The road to the naval colony in Karachi, Pakistan, passes a fifty-acre field so lifeless that its soil is bleached white. This is Moach Goth, a cemetery for the unknown. The tens of thousands interred here are found in the streets, the dumps, or in the mangroves along the harbor: addicts, unclaimed bombing fatalities, terror victims, the homeless. Their graves are marked with plywood triangles bearing fading numbers and sometimes a date. Across the road, two other equally large fields, already full, are disappearing under weeds and mesquite scrub.
In the farthest row, a man in a loose white turban, his nose gullied with lesions, sinks a spade into the white dust. His name is Khair Mohammad; all morning he has been digging little rectangles, three feet long. Each will be headed by a small blank hunk of stone, because they are for children who never lived long enough to be named, or who were never born at all. No one will visit them. Mohammad has buried thousands.
Once a week, they are brought in ambulances by Pakistan’s Edhi Foundation, one of the world’s largest social welfare NGOs, each wrapped in white cloth. Mohammad has received them for twenty-three years; the caretaker before him, his father, recalled them arriving in wooden carts pulled by men. Some are found in the garbage, some are left in front of mosques. If an infant is still alive, the Edhi Foundation gives it a home. If not, they come here.
Grave digger, Moach Goth Cemetery, Karachi, Pakistan
“God knows who they are. God knows who is the father. The mothers are sinners: they sin, then throw their baby away.”
The majority are girls. Some are full term, some fit in the palm of his hand. Sometimes he and his son Nadeem, who assists him, can’t tell if it was male or female. God would also know how many were unrecognizable lumps of tissue that never made it here, or were never seen in the trash. An estimated 890,000 abortions occur in Pakistan each year, though no one really knows. Women of means use abortion as stop-gap birth control. Mothers who can’t afford more children often get rid of new babies.
“Unmarried pregnant women,” explains Karachi gynecologist Nikhat Saeed Khan, “have no place to go, because premarital sex doesn’t exist in our culture, of course. So they endanger their own lives with untrained midwives or abortionists, or find some misoprostol to take.” The same, she says, goes for adulterers and for women claiming rape who can’t produce witnesses: their “crimes” risk punishment by death.
Nadeem arrives, carrying a jerry can of water. He’s the fifth youngest of Mohammad’s four sons and six daughters. He wears a white tunic, his head uncovered despite the sun. Nadeem’s job is to wash each baby, then offer prayers over them as his father buries them.
“They are innocent of sin, so they will go to God,” he says. “And God will ask their parents why they aborted or abandoned them.”
“This is our sad job,’ says his father. “I believe God will reward us.”
In the white sky overhead is a swirling funnel of hundreds of black kites—the bird that circles Karachi garbage heaps and docks when fishing boats discard offal. Their long shadows speed across the tiny nameless graves.
Could all this be avoided? What if the mothers could choose when to conceive a child, and when not to?
“Ask God,” says Nadeem.
“It happened so fast,” says Tanveer Arif.
Although he’s talking about 1995, he still sounds stunned. That was when the wells went dry in Gadap Town. Only two decades earlier, the lands here were among the most productive wheat and cornfields on Earth. There were guava and coconut orchards, and 5,000 farms that provided all the vegetables for nearby Karachi.
Most of those farms are now overgrown with invasive mesquite, and used only as picnic grounds for weekend outings. A few rent horses, or have private zoos stocked with the black bucks, wild ass, and blue bulls that were here when Pakistan was carved out of India in 1947 and was still one-third forest. Today, Pakistan’s forest cover is barely 4 percent, a figure that includes lands designated as forest where little or nothing is actually covered.
Arif sits on the crumbling porch of a brick farmhouse belonging to a friend who no longer comes here. There’s only one employee left, a caretaker with a curly beard named Soomar, who’s worked here forty years, since he was five. “The well then was only 25 feet deep,” Soomar says. “Fifteen years ago we had to go to 200 feet. Then 250. Then completely dry.” They dug another, a foot-wide bore hole he keeps covered with two mud bricks. After 350 feet, still nothing.
“So we quit,” he says, spitting out a wad of betel leaf.
A third hole, at the same depth but 2,000 feet away, still delivers, but its pressure is falling. Soomar pipes its flow down shallow ditches to fields whose soil is now just powder, and farms at a very modest scale—just enough to keep himself employed, Arif suspects. He harvested 40 kilograms of wheat this year. They used to get 150 kilos.
“This is a man-made environmental disaster,” says Arif, mopping his skull with his shirtsleeve. Gadap Town was a Green Revolution zone, planted in dwarf hybrids that yielded incredible harvests: just add water. So everyone stuck straws in the ground, and when the flow slowed, they stuck in more, and deeper. Now that has failed, with no alternatives in place, such as catchment dams in dry riverbeds to capture monsoon runoff.
