A SMALL eight or 10-year-old boy walks up to the car at an intersection. He tries to put a small Pakistani flag mounted on a stick on the windscreen and makes a beseeching sign with his small fingers for two rupees. At another crossing, it is a girl of the same age who puts forth the same request. This happened in Karachi about a week prior to Independence Day.
There is also no dearth of child beggars in Lahore. The city has hordes and hordes of them. They approach people at every intersection, every marketplace, and at every point where a person makes a stop. Every child has a begging act of his own. Some specialize in selling popcorn packets. For a while, they tried to attract attention by spilling the popcorn. People would see them weeping besides the scattered popcorn kernels, take pity and give them something extra.
One could also see them uneasily shifting bare feet on the road in the scorching days of summer. Their feet seemed to be burning. They looked so innocent and in such a pathetic state that one’s heart immediately went out to them. One day, I saw a fat older boy handling one of the popcorn children and realized that while the road must be afire and the child’s feet must be blistered, their shifting was also an act. The children were simply being manipulated and taught tricks to bring in more. In the week before Independence Day, some of them were selling national flags.
These flags were to be found all over the city in the days before August 14. Every pavement of Lahore, as most other habitats, offered them in all sizes. They had contributed a green look to the environs. But their quality of peacefulness was in cutting contrast with hard facts on the ground. The underage salesmen hardly realized what their goods meant. The emaciated children dressed in tatters or dirty clothes would certainly not have any idea of what the national flag was worth and what the Independence Day signified because it has no relevance to their lives. Perhaps, it stands for the liberty to beg that they may have been denied otherwise.
This freedom is available to people in great abundance. There is constant talk of poverty and of people living below the subsistence line. Percentages of the wretched are worked out. Every statement presents a different count. All the deprived are placed under one head, while the extent of misery, deprivation and exploitation vastly differs among the have-nots. There are people who have to sleep on footpaths. Not all of them are in the same category. Their agony is not similar.
Pakistan has experienced a veritable explosion of population. Official statistics of population growth are to be doubted. Available facts contradict them. For instance, wheat production has increased manifold over the years. The amount of wheat consumed belies governmental figures of yearly increase in population. People familiar with rural Pakistan — not many urbanites are effectively exposed to that area of life — inform of far greater increase in population than the official count. Scores of children roam all over. Village ponds are often a sea of heads on the hot days of summer, just as the canal in Lahore has uncountable occupants at such times. They add up to a frightening number.
But the bomb that is dangerously ticking is not the number but the quality of the new population. Educated citizens conscious of their responsibilities to their children and aware of the escalating cost of bringing up children in a highly-competitive world try to keep the number of children within means. But the uneducated, unemployed and struggling segments of the population look at things differently. Children are earning hands for them and so, the more the merrier.
But it’s not just in the villages, evidence of this is amply available in Pakistan’s cities, too. The mounting number of child beggars informs of the rate at which poverty-ridden segments are adding to their strength. Lahore has built a reputation as a well-maintained city and is envied by citizens from many other parts of the country. Newly-constructed roads and aesthetically appointed gardens have sprung up and local means of transportation has been largely mechanized. But bullock and horse-drawn carts have been in harness along with motorized wagons and vans. But due to the city’s need for inexpensive transportation, the donkey cart still exists side-by-side. The city is simply teeming with them. Visitors do not come across these carts on all roads as they have been disallowed on most of the main roads.
Rural immigrants generally own these carts. They come to the city of opportunities when they cannot find work in villages and small urban centres close to their homes. Comprising unskilled labour, these villagers used to get work as construction industry workers, but private-sector activity has come to a virtual halt and we all know about the government’s financial constraints. It must have been hard-pressed to meet the expenses of the referendum, now wondering about means to meet another heavy fiscal demand in the form of the October elections. Consequently, there is no living to be earned by the immigrants. Being familiar with the kind of heavy duty a donkey can render, they invest their means in an animal and a cart; many of them bringing donkeys from the villages. Meanwhile, they continue pursuing the process of procreation and bring new souls into the world with the minimum possible period of time between newborns. The donkey cart offers hope to the children, too. They are professionally broken early, at five or six, and by the time a child is eight, he has a cart of his own. These children are street-wise; they can manage their way around and become earning members of the family at a tender age.
They are most certainly not a burden on parents. As a result, there is no constraint on producing children by the poor and this provides impetus to the breeding of donkeys, too. Livestock sector experts say that donkeys have the highest rate of growth among the animals of Pakistan. The streets of Lahore provide incontrovertible proof of that assessment. Wherever one turns, a donkey cart is likely to be there.
The net result is unhindered growth of human beings and donkeys in the country. The new population members may start earning at a very young age and have one thing in common with the animal that has come to be an important companion: they can both survive on the minimum. Freedom has helped Pakistan nourish a variety of the wretched in both man and animal. Both of them love their country, too. Days ahead of Aug 14, one could see as many flagged donkey carts around as cars, motorbikes and other vehicles.
The educated and resourceful of Pakistan continue migrating to other lands of promise after they have drawn the maximum from their homeland. The process slows down only when issuance of visas to western heavens is discontinued. The young seem to be fascinated by the green of the far and away valleys, even when they know that someday they would be turned into fodder for prejudiced policies. The donkeys and the deprived of the country would, however, keep the flag fluttering under all circumstances. Buy one from the child if you want the child, the donkey and the national flag to keep fighting the odds.
A SMALL eight or 10-year-old boy walks up to the car at an intersection. He tries to put a small Pakistani flag mounted on a stick on the windscreen and makes a beseeching sign with his small fingers for two rupees. At another crossing, it is a girl of the same age who puts forth the same request. This happened in Karachi about a week prior to Independence Day.
