Coming home

I’VE been in Islamabad for almost two months. That’s all it took. Eight weeks of functioning traffic lights, of roads that didn’t feel like an act of aggression, of arriving somewhere without the particular exhaustion that comes from simply moving through a city. Two months and I had, without meaning to, forgotten.

Then I came home for Eid.

The road rage returned the following morning. Not the honking kind or the shouting kind. The quiet kind. The settling-back-into-the-body kind. The ‘oh yes, this is how we live here’ kind. And then, on streets dressed up for a holiday, among families in new clothes — the garbage. Just everywhere. Piled and ignored and somehow invisible to everyone except me.

I sat with that feeling for a while. It wasn’t outrage. I know outrage. This was something older and softer and more defeated than that.

Resilience in Karachi is what’s left when hope has packed its bags.

It was the feeling you get at a graveside, not in the first days of loss, but years later. When you’ve made your peace with the absence. When you visit not expecting anything to have changed, and nothing has, and somehow that still manages to break something small in you.

I’ve been writing about grief for some time now — in places like Palestine, Beirut, Tehran, and ours. Of broken promises, of not having time to recover from one disaster before another strikes. Of losses that don’t make headlines and wounds that don’t appear in footage but settle quietly into the bodies of entire generations.

At least elsewhere, suffering is occasionally acknowledged. In Karachi, we can’t even get a garbage pile on the front page.

I didn’t expect to find grief here. On the way home from the salon. In the filth of a city I love.

When I write about our grief, people write back. Not the measured responses I sometimes get when I write about politics or policy. Something rawer. People who love Karachi the way you love someone who is failing — desperately, helplessly, with nowhere to put it.

The anger is always there, just beneath the surface. But it’s a particular kind of anger; the kind that has been disappointed so many times it no longer expects to be heard. We’re not throwing it at anyone anymore. We’ve lost the energy for that. We just carry it, quietly, like an old injury that flares up when the weather changes.

Eid, apparently, is that kind of weather.

And the people responsible? They’re not even worth the outrage anymore. That’s the most defeatist thing I can tell you. The city’s managers — and I use that word as a joke — have long since stopped pretending they’re governing anything. Karachi funds the country and receives nothing in return but neglect and the occasional press conference. We’ve always known this. What I didn’t expect was to reach a point where I couldn’t even summon the energy to be furious about it. Where the garbage on Eid just felt like part of the landscape. Like weather. Like something that simply is.

That’s not acceptance. Acceptance implies a kind of peace. This is something else: the grief that comes after you’ve stopped expecting things to change. The love that has learned to lower its gaze.

Karachiites are called resilient so often that the word has lost all meaning. Most of us hate it. It’s what people say about you when they’ve decided your suffering is admirable rather than preventable. Resilience, in this city, is what’s left when hope has quietly packed its bags and someone else is taking the credit for your ability to survive the mess they made.

I’ve been thinking about what we do with all of this. The grief that has nowhere to go, the anger that has no target willing to receive it, the love for a place that doesn’t know how to love you back. It sits in the body. It shortens the breath. It comes out sideways — like road rage, or in the sharpness we sometimes show each other, in the exhaustion that isn’t really about traffic.

I’ve been thinking of building something. I’m not sure what, but somewhere people can breathe through what they’re carrying and find words for what they haven’t been able to say. It comes from this, from all of this. From the messages people send me about how they love this city and don’t know what to do with that love anymore.

Karachi isn’t dead. That’s the unbearable part. It’s loud and alive and infuriating and home. But something in it is dying, slowly, in plain sight, and we’re all just living around that fact — the way you rearrange furniture in a room you know you’re going to have to leave.

I came home for Eid. The road rage returned quickly. The grief took a little longer. It always does.

The writer is a former journalism instructor.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, March 29th, 2026

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