“Instead,” says Arif, “they mine them all the way down to bedrock for sand to build more Karachi, so the soil can’t replenish.” Where trees once lined Karachi’s rivers are now mounds of sand and gravel that go on for miles. As does Karachi.
Arif, a biologist, directs the Karachi-based Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment. Running an environmental NGO in Pakistan practically redefines the word defeat, but Arif soldiers on. His efforts to save the Houbara bustard, a game fowl favored by Dubai oil sheiks who jet over on weekends with permits allowing them one hundred birds apiece, elicit phone warnings that his legs will be broken. All the good trees around—especially guggal, the local myrrh species—were cut by men with political connections and weapons, or by politicians themselves, who then brought in Texas mesquite to control erosion, which instead ran amuck in the fields. People try burning it, but it just comes back faster. Then they brought Australian eucalyptus, whose thirsty roots broke up pipes all over town. Arif led the campaign to have guggal declared endangered, but thugs hassled the Green Guard youth brigades he organized to protect the remaining stands. East of Karachi, in forests along the Indus River, the timber exploiters are often members of parliament who can quickly relieve a protesting ranger of his job. Up north, the Taliban does the same.
Until quite recently, Pakistan brimmed with fecundity. A major cradle of human civilization arose along its great Indus River, which carried nutrients down from the Roof of the World, the Tibetan Plateau, and deposited some of the richest soil in Asia over its enormous flood plain. Pakistan’s current water crisis and dwindling crop fertility are, as Tanveer Arif states, a man-made disaster. There are multiple causes of this; all stem from packing 185 million people into a country not much bigger than Texas, which has 26 million.
Within the next two decades, Pakistan, one of the fastest-growing countries on Earth, will surpass Indonesia as the most populous Muslim nation. Indonesia has 248 million, but it also has one of the developing world’s better family-planning programs; still, it will add 40 million by 2030. Pakistan, however, currently with three-fourths of Indonesia’s population, will add double that amount. By mid-century, if its growth continues apace, Pakistan will far outnumber today’s United States, with a projected 395 million people—all in a land the size of Texas.
Along with India, Pakistan is where the Green Revolution was first implemented. Starvation was averted, and millions lived to beget millions more. Today, 60 percent of those Pakistani millions are under thirty. The wells and rivers that watered the Green Revolution and gave them life are now giving out, leaving one-third of Pakistani children chronically malnourished. Unemployment, in double digits, grows along with the population, and the percentage of those underemployed is even higher.
Unemployed young men grow frustrated, and angry. A nation filled with angry young males is not a stable place, especially when they are tempted with paid opportunities to commit mayhem, including international mayhem.
A shaky nation with too many people running out of water and driven to mayhem becomes an entire planet’s concern. Especially when that nation happens to be a nuclear power.
Yet again, the explosions have subsided in Lyari Town. The streets here, the oldest part of Karachi, are once more mobbed with cars, motorbikes, horse-drawn wagons, motorized rickshaws, carts of watermelon and betel leaf vendors, and the fabulously painted transport trucks that have become Pakistan’s greatest indigenous art form, whose extravagant adornment often costs a trucker more than his house. Everyone is back: men in white kurtis and prayer caps; hijab’d women brilliant as tropical birdlife, wrapped in multihued loose pants and tunics called salwar kameez; other women in black chadors, even transvestites in chadors, all threading their way through the stalled traffic, buying provisions and tea.
Since 10:00 a.m., that traffic has gone from mere paralysis to pandemonium, as Lyari’s stoplights are out for the next three hours. All but the most privileged parts of Karachi are subject to load-shedding—daily rolling blackouts—because the city can’t possibly keep up with demand. There were fewer than a half-million people here in 1947. Today’s 21 million is a forty-two-fold increase.
No one could have prepared for this.
Three days earlier, when the grenade attacks began, everyone stayed hidden until long after the explosions ended. Thankfully, only two deaths this time. At the Civil Hospital, Pakistan’s biggest, which has a police station at its front entrance, eleven wounded were brought into emergency. That was far better than the attacks two weeks earlier, when the grenades were rocket-propelled, with forty wounded and eighteen dead—an overload for the fourteen tables in the surgical theater, where armed guards are posted lest warfare erupt in the triage units. To handle Karachi’s literally exploding population, a fourteen-story trauma unit is under construction.
This latest salvo was over an unpaid loan. Everyone knows who owed whom, but as usual, no arrests. Newspapers reported it as yet another episode in “the ongoing gang wars” and life resumed. Lyari’s balconies are hung anew with laundry that is grimy again even before it has a chance to dry. Billboard-sized posters of smiling gangsters—urban Robin Hoods who provide most of Lyari’s jobs—continue to festoon exterior walls everywhere, except on mosques.
