Of This & That - Watery Tales

JUNE 2001 - It is hard to understand why everyone expresses great shock as soon as the first downpour hits the towns and cities of Pakistan and all the streets, roads and localities are instantly submerged under oceans of stinking water. The newspapers are full of lurid stories about the hardship that people have to face and television crews immediately board large vans and float about covering what looks like a cheap version of Venice. Everyone blames the civic agencies and moaning can be heard on the moon how once again these agencies have failed to deliver. Equal groaning and more moaning announce the dereliction of Wapda and the hours of power failure that seems to strike the rich and the poor alike. Everyone is shocked.

Let’s get a few things straight. The civic agencies – and anyone who has dealt with them knows they are not very civic, have absolutely nothing to do with civic amenities. It might have been once a part of their charter of existence. But those things are so steeped in the mists of time that no one quite knows if such was ever the case. Wisely, civic agencies long ago, had themselves divorced from such useless and time consuming activities as drainage, water supply, sanitation and other equally purposeless madness. The last thing any civic agency is expected to do now is eradicate gutters that choke. Why should they? It is a nasty piece of work at best. Gutters stink, which is why they are called gutters. Cleaning them, is not a task that the founding fathers had when they carved out a homeland for the faithful. What civic agencies do of course is not known though some wild theories continue to surface every now and then.

It is rumoured that they are all engaged in a globally-funded, ultra secret probe to locate the lost city of Atlantis which research places somewhere between Karachi and Peshawar, which also happen to be areas that fall into greater Pakistan. The flooding that ensues every time a drop or two descend from the skies merely galvanizes the hounds in the civic agencies to renew their quest. Their theory is that the more water there is, the better chances we have of finding the lost city. How they hope to accomplish that is not easy to understand and having found the city, they will ensure it sinks again. Of course this is just a theory and not surprisingly, a rather strange one, but then such things are to be expected when there is such a veil of secrecy draped over their activities.

There is an anti-Atlantis school of thought, although it is neither a school as such and is not given to much thought, which says that actually there is no such thing as a civic agency anywhere in Pakistan and whatever passes for that is just a decoy cleverly placed by the ISI. This is not as fantastic as it sounds. The ISI has done stranger things than posing as a civic agency and it is possible, even as we speak, that a high level (it is always high level – something to do with the level of the gutter water one is certain) espionage plan is unfolding which may eventually lead to the Red Fort being shipped to Lahore. Undoubtedly, the Jihadi parties can then raise the green and white flag and dance into the wee hours of the morning. However, all this is speculation and a great deal of it rather unnecessary, but had the civic agencies continued doing civic things, we could have all slept in peace and not shivered with fear every time a rain drop struck the window.

Having dismissed all the nonsense theories, there is still the mystery of why rainwater rises like a tidal wave every time it rains. It was like this fifty years ago and it seems it will be like this fifty years hence. A country that can build a fountain at the drop of a hat – drop a hat and Mr. Lashari in Lahore will build you a fountain, and a nation whose engineers are happily presenting Kalma Chowk Mark 4 to the delight of the people, could surely have stumbled upon a way by now. That, to put it more simplistically, would involve pouring a cup of water into a pipe and persuading it to come out of the other side. Agreed that help from NASA would have been handy or had a few bright lights from MIT taken the trouble to work out the complicated equations, the difficult task could have been accomplished. We could have asked Dr. A.Q.Khan to pitch in. After all a man who could make a mountain vaporise in Baluchistan (ok he couldn’t vaporize a rolly polly Prime Minister in Islamabad. So what? Everybody is not perfect), could surely have solved the riddle that’s baffled engineers who have poured glass after glass into a small pipe only to see it bubble right back, murky and smelling yuck. Now I guess it’s too late to ask the good doctor to come to the rescue of the nation. He’s miffed and sulking and not in a very chatty mood.

This brings us to the conclusion that rivers will flow not only in the land of five rivers but also in all the streets and towns and cities of that land as well in lands where no rivers flow at all. This is a strange country and strange things unfold here. We are either having droughts or we are flooded out. Experts here have argued for over 20 years where to build a dam and most people if asked simply say ‘damn it.’ In between the droughts and the floods, live the people who are either fighting for a drop of water or swimming to save their lives. That is if they are not getting knocked out by cholera, typhoid, TB, dysentery, hepatitis, local bodies elections or the armed and happy-to-gun-you-down fundos who are so trigger happy that one fears they will all shoot themselves by mistake one of these days.

Therefore, the good news is that things will get worse which is better than things getting really worse. Since rainwater will inundate every inch of the land, let us all build boats and have a whale of a time. Yes, we will have to get some whales from somewhere. We can ask President Tarrar to inaugurate Inundation Month and float down Mozang Chungi cheered by his supporters – we know there are at least ten. That will set the tone for the rest of us to do the same.