaccinated, so the trash won’t do much to detriment our health) transitions from a concept to a belief.

It’s how, in the larger scheme of things, street sweepers will be street sweepers for the rest of their lives, and how, eventually, when your entitled drunken 16 year old child driving his sports car runs over two people – he can casually blame his driver, who is then made to consent to both trial and incarceration. It is how the nation has continued its state of existence, how the industrialists do, in fact, bathe in mineral water. Through unawareness, weakness and deprivation. And it exists in places unfathomable, where the eye simply cannot reach, where people will simply never realise.

People in the metropolitan hub of Punjab are being told that washing their hands comes second to keeping quiet about where they live. The people of Mahmoodboothi are people who had moved to town for better employment, yet they had been carelessly discarded.

Almost as if they were pieces of trash.

The disgusting contrast between the modernity the road exuded and the backward lifestyle the abaadi emits makes the real state of affairs in our country all the more clear.

‘Humein bass nahaanay ke liye saaf paani chahiye’, ‘School ko zarra theek kardein taakay mahalay ke bacchay kharab na hoayn’, ‘Badbu yahan se boht aati hai’ (I only need clean water to bathe with, Fix the schools so that our children won’t end up becoming misfits, It smells awful here) and other such countless cries echo through the remains of what was once, a unified nation, premised on equality, on proper economic sustenance for all. With much of its budget being channeled towards ‘development’ we forget a crucial part of it when a segment of our population is equated to scrap metal, left to decay and corrode.

The poor are not our trash.