Many of these urban warlords descend from the original farming families when Lyari was a village, long before Britain decided to build a major warm-water port on the Arabian Sea near a small fishing enclave called Kolachi, in what was then part of India. As the two villages grew and merged, farmers opened shops, consolidated, became community fixers, made land deals, and became powerful in a city where laws were scorned under colonial rule, and now exist mainly on paper.
British rule in India ended in 1947, a triumph for Mahatma Gandhi’s gentle civil disobedience. But Muslims who feared living under a Hindu majority demanded independence, and Pakistan was born in two Muslim majority regions cleaved from eastern and western India. With its two halves separated by a thousand miles, governance in Pakistan was weakened from the start, and the division couldn’t last. In 1971, East Pakistan finally bolted. Following a civil war in which by some estimates 3 million died, it became Bangladesh.
Although beset with its own problems—along with tiny Pacific atoll nations, it is the country most imperiled by sea level rise, lying almost entirely in the Ganges Delta—Bangladesh is comparatively stable, in part because since the 1980s it has made family planning a national priority. In Pakistan, however, the precedent of weak government was never really reversed, even under periodic military dictatorships. Even in cities, tribal allegiances still trump all others.
In a room whose door opens directly onto a rubbled Lyari street where a dozen goats hug a strip of shade along a wall, ten women sit on the concrete floor where they waited out the grenade bombardment, embroidering salwar kameez for a dowry. The betrothed, a slender, pink-clad woman named Rashida,1 is one of eight people who currently live in this room. The goats are hers; she grazes them every day along the dry Lyari River, an hour’s walk away. She has three sisters and five brothers, all without work. Her father staples papers and serves tea in a bank. Rashida is lucky: her fiancé drives trucks. “Most men just roam around,” she says. “They’re mad because there’s nothing to do.”
“And take out their tempers on us,” says orange-clad Shehzadi, who housekeeps for a politician.
The mud-plastered room is stuffy and dim, as the power is still off. Rashida takes the turquoise kameez she’s beading with burgundy thread over to the doorway and holds it up to approving murmurs. Every woman is beading a different-colored set of salwar kameez for her; Rashida’s truck-driver husband-to-be is helping to pay. By the wedding, she’ll have twenty-five or thirty sets. The outfits will cost around four thousand rupees2 apiece. Because the garments are loose-fitting and so well crafted, she expects to wear them all her life. “Before, women would have eighty or ninety sets. But everything’s so expensive now!”
Especially children: “Who today could possibly want a lot? I only want two girls and two boys. No more.” The other women smile and keep sewing, knowing better. They all said that once. And look what happened.
All these women wrapped in beautifully appointed cottons, their multiple earrings dangling beneath long dupattas, are Balochs. Their fathers brought their families to Karachi, in Sindh province, from the western desert province of Balochistan, where there is even less work than here. Rashida, born here, dreamed of being a doctor when she was in school, but school ended after eighth grade. The schools are often closed because there’s no water or electricity. To protect all the children wandering the streets, the government builds extra-high speed bumps to slow traffic. Rashida’s sixteen-year-old sister Nasreen, sullen because the power failed during the soap opera she was watching while she embroidered, hasn’t studied at all.
“I hope my own children have more to do than housework and embroidery,” Nasreen says, without much conviction. She’s working on a yellow tunic, triple-stitching the long reinforced pocket that women use to thwart pickpockets. “It doesn’t always help, because they just cut the bottom.” They know, because they have brothers who are pickpockets.
Zeynep, a woman in green with a furrowed brow, finishes the eggshell-blue kameez she’s embellished with tiny red diamonds and struggles to her feet, pausing to collect two pails she left by the door. “I’ve aged before my time,” she declares, “staying up all night waiting for water to appear in the tap.” She’s given up on ever having it in her house again, and now walks five blocks to fill pails for her six kids from a public spigot. After her last three pregnancies ended in miscarriages, she took a daring step and got sterilized. To her surprised relief, her husband didn’t object. Balochi relatives in Iran helped her with money from their government pension. “It was a nice hospital,” she says wistfully.
As she leaves, two young men enter, Rashida’s brother Nawab and his cousin Shahid. Both are dressed in white, with short-cropped hair and beards. “Assalam-o-alaikum, Auntie,” they greet Zeynep as she passes. Everyone on this street is related.
The men sit on the floor. With fabric scraps, Shahid begins to clean a pistol. “We aren’t criminals,” he says. He looked for a job last week, but no luck. “They don’t hire Balochs. Jobs come easier to other sects.” Meanwhile, one of the local strongmen pays them a thousand rupees a day to guard the community. “The guns are to protect our neighborhood from outsiders—you can’t depend on the police.”
