When the clouds finally break over Pakistan, the roads go first. Then the drains give up, water climbs into homes, standing crops are flattened, and families wait on rooftops for help that comes late or not at all. Give it a week. The taps run dry, the tanker is back on the street corner, and the farmer lowers his pump a few more feet into ground that has less and less to give. This is the cruellest contradiction of our national life. For a few weeks we drown. The rest of the year we beg.

Our problem was never simply scarcity. It is too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then too little when it matters most. Rain turns into catastrophe here because nothing is ready to receive it. The soil is paved over. The natural drains are choked, encroached upon, or built over entirely. No institution, federal or provincial, has made it its business to hold the monsoon surplus for the dry months that always, always follow. Instead, we let it run into the sea, or into someone's living room.

This year's figures say it plainly. The Pakistan Meteorological Department recorded rainfall about 36 per cent above the long-term average between April and June 2026, and its outlook for July to September carried a caution that deserved more attention than it received: even where seasonal totals stay normal or below normal, short, violent downpours can still drown a city, send flash floods through the hills, or bring a slope down on a village. Scarcity and flooding are not opposites.

Rachel Carson wrote in Silent Spring that "in nature nothing exists alone". She might as well have been........

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