TIME and tide wait for no man and perhaps to underscore the point, the tides of Gulshan-i-Faisal did not have the grace to wait for the Karachi Water and Sewage Board, in its role as the executing agency, to finish constructing the area’s storm-water drains.

Which is not to say that the civic authorities weren’t given a sporting chance; the warning shots were fired last year. Officialdom paid attention but not closely enough. Projects to clean out drains were initiated indefensibly late. Contracts for stormwater drains were signed but too many are still under construction — including the Gulshan-i-Faisal drain, which is why Street No. 4 is currently an unbroken expanse of muddy brown, tinged with black, for the second year running. Residents would consider selling tickets if fellow citizens weren’t in a similar plight!

The flooding wasn’t entirely unexpected. Tension has been building up along natural and manmade borders for some time and a full-scale confrontation was inevitable. For years, nature’s needs have been relegated to last place while those unholy bedfellows, development and commercialisation, have been reaping the rewards of partisanship. Having planted representatives in the city councils, dev&com have been forcing through directives for more roads, high-rise blocks, shopping plazas, signal-free corridors, elevated expressways and bypasses – in fact, more concrete, mortar, tar and steel.

Nature, poor thing, had only enough influence to get some of the private sector on her side. While her team was constructing its arguments, the mob was busy erasing water-absorbing vegetation, natural drainage patterns, the gradient of the land and the very borders of land and sea.

As is the way of this world, part of the reward reaped by dev&com was that the last word in power-brokers, cash, which hired for them spin doctors to convert unpalatable goals such as “money, money and more money” into the more politically correct “gift to the people” and “for the greater good.”

Nature, meanwhile, had to make do with a feature article here, a conference there … no wonder, then, that she reached breaking point. Perhaps encouraged by her international cousins who ended the ambivalence about global warming once and for all by launching full-scale offensives, including smiting the UK with floods, nature Pakistan also decided to take matters into her own hands.

Her initial attempts lacked strategy. The cyclone and earlier floods hit defenceless communities who have no say in city planning and even less political significance. So Karachi came next, and as water fell from the skies, so water rose from the ground, pushing aside the manholes and gutters that had held it in check; together, they launched into a battle that reduced the city to shambles in two short days.

A hit below the belt, you may say. But then, no wonder they call her a ‘mother.’

Post script: There’s water rippling across the road, making waves on the sidewalks and happy little children are swimming in my parking lot – at least, until contamination makes them glow in the dark, bless their hearts. My books are desecrated by rivulets creeping along their spines and drips are making merry on the cushions. The bathroom drains sound as though they’ve got indigestion and the new seedlings have gone to Davy Jones’ Locker. But of course those indispensable purveyors of drinking water haven’t shown up – which is why I’m feeling a bit like the ancient mariner these days.

— hmumtaz@dawn.com