One political party recently promised two hundred construction jobs in exchange for their votes, says his cousin, but they didn’t materialize. “All we get from them are free body bags.”
These men are uneducated and unemployed, working as armed goons for their street. Their city has plunged into havoc, yet in this room all seems calm. Women fuss over a girl’s trousseau, men polish weapons, and life proceeds.
“We don’t think about the future,” Nawab says. “It’s up to God.”
But where is God amid all this killing and rage?
“We don’t all shoot each other in streets,” he says. “We take out our anger at home.”
The women’s eyes stay averted.
In a provincial family-planning clinic a mile away, the benches are jammed.
“Always,” says Asma Tabassum, one of Pakistan’s ninety thousand LHWs—Lady Health Workers. “The only time it eases up is when a bomb goes off.”
Now that tensions from the last grenade battle have eased, a rainbow of women wrapped in yards of colored fabric has landed in her office all at once. Usually she gets from fifteen to twenty a day, but by 10:30 a.m. she’d already seen that many. With a stethoscope dangling beneath her pink hijab, she checks blood pressure and gives prescriptions for progestin contraceptives: monthly injections of Norgestrel or oral packets of lo-femenal and ferrous fumarate tablets. Women can also request IUDs, longer-term Depo-Provera shots, condoms for their husbands, or tubal ligation, but shorter-term birth control methods are preferred here. The goal of most Pakistani women is birth spacing, which husbands are more willing to accept. Anything beyond monthly medication prompts fears of unintended sterilization.
The women in her windowless office, fanning themselves with pamphlets describing Bayer progesterone, represent several Pakistani ethnicities. Some have arrived in Karachi seeking work; others came as refugees from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in northern Pakistan along the Afghan border, including one woman whose chador resembles camouflage fabric. As Asma takes her pulse, she confesses that for the past three days she has been self-medicating, because she has irregular periods. Now her head hurts; she thinks she made a mistake by experimenting with two pills a day. Asma tells her not to worry since it was just three days, and recommends regular injections so she won’t accidentally overdose again. But the woman declines and leaves.
The next chador is black, trimmed in fine gold thread. Asma checks the woman’s pulse; she is in her thirties and diabetic, so she should avoid anything hormonal. They discuss an IUD, but the negligible chance of infection is magnified because of her condition. “Your husband should use condoms,” Asma tells her. They cost two for one rupee here: about a U.S. penny. Everything else, including an IUD, costs three rupees. Logos on a wall poster above Asma’s head indicate that contraceptive funding comes from USAID and the Population Council, an NGO founded by John D. Rockefeller III.
The woman says she’ll try to ask her husband, but she doesn’t see him often. She is the second wife of a man who was her brother-in-law until her husband died in a bombing. In northern Pakistan, a man will often support a brother’s widow by marrying her. He has six children with his first wife, and three with her. She wants to keep pleasing him so he’ll be attentive. Alma takes her hand. “But in your condition, more pregnancies are a risk.”
The overhead fan quits and the deadened air is immediately stifling. The women exchange worried glances, because load-shedding was over for the day, and unexpected blackouts often signal yet a new civil disturbance. Asma pulls a flashlight from her desk drawer and motions for the next client. An entire bench stands and approaches: five women in white burqas bordered with lace, their dark eyes peering through woven lattice grills in their face hoods. They are Pashto speakers from Pakistan’s own version of Switzerland, the Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: a sublimely beautiful region wedged between Afghanistan and Kashmir in far northern Pakistan. As one woman sits and gingerly lifts her veil, revealing a round, anxious face with a triangular nose ring, her companions stand protectively around her. The other clients titter at these monochromatic women, calling them cabbages and shuttlecocks—the term that colonizing British coined to describe their full burqas.
These women are rarely seen here, and birth control isn’t this patient’s agenda: in fifteen years, she’s been unable to conceive. She’s endured many treatments in villages and is tired of trying, but she really wants a child. This is her third visit, and Asma has test results for her. “You’re fine,” she tells her, her own diamond nose stud glinting as her penlight illuminates the page. The answer came in the semen test: “The problem isn’t yours. It’s your husband’s.”
The woman’s reaction is a confusion of relief and trouble. She retreats behind her veil. “If a man can’t conceive, he gets by,” says Asma as the Pashtun contingent files out. “If a woman can’t, she gets left. Or he gets a second wife.”
The hot afternoon crawls on, the line of colorful women advances. Without asking, Asma knows which are housewives, because they want help with birth spacing. Nearly anyone who works, usually either a schoolteacher or an LHW like herself, wants to stop after two. When one housewife pleads that she wants to wait after her second child is weaned before starting on her next, Asma asks how many she wants to have.
