THERE’S a snapshot from Clifton, Karachi. In the foreground, a mound of trash rotting in the heat; a skinny, teenaged boy bent in concentration as he turns items over. He’s looking for anything that could possibly be of any value at all.

Here’s a glass bottle, a shoe that he straightens up to consider, a piece of tin sheeting — all these go into a large sack. He chucks aside a soiled diaper. And now, he finds a stinking bag of fruit peels which, when emptied, proves also to contain an orange. This, he carefully polishes on his sleeve and puts away in his pocket.

In the background is a portly, middle-aged, dupatta-clad lady, frowning against the glare of the sun. She is accompanied by a man pushing a shopping trolley. A box of cereal pokes out of one of the bags, and a carton of milk boxes can be seen.

The refrigerated items are placed in the backseat where the butter won’t melt on the drive back home — bound to be irritating in a city that is famed for its chaotic and dense traffic. At the store she’s just left, many customers’ weekly grocery bill usually exceeds the country’s monthly minimum wage standard.

A common picture in Pakistan and elsewhere, of course, this juxtaposition. It’s heartbreaking, yes. It’s an indictment of state and society, yes. And we’re all quite used to it, yes to that too.

Now consider this: across the country, in settings rural and urban, in families with education and those without, in households rich and poor, so-called crimes of ‘honour’ continue to occur with depressing regularity. Apparently, no intervention can wipe them out entirely, no amount of legislation seems to succeed in proving a deterrent.

For ‘honour’, couples who marry because they love one another are murdered; for ‘honour’, women might have to suffer being publicly humiliated and raped; for ‘honour’, families and tribes settle disputes by throwing young children’s future to the winds.

Honour is an important thing, and in many sections of Pakistan’s population, we seem to have more than a surfeit of it.

Which is curious, because when you really think about it, what is Pakistan but an experience that keeps chiselling away at your dignity and your honour and your self-respect until what you’re left with is indistinguishable from nothing?

There are very few who are immune to this disease, and even they may well argue that they might have learned to navigate treacherous waters, but not without compromising their ideals and their honesty.

The rich may have minions to do all the irritating little chores that frustrate and annoy and humiliate others less fortunate on a daily basis, but funding this involves very many stains on the conscience that accrue till the soul becomes a carapace. You can’t swim in a swamp without getting muddy.

The middle class, such as it is in Pakistan, must in a thousand different ways suffer humiliations and privations on a daily basis, whether it’s while driving a car or taking a bus, paying a bill or getting a child into school, having a government document issued or getting a pension.

At every step, there is unhelpfulness if not outright obstructiveness, each person putting one over the other at every opportunity. Because if you have even a shade more power, you must not waste the opportunity. Because the reality is that you haven’t any power, not actually, and hardly any rights either.

As for the poor, the less said of the ignominy and deprivations they face, the better. Rights are all very well, on paper as they do exist, but they have little relevance when there’s no one to ensure they are made available; self-respect must take the back seat when more pressing demands are being made by starvation and disease.

Could it be postulated, then, that given the manner in which people are stripped of their dignity and honour, one of the consequences is people attempting to protect the shreds they have left through unreasonable means, including crimes and the abuse of others’ rights? You are most likely to try and protect, after all, what you have least of, what you feel most outraged at standing in danger of losing.

Meanwhile, when a person feels violated, he is likely to take it out on whomever he has power over, whoever is most vulnerable. And then, there is that saying ‘empty vessels make the most noise’.

I wonder, what are the long-term perversions produced in societies whose members suffer a lifelong diet of indignities and humiliations, with no hope of it ever ending?

The writer is a member of staff.

hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com