KARAK, Aug 9: Cave houses are a common feature in the eastern hilly parts of Karak district and almost every second house has two or more cave rooms.

A cave-room, locally known as Kamar Koota, is either used as a guest room or bedroom and provides protection from the vagaries of weather.

It is warm in winter and feels like an air-conditioned room in summer, although it usually has only one entrance and no other opening for cross-ventilation. The villages which have houses with cave rooms or cave houses are Doro Algada, Ghunda Shamshaki, Shamshaki village, Walay Banda, Mator, Worgha Banda, Kandokehl, Lawaghar Chinikhel, Zaibi Chinikhel, Sarobi, all located on barren hills.

Abdullah, who practises homoeopathy in Karachi and has come on vacation to his village, Doro Algada, located upstream from Palosa Sar, loves his birthplace. "I don't feel cut off from the outside world and don't miss the hustle and bustle of the mega polis.

But, coming here I do feel that our people need basic amenities," he says while sitting in his cave guest room. "It is the love of one's native village or birthplace that brings us here to live amidst the barren and desolate mountains."

Abdullah's father, who is a hakim and a prayer leader at the village mosque, and his grandfather Taimer Shah have built as many as eight cave rooms in the house on a cliff.

They have also started to excavate another cave room for the village children to learn the Holy Quran there. A cave room in Abdullah's house opens midway in the back of a steep hill. The back opening is as high as 50 meters from the dry natural water course.

Mohammad Mushtaq, another resident of Doro Algada, works as a mason in Islamabad. He has also come to the village to spend the hottest months of the year away from the humdrum urban life.

He says he would never leave the village if it were not for earning his livelihood. His minor son along with other village children also enjoys bringing water from the community water tank recently built on the dry stream.

Akhtar Amir, a young man of the same village, is worried about his future as despite having got education in Islamabad he could not get a job. Both Mr Mushtaq and Mr Amir say they missed the village and its Kamar Kootas despite the virtual lack of all civic amenities.

Although, the village has one primary school, the children go a long way on foot to the high school situated down the stream at Ghunda Shamshaki. Lack of basic civic amenities, specially roads, schools, hospitals, drinking water and electricity have forced majority of the villagers to migrate to big urban centres and other cities for employment and education.

The present population of the village is not very big, as most of the residents have migrated, the villagers said. The villagers complained that in their area the government actually did not exist.

Nobody has ever bothered to have mercy on the people who have been in the hardest life away from the cities. The people are also angry with the elected representatives of the area and say that after election they seldom turned back to fulfil their inflated promises.

An elderly labourer while taking lunch at a village tandoor said that a small portion of the katcha track to Shamshaki was built with concrete with Rs500,000. He claimed he could have built such a track with only Rs50,000.

The village women in small groups come down from the cave houses herding donkeys and carrying plastic containers to take water from the community tank. They feel very excited as the supply of water to the tank started only a couple of days back. Although the village gets water by turn, but the villagers hope it would benefit them a great deal as the water was supplied through the gravity flow.