“My husband wants at least six.”
“And you?”
Shyly, she raises two fingers. The other women in the room are watching. They nod.
“You’re wise,” Asma assures her. “We’ll never be healthy and have enough schools if our population keeps growing.” More nods.
A middle-aged woman named Nazaqat in a full black chador and rectangular wire-rimmed glasses appears. She is today’s vaccination technician on duty, responsible for seeing that pregnant women have their tetanus and polio shots, but she won’t give a contraceptive injection that Asma has just prescribed.
“I don’t believe we should practice family planning. Our community should increase in number.” Asma gazes at the ceiling. “It’s not for me to question why,” Nazaqat continues. “It’s God’s will. He determines destiny.”
She would have had as many as possible, she says, had she ever married. Yes, she knows, it’s a problem that kids roam the streets because there aren’t enough schools. And yes, it’s heartbreaking to watch women try to feed eight children. And yes, her own work is made harder by men who forbid women to take polio vaccine, because they suspect it’s really birth control.
“But every country has problems,” she says. “Ours is overpopulation.”
Because schools, although constitutionally guaranteed, are so often scarce, and population grows so fast, a Pakistani child is less likely to get educated than a sub-Saharan African child. One summer night in 1995, six Karachi businessmen found themselves at dinner, whining again over their country’s dismal descent. Especially infuriating, they concurred, were teachers who collected government salaries but showed up only once or twice a month. That night, they decided to take matters into their own hands. When they announced plans to start 1,000 private schools in the poorest parts of Pakistan, friends asked if they’d gone crazy.
“An insane country needs crazy solutions,” they’d reply.
Eighteen years later, TCF—The Citizens Foundation—is up to 830 schools. One of the first was in a ramshackle colony near Karachi’s harbor, whose name, Machar, means “mosquito,” being Karachi’s epicenter of malaria and dengue, as well as leprosy. Unlike its surroundings, TCF’s Vohra School has solid whitewashed walls and a pleasant brick courtyard filled with ornamental plants. There are classrooms for kindergarten through fifth grade and, rare in Machar, electricity and plumbing. A nearby TCF secondary school also has science labs with microscopes and dissecting tables equipped with sinks, and a computer room.
Vohra School’s upper windows look out on a jumble of unplastered walls and corrugated roofs held in place by stones, and columns of smoke rising from cooking braziers sliced from fifty-five-gallon oil drums. With eight hundred thousand residents, Machar is called the biggest illegal squatter community in Asia, although there are many contenders. Few streets are wide enough for vehicles, which navigate with their horns through the cows and goats. Most are lined with ditches filled with plastic debris and a scum of shrimp shells. Women and children sit in doorways, peeling shrimp that arrive in port around 3:00 a.m., an event so critical that it’s announced by the mosques, like a muezzin call. It is the sole source of local employment, but only for woman and children, whose small fingers are fastest.
The children peel from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., then change into tan shirts and slacks for boys, tan salwar kameez and white hijabs for girls, and head to school. Their first stop is the washroom, where they soap their hands with filtered water and get Vaseline to treat the cuts on their fingers. Most have stomach and eye problems from the water at home. When her parents first visited the school, says a fourth grader, “I brought them here because the bathroom smells so beautiful.” Her mother inquired why, and took home a bottle of disinfectant.
The businessmen founders decided that to foster responsibility, everyone must pay something. Sliding monthly tuition ranges from 10 to 200 rupees (10¢ to US$2.00); the school subsidizes half the cost of the 300-rupee uniforms, purchased in installments. Half the students are girls, and classes are coed so that boys learn respect for the opposite sex. All fifty-four hundred TCF teachers are female, because most parents won’t send girls to male teachers, nor allow daughters to teach where men are on the staff. Although the monthly salary—the rupee equivalent of about US$200—is below the government rate, they get many applicants, because it is considered safe: a fleet of minivans, small enough to negotiate the warren maze of Machar streets, transports teachers daily to and from home. They get full support from mosques, says Afshan Tabassum, the school principal. “Some TCF schools are inside madrassas. They want kids in religious class in the morning and in our school the second half.”
Although their per-school budget is half that of government schools, 95 percent of The Citizens Foundation students pass national exams, versus the 55 percent national average. The minuscule dropout rate—under 1 percent—is partly because Tabassum and other principals constantly visit students’ homes, coaxing parents not to take their daughters out of school to marry them off.
“That’s the key. When a girl receives an education, she educates the entire family.” They started with 60 students, and now have 410 (TCF student enrollment nationwide is 115,000) in double-shift classes taught in Urdu, 30 students per class. There is a waiting list of 250. Because they take siblings, the size of families is a huge burden. Machar has nearly doubled since Tabassum came nine years earlier.
