Permanent enough to burn, temporary enough to evade safety
Urban Bystander
At 8:37pm, the fire tender posted at Gate No. 5 remembered an appointment elsewhere and left. At 9:47pm, the fire arrived, punctual as a clerk. For seventy minutes, H-9 Weekly Bazaar was guarded by the strongest force the capital keeps in reserve: the assumption that nothing will happen until a committee says it has.
Gate No. 5 opened, closed, and prepared to cooperate with the inquiry. By morning, roughly 380 of the bazaar’s 2,749 stalls were gone, along with garments, shoes, ledgers and the arithmetic of stock bought on credit. No one died, which in this city is filed under success. The losses remain preliminary, the word Islamabad uses when arithmetic becomes politically flammable.
Block C looked less destroyed than translated: cloth into smoke, plastic into stench, ledgers into grey feathers. Men who had lost everything still owed money by evening. The bazaar had learned the city’s oldest language, which is ash.
Since 2017, H-9 has burned in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2024 and now again; the record may decide which count as major. The flames have returned often enough to Block C and its combustible neighbours, followed by the one structure H-9 reliably produces afterwards: an inquiry committee. Prosecutions, at least in public view, are so well hidden they deserve their own inquiry. The committee is the capital’s most dependable fire response. It never runs out of water because it carries none.
The bazaar was never meant to burn like this. Vendors were to come in the morning, citizens to carry home onions and school shoes cheaper than the market allows, and by evening the ground was to return to ground. “These are temporary stalls, not shopping malls,” an official informed, true the way a wish is true.
But Islamabad likes the poor temporary. Temporary stall. Temporary roof. Temporary claim. Temporary grief. Only the rent is punctual. Rent is about Rs1,200 a month, Rs100 for each of its dozen days. For that the city sold a morning, and the morning forgot to end. Goods stayed overnight, tarpaulin hardened into roof, and a stall became a shop, then a warehouse, then an asset worth far more than the rent admitted. It had grown permanent enough to burn and never permanent enough to be made safe.
Ask who allowed this, and the smoke performs its Islamabad duty. It rises, enters every office and leaves no signature. DMA runs, CDA owns and collects, Civil Defence is meant to inspect, though paper seemed easier to find than prevention. The District Magistrate convenes the inquiry. Even the Pakistan Navy was summoned, because a city rich in acronyms could not get water to Block C in time.
A day before the fire, authorities moved against gas cylinders in weekly markets. Prevention arrived one evening before the fire, punctual only by Islamabad standards. Months earlier the bazaar was made cashless. The city digitised the receipt, not the fire exit. The QR code survived.
Officials have cited an old court order restraining daily clearance of goods. The fire-safety question was left unresolved and load-bearing. A stay can protect a stallholder, not a tinderbox. Rights become hazards when officials use them as alibis. When enforcement is restrained, somebody must redesign safety; in H-9, that somebody is still being located.
Vendors broke rules inside an arrangement the state tolerated, taxed, digitised and discovered only after it caught fire. A stall is borrowed stock, a daughter’s admission form, a loader’s meal, goods bought on credit against a market day arriving as ash. The weekly bazaar is where clerks, guards, drivers, maids, students and pensioners stretch a note into a meal, a uniform, shoes. Five thousand or so work here; far more come for what they cannot afford elsewhere. When Block C went up, all of it went with it, on borrowed money. The tender, presumably, is back at Gate No. 5, present in the SOP and absent from the only hour that mattered. The committee will report. The bazaar will reopen because the poor cannot wait for findings.
Islamabad can still decide, before the next fire, that a market for ordinary people deserves an expensive seriousness about keeping it standing. It has the words. It has the acronyms. It has the committees.
Block C only ever needed the water.
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