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........

© Dawn