“Every family has six or seven, and is expecting another.” There are so many kids that people sleep on roofs. She’s had success with hygiene and literacy classes for mothers, but talking to parents about family planning usually doesn’t work. “The more kids in a family, the more pails of shrimp the Karachi Port Trust will bring them to peel.”
But the girls enrolled here figure out family planning for themselves. By eighth grade, along with math, science, social studies, geography, and English, they enter a mentoring program that pairs them with professionals in fields they’d like to pursue. If they complete school and find work, most, like their role models, have no more than two children.
“I want to be a doctor, and help heal and feed people,” says Rubina, braids bouncing under her hijab.
“I want to be an air hostess and travel on airplanes,” says Nimra.
“A teacher, like you,” Naeema tells Principal Tabassum. “You are always in my heart.”
The boys want science and engineering, or to be pilots in the Pakistani Air Force. But in Vorha School it is clear that in the coming years Pakistan will be blessed with many women doctors and educators.
“Which is how we’ll change Pakistan,” says Citizens Foundation vice president Ahson Rabbani. He’s proud that this has been a success, that they’ve raised more than $100 million to build these bright, well-equipped schools, and 95 percent of that money comes from Pakistan. But the most important measure, he agrees, is the number of girls they’ve reached.
“In northern Pakistan, they blew up two hundred fifty schools because they were teaching girls. In the entire Swat Valley, girls stopped going to school. When we get threats from the Taliban, we tell them: Blow up one school, and we’ll build five more.”
The dirt-scrabble of Machar ends at a wide mudflat of green mangroves separating it from Karachi Harbor to the south. As the community’s population expands, more rubble foundations push into this natural area, even though cutting mangroves is prohibited. A timber mafia pays squatters to down more trees, and pays police to overlook the plunder clearly visible from the school’s roof.
Past the harbor, the mangroves resume on a thickly forested 400-hectare sand-spit that protects the city from typhoons. Endangered green turtles nest on the Arabian Sea beach where fisherfolk, as they are known, launch dinghies to catch mackerel, kingfish, and grouper. When they realized that city effluent was poisoning the mangrove lagoon where they catch crabs, prawns, shrimp, and cuttlefish, they contacted the United Nations Development Programme and World Wildlife Fund. Eventually, a wetlands center was built, and both organizations gave grants to two adjacent fisherfolk communities to help to protect the mangroves and plant more.
One community used the money to start an ecotourism project, with lagoon boat cruises. It was soon attracting 250 people on the weekends. Visitors marveled at this placid oasis, filled with flamingos and frogs, that most never knew was at the edge of their churning city.
But the other group began cutting mangroves and selling the wood. They divided protected land into lots to sell to Saudi and Dubai sheiks for beach and harbor view vacation homes. The first group filed complaints. One night in January 2011, their computers were smashed, life jackets were shredded, and their office was riddled with bullets. They reported it to the police, who never responded. A lawyer advised them to forget it.
They moved to another office. On May 5, a grenade blew off its roof, bending the steel I-beams into parabolas. Two tour boats and the jetty that UNDP built were burned. Men parked outside the house of the ecotourism project founder, Abdul Ghani, and fired guns into the air. The fisherfolk fled into the mangroves. At 3:00 a.m., they returned, except for Ghani and a colleague, Haji Abu Bakar. The next day, they found them floating in the lagoon. Bakar’s hands were tied behind his back, and his neck was broken. Ghani was mauled and strangled.
Two days later, Ghani’s three brothers, his nephews, and his twin twelve-year-old sons sit barefoot on the flat green carpet, looking at photographs of the dead leader and at an entry in his journal, signed in blue ink, written after the January attack. “I had spoken against the destruction of the forest, and [X] became my enemy. He and his men threatened my life. If anything happens to me, they are responsible.”
The mattresses they hid behind that night still block the windows. Ghani’s wife, daughters, and sisters weep in the next room. Over and over, the men watch on a Nokia mobile phone the video of his body being hoisted from the lagoon. The man he named, a well-known local strongman, is said to be hiding in Karachi. The UN and WWF staff came by; they took the names of the twins, their four sisters, and their eight-month-old brother, and promised to provide for them. No one has come from the government. The police van and unmarked gray sedan with a blue light slapped on its roof outside are supposedly for their protection, but everyone knows who pays them. Twenty-five witnesses, no arrests.
“All we tried to do was save trees and the lagoon,” says Ghani’s brother Mohammad Harun, a thin, deeply bronzed fisherman in a crumpled knit prayer cap. “All is now madness.”
