The City of Eternal Dust

DECEMBER 1996 - Two weeks ago, travelling from Chiniot to Lahore through Faisalabad, I saw the Manchester of Pakistan (as we like to euphemistically refer to that city) from up close, and it was one of the most depressing sights that I could have ever imagined possible. It reminded me of a trip taken four years ago. As we landed and taxied our way at Manchester International Airport, where gleaming wide-bodied aircrafts from famous airlines stood shoulder to shoulder and an air of brisk activity and international commerce was in evidence, I turned to my companion and said, “Faisalabad of England.” We smirked in silence because we both knew what it was all about.

My last trip to Faisalabad was a few months prior to the World Cup, when in the company of my clients and armed with a well-padded Pajero, we tried to breach the city. It was, as we quickly discovered, not possible. Faisalabad resembled a city that had recently been felled by a nuclear explosion. It lay in ruins and a huge and ugly mushroom of dust stood guard over the inhabitants of this wretched city. There were no roads anywhere. Everything had been dug up and then left to its fate. There were no signs and travellers negotiated ditches and pits with little success. The Pajero shook and rattled like a matchbox. We wound our way through filthy lanes awash with putrid sewerage waste and even arrived at a ‘village pond’ from where we took more abstract directions to get to the city centre. It was an incredible experience. We, the inhabitants of the Pajero, born and bred Pakistanis to boot, were lost like the proverbial tourists. We kept asking ourselves how was it possible for human beings to live and survive under such horrible conditions. Of course there was no answer. We took about an hour to get into the city and the Serena Hotel, where inspite of the clouds of muck and relentless dust, there was a semblance of civilization present. Having had our meeting and a hasty lunch, we fled from Faisalabad, wondering how could this bombed-out disaster city possibly hold World Cup cricket matches without asphyxiating the playing teams, the spectators and any birds unluckily intruding into the Faisalabad airspace.

Two years later as we hit town in a storm-bearing cloud cover, the situation was worse than before. As we bounced up and down like a small plane caught in severe turbulence, we passed factory after factory, owned and operated by the billionaires of Faisalabad, yet even the ‘road’ in front of their billion-earning factories, was in complete and total disrepair. There were cess pools everywhere and craters pock marked the travelling surface (what else could one call it ?). Over all this, hung the omnipresent cloud of dust, of a quality so fine that when it fell over the windscreen, it reminded me of snow falling. This of course was no snow. When we turned on the dry wipers to clear the screen, the dust fell off in scoops. It was a soul chilling sight and one was filled with a sense of absolute and utter futility. Through all the muck, the luckless and wretched people of this wretched city, live on, breathing pollution by the lung full. I do not know how many people suffer in this God-forsaken city with lung diseases, but surely if the polluted water is not killing them, the dust must. As we climbed a city bridge to descend on the road that would mercilessly lead us out of this horror, we had an aerial view of Faisalabad. In the distance stood the tall spires of chimneys as they belched black and frightening clouds of smoke skywards, almost as if to defy the Almighty. Under the soot-laden chimneys stood the city and it was not difficult to guess who was winning. There was a ring of smoke, dust, soot and grime that stretched from one end of the blighted horizon to the other.

A few miles out of this hell, we stopped. On either side of a shanty town, stood a growing line of cars, buses, trucks and tractors, completely blocked from end to end. A villager had been tortured to death that evening by the local police station. The villagers had blocked the road, set tyres and cots on fire and demanded the police come and face them. To get to Lahore, there was no choice but to take a detour, one that led round the trouble spot and rejoined the main road near Shahkot. We took that detour and arrived at the end of a village path, where the ‘road’ petered out into nothing. We had driven past small villages and huts and fields barren and destroyed by salinity. It was another nuclear fallout scenario, the villages appearing out of the dusty haze like ghosts. The simple rustics, wrapped in dusty ‘chaddars’ stood by idly drinking in the pollution and perhaps wondering what sins had they committed to deserve this death by poisoning. It took over an hour to travel the 20 odd miles on this back-road of rural Punjab, but without exaggeration, I have never in my whole life seen or ‘drunk’ so much dust. It was beyond belief that there could be so much of it. The ‘road’ was ankle deep in fine dust and the slightest movement raised voluminous clouds that enveloped everything. Right in the middle of it all, there rose a huge factory, like a medieval ghost, with yellow, murky lights and black smoke churning upwards. Who were these industrialists who could sit out there and mint money while laying waste to the countryside. How could anyone survive when even the leaves of the trees were laden with layers and layers of this poison ? It was a journey that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy and it reinforced the fear that there was nothing that could be done about this country. If the corrupt and depraved rulers of this land were unsuccessful in wiping it off the face of the earth, surely the pollution would.

And what about those billionaires who have made their money off the Faisalabads, Sialkots and Gujranwalas of this country ? What have they given back ? No points for guessing the answer. The fact is we are born looters, whether we are in business or politics. And all the time we plunder our country and rape it from end to end, the poor and the wretched of this land, watch in despair and die in despair.