A Farewell to August Evenings, Shade, Tea and Neighbours
Urban Bystander
One morning Islamabad woke to discover that its verbs had gone missing. The nouns remained in excellent condition: roads, parks, colleges, elections, rescue stations, trees, mornings, evenings and nights. Each had a name, a file and a revised cost estimate.
But nobody could walk, teach, rescue, vote, shelter, linger, laugh or sleep.
The Ministry of Nouns assured the city that the verbs had been approved in principle.
No one knew when the spell was cast. Some blamed the word underutilised. Whispered over land, it could turn a field into a feasibility study, a tree into an obstruction, a verandah into covered area, a nullah into encroachable land, and silence into a missed revenue opportunity.
Islamabad had survived many curses. This one came with minutes of meeting.
There was a time when two to four enjoyed constitutional protection from life. Curtains were drawn. Ceiling fans turned with the confidence of old civil servants. Shopkeepers lowered their shutters halfway. Children were warned not to ring anyone’s bell.
The siesta required no notification, consultant or foreign study tour. People simply lay down.
Rest has since been abolished, possibly because no department could count it.
Now drills continue. Phones vibrate. Delivery riders arrive. A man closes his eyes and the city sends somebody with a verification code.
Evening suffered next.
In older streets, verandahs performed functions no authority had assigned. Friends arrived without appointments, called from the gate and borrowed chairs from inside. Tea expanded to accommodate whoever appeared. A conversation beginning with sugar prices might pass through politics, gout and an ungrateful nephew before dying honourably at sunset.
People did not say, “We must meet soon.”
They met.
Now a friend sends it from three houses away. The verandah is enclosed, tea has migrated into a paper cup, and friendship requires calendar coordination.
The city improved connectivity and lost contact.
After dinner, neighbours walked.
Not for fitness. Nobody counted steps. They counted marriages, illnesses, electricity bills and Mr Qureshi’s promises to repair his leaking roof. Sometimes they returned with no conclusion. This was perfectly respectable.
Now one neighbour drives to the gym while the other watches his car leave.
The road remains. The verb has gone.
The Capital Development Authority suffered no such shortage. It widens, tenders, notifies, auctions, relocates, regularises, commercialises, beautifies and commemorates.
Its difficulty lies with smaller verbs.
To shade. To maintain. To protect. To leave alone.
To widen a road produces photographs. To preserve an evening produces only an evening.
Soon the abandoned verbs found new owners.
People stopped gathering, so garbage gathered. Neighbours stopped visiting, so rain visited their drawing rooms. Citizens stopped walking, so floodwater crossed entire sectors. Friends no longer lingered over tea, so smoke lingered above the gutted stalls of Bhara Kahu.
After every downpour, officials ran. This was encouraging. At least one verb remained operational.
The same grammar appeared elsewhere. Six colleges had buildings but no sanctioned staff. Four rescue stations announced in 2008 returned as tenders. Water charges advanced before supply did. The city had delimitation but no elected local government. A park kept its name while losing much of its shade. A satellite returned to the same coordinates twenty years later and could not recognise the landscape it had left.
Islamabad had perfected modern administration’s favourite sentence. The noun is functional. The verb is awaited.
Rain had once been a social event.
Children escaped into it. Adults stood beneath verandahs and issued warnings nobody obeyed. The smell of wet earth passed from house to house without a permit.
Now rain arrives as an advisory.
Avoid low lying areas. Expect traffic disruption. Remain indoors while the city demonstrates the consequences of outdoor planning.
The rain has not changed. The city has forgotten how to receive it.
One evening, the power went out as rain fell on an old street.
Generators coughed into life, reconsidered and died. UPS units gave their final indignant beeps. Televisions went black.
People pressed remotes, restarted routers and advised generators that had not asked.
Then the first door opened.
Nothing had happened. That was the miracle.
Someone brought out a chair. A neighbour brought another. A child stepped into a puddle before an adult could classify it as a drainage emergency. Tea arrived from one house, pakoras from another. An old story resumed from somewhere in the middle.
Nobody had scheduled the meeting. Nobody had inaugurated it. No department had claimed jurisdiction.
The nullah was still rising. The underpass would probably sink again. Somewhere, a tender was travelling faster than a rescue vehicle.
Islamabad had not recovered all its verbs.
For one wet evening, it remembered how to stay.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