East of Karachi, the road to the Indus River delta is lined with tents of refugees from floods that, three summers in a row, have scoured entire villages from the land. Stagnant lakes fill what were once fields.
In the village of Haji Qasim, fifty kilometers north of the seacoast, people are leaving for the opposite reason: because the water has left them. Since the dawn of human civilization, the great serpentine Indus, one of the world’s biggest rivers, brought snowmelt from the Tibetan plateau down through the fertile Punjab of India and Pakistan, then ended its journey here in Sindh province, where it gushed freshwater and sediments a hundred miles into the Arabian Sea. That silt gave Sindh province some of the richest farmlands in Pakistan, famous for the rice and tea they supplied to all Asia. Now the flow of water is reversing: first India, then Pakistan built dams and barrages across the Indus, trapping the water in the Punjab, stranding the blind Indus River dolphins that had evolved to be sightless in the river’s nutrient-rich silt load. Since powerful Punjabi farmers no longer send enough water to allow the Indus to reach the sea, the sea is creeping up its delta.
In Haji Qasim, a mud-and-thatch village now devoid of foliage, men still make their living from the irrigation canal, but by fishing, not farming. At noon, they come out of the sun to drink tea steeped in buffalo milk in a communal room alongside the wide canal. A wall is lined with yellow jerry cans filled with drinking water they bring in by donkey cart. The only fresh water that reaches here now is during floods, which, strangely, are caused in part by drought: as dry riverbeds fill with windblown sand, they flatten and can’t control the flow during the monsoon. When the floods subside, seawater intrudes, and mangroves at the river’s mouth die.
“Without the mangroves, the wind has changed,” says Shafit Mohammad, a cotton farmer who now fishes for mullet. “Long before this happened, our elders had a premonition that the sea was coming, from the wind. People below had to cut the trees, because salt water killed them.”
He wipes buffalo milk from his moustache. “It was beautiful here. There were so many trees that children couldn’t go in alone, because of boars and wolves. As the sea approached, first our crops were ruined. Then our date palms and forest.”
Now the sea is rising in the canal. “Every fifteen days, it comes up at night. It has taken boats and flooded our houses.” The floor of this room is a raised wooden platform. Shafit points out the doorway at the yellow hardpan, where rice and wheat once grew. Now, only salt-scrub, and dead palm stumps. “The water is now like cancer to the land.”
They have built mud berms to hold the rising waters back, but most of the thousand people who lived here have left. “When a man dies, we have to go to Thatta for sweet water to clean his body, it’s so scarce. Three more years, and there will be no more village.” They will have to move to where water is still fresh. Again.
The elders who read the wind predicted that the Arabian Sea would one day reach Thatta, a town fifty kilometers to the north. No one believed them. But in Ahmed Jat, ten kilometers farther upstream, they are beginning to believe. To the families left in Haji Qasim, visiting Ahmed Jat is like time-traveling to their own village just a decade earlier. Orchards of date palms, filled with mynah birds. Neem trees, figs, mangos, and almonds. A network of trickling irrigation channels bringing transparent water to cotton, sugarcane, rice, wheat, tomatoes, squash, and okra. Hand pumps and solar panels. Goats and water buffalo.
“Everyone here is related by blood to a single couple who founded this village sixty years ago,”3 says Shafi Mohammad Jat, a wiry man in a long orange kameez with a thicket of black hair, his cheek full of betel leaves. Today, Ahmed Jat has 270 families, most with seven or eight children. God has blessed them with a good life, Jat says, even though the last drought killed sixty goats, and even though they are so remote that the Green Revolution never came here.
“We never got those fancy fertilizers.” Plus, the nearest clinic is thirty kilometers away. Eight women have died in childbirth trying to reach it in the rains.
“But we do well,” he says, showing off crops grown with buffalo manure, and a bamboo-shaded longhouse filled with poles of healthy betel vines. “Except—”
Except another of their wells has just turned too brackish to drink. “We can still use it for most crops,” he says. So they’re digging more wells, this time a thousand feet from the village. “But we know what’s going to happen.” Seawater is moving north, a kilometer a year. “Maybe we have ten more years. Or less.”
And then?
He points north. “We move to Thatta.”
In a room on the outskirts of Thatta, a man with a fan-shaped moustache named Shaikh Tanveer Ahmed quotes from Qur’anic verse 2:233, the Surah Al-Baqara:
“Mothers shall suckle their children for two whole years.”
His audience, four young bearded imams, quotes with him in unison. The surah has become Ahmed’s mantra. It is the key that opens a tightly shut door. He has debated many religious leaders who oppose family planning, but he always wins, because it is incontestably clear that the Prophet intended for women to nurse babies thoroughly, thus spacing their births.
