How to close complaints and leave the ground open!
Urban Bystander
There are cities that preserve their dead with silence. Islamabad, being more ambitious, has lately begun preserving them between projects.
In H-8 lies the capital’s first graveyard. A poetess rests there, who wrote of longing and tenderness in a city once designed for breathing. Beside her lie planners and engineers who drew these sectors with care, mapped green belts between them, and imagined that geometry and gardens might coexist without filing objections against one another. They arrived when Islamabad was still blueprints and possibility, before it developed its present appetite for concrete.
Now the graveyard sits between a monument and an EV Bus station, as if even the dead must make room for pilot projects. But the dead cannot file complaints. The dead cannot tag @cdathecapital.
At Street 47 in G-11/3, a manhole opened on January 18. The cover had held for twenty three years, then gave way. On January 20, a resident reported it. Eleven minutes later came the reply: “Complaint noted. Field team dispatched.” By evening, the portal displayed its usual miracle: STATUS: RESOLVED.
On March 29, it remained open.
Boys jump over it twice daily on their way to school. Men returning from work clear it with the tired accuracy of people who no longer expect help, only memory. Women with grocery bags slow instinctively before it, measuring dignity against gravity. Last Tuesday, a man stumbled mid step, lurched, recovered, and kept walking with the stiff embarrassment of the nearly fallen. Last week, an elderly woman missed the edge at dusk, twisted her ankle, and limped away leaning on the corner shopkeeper’s shoulder. No ambulance came. The portal had already done its part.
The shopkeeper no longer asks when it will be fixed. He simply looks up each time someone approaches and waits for the landing. That is what civic failure looks like at street level: not catastrophe, but repetition. A hazard absorbed into habit. A neighbourhood quietly adjusting its body to the absence of the state.
The portal, meanwhile, has moved on. The ground has not.
This is the arithmetic of the capital now. A flyover in ninety six days, a manhole unresolved in ten weeks. Trees felled in afternoons, service roads crumbling for months. What is visible moves at world record speed. What is necessary waits indefinitely.
The city builds vertically at speeds that impress engineers. Horizontally, it barely functions. Service roads along Jinnah Avenue have returned to gravel. Ninth Avenue, rebuilt at great cost, is already cracking, someone built this to be inaugurated, not to last. At I-11 transfer station, fifty garbage trucks arrive each morning. Six depart. No one asks where the rest of the garbage goes. Everyone knows it stays.
At CDA headquarters, the dashboard glows green with institutional self esteem. Projects launched. Complaints resolved. Targets met.
And the ground, neglected long enough, has begun to develop a personality. The manhole at G-11/3 now keeps its own counsel. Mind your step, it seems to say. The Authority no longer does.
Last week, the resident tied a plastic bag to a stick and planted it beside the opening, a small roadside flag for an absent republic. Others in the lane have started doing the same near other hazards. Three more plastic flags now mark the walk to the corner shop, little warnings fluttering where the city has forgotten to look. This one is merely the neighbourhood’s nominee in a capital crowded with similar monuments to municipal amnesia. There is no ribbon to cut on a covered manhole. No drone shot in a swept lane. No plaque for a drain that does what God and engineering intended.
Back in H-8, the monument stands tall. The EV station hums. Between them, the graveyard endures. A poetess who wrote of tenderness now rests amid diesel, fencing and official appetite. The planners who drew a city of restraint lie beneath one that mistakes crowding for progress.
The resident’s phone buzzed again: Resolved (Digitally). ACTION REQUIRED: Rate your experience.
He rated it one star. The portal thanked him. The manhole remained open.
In Islamabad, the state now repairs its record faster than its roads .
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