Ahmed directs HANDS, the Health and Nutrition Development Society, a Pakistani NGO that gently presses the government to deliver services it promises. He is under no illusion about what his country faces. During the 2010 floods, caused by ferocious monsoons, 175,000 people—70 percent of the district of Thatta’s population—fled one night when a levee broke. During the 2011 floods, one-fifth of the country was under water, and again in 2012. Now the sea is advancing, pushing millions of people into less and less space.
Reducing population pressure is critical, he says. “But you can’t say ‘family planning.’ You must say ‘birth spacing.’ If it’s about health, they accept. Numbers, they resist.”
In every district, they identify the four most important leaders, such as these white-clad mullahs. “We send them to Islamabad, to meet with high religious leaders who have been trained by the Population Council. They learn that to have healthy nursing mothers means dealing with the fact that half of Pakistani girls are malnourished. That means changing the custom of women getting what’s left over after men have their fill. They learn that this submissiveness can’t be overcome if there are ten times as many schools for boys as for girls.”
“In the 1960s,” says Qari Abdul Basid, imam of Thatta’s Shah Gehan Mosque, “the government didn’t consult the imams. The proper way was ignored. So people refused family planning.” Now, in Friday prayers, they teach that Islam professes health and nutrition, and they repeat the directive in Surah Al-Baqara that a child has a right to two years of mother’s milk.
They prefer nursing to avoid conception, but they accept pills and condoms. Much of the birth control comes from USAID, a delicate point with Pakistani mullahs; the pamphlets they share in meetings with extremist religious leaders omit the USAID logo and its accompanying motto, “From the American people.”
“Acceptance is growing,” says Imam Basid. “People space births, and instead of seven or eight, they have four or five. That is important: without birth spacing, our resources will be finished.”
A prayer chimes: it’s the ring-tone of his mobile phone. He begs his leave. The four imams file out, leaving Ahmed at a table surrounded by a new USAID shipment of midwifery instruments.
In the village of Ahmed Khan Zour, fifty kilometers farther north, a HANDS theater troupe is giving its 640th performance. More than one hundred women in bright salwar kameez and sparkling nose rings, surrounded by daughters with henna-painted arms and even some fathers, crowd under a portico to watch. The performers begin with a song that equates happiness with health, and health with a two-year gap. A male actor explains that the drama will reveal what that means, and invites them to figure out what’s wrong with the picture they’re about to see.
It begins with a marriage ceremony; the bride is very young. The scene shifts to a bedroom. The wife lies against a pillow, trying to comfort an unhappy infant.
“What’s wrong?” asks her husband.
“Fix him!”
“What can I do? I’m sick myself. I’m pregnant again,” she sobs.
The next day, a neighbor comes by and finds her sicker and weaker. “Why don’t you space your births?” she asks. “My husband and I do.”
The whole family gathers. “You’re not sick, you lazy liar,” declares her mother-in-law. “You just don’t want to give my son children. You only worry about yourself!”
By now, the audience is murmuring, and the action stops. “What’s wrong here? And why has it happened?” the actor playing the husband asks.
Hands raise; opinions are voiced. The wife wasn’t even sixteen; she wasn’t ready to have children. Her parents should have taught her about waiting between children. Most comments, though, blame the mother-in-law: “They want us to have as many children as they had to have,” says a woman in a black hijab, to applause.
The woman playing the mother-in-law turns out to be a doctor. Out come the pills, the injectables, the T-shaped copper IUDs, the foil-wrapped condoms. She explains each, and explains which ones require a visit to the clinic.
“We have to go all the way to Thatta,” a woman says.
“Not today,” says the doctor. Walking to stage left, she pulls back a sheet, revealing the ambulatory clinic they’ve brought along. She steps inside. “I’m here all day,” she says. And the line forms.
When Pakistan developed a nuclear bomb, USAID cut off funding family planning here for six years. Funds for the roving theater performances run out in 2013. “We tell USAID,” says HANDS director Shaikh Tanveer Ahmed, “that without continued support, Pakistan will probably produce more of the kind of people that the USA fears.”
Only about 13 million of Pakistan’s 90 million females have access to contraceptives, he reminds them. “They understand. But sometimes politics in Washington make them reluctant.”
Even if they do continue providing, he knows that a two-year gap resulting in four or five children per family will not add up to population stability.
“No. We’re really afraid we can’t cope with the growing population. We are a crowded, underdeveloped nation—more a crowd than a nation. So we’ll have more illiterates, more youths without productive jobs, and more chaos.”
He makes some marks on a pad. “If we can’t keep providing contraceptives or encourage their use, by 2050 we’ll be approaching three times the number we’re at today.”
He tosses his pad down. “We’re praying that Pakistan only doubles.”