Karachi has its own dense forests, if only somebody would care to notice
ONLY three hundred meters away from the road and the seashore in Sandspit, is a full-grown forest, which, mile for mile, would pale even the mighty Amazon by comparison.
If I tell this to anyone, would they believe it, I wondered. Aslam Shah, a retired professor of the Karachi University, who was one of the four people in the boat we were moving in on the backwaters, said, “You have no choice. Seeing is believing”.
I felt cheated for a while. Just months back I had travelled to the Indus Delta to shoot a romantic sequence against the backdrop of the coastal forest, when a thicker, greener and more picturesque forest was closer at hand that stretched for seven kilometres, just a 20-minute drive away from the outer limits of SITE.
“The oil spill from the Tasman Spirit did not reach the backwaters,” someone who monitors the flow and the condition of the seawater informed us. “At the inlet which allows the water to enter the lagoon, like the expanse around which the forest stands, there was no sign of the oil spill.
“The wind was also against the flow of the water which stopped the oil to get here besides the long spit on the beach acted as a buffer that broke the force of the tides ,making the flow of the contaminants very sluggish,” concluded the expert.
I, Aslam Shah, his Japanese wife Mariko and Durrani agreed without a debate that this was probably the most picturesque spot in Karachi.
It had begun to drizzle. A flock of flamingos that stood stolidly in the water lowered down their outstretched necks and crouched a little as a short-lived flurry of big raindrops pelted them.
A bearded fisherman in a hungi cast his dragnet which flew into the air before it fanned out to drop with a ‘swish’ into the water. This, the fisherman had done to oblige the owner of the boat who had shouted, “Show the guests how your net works.”
The boatman propelled the boat by the aid of a wooden pole. He placed it at regular intervals on the floor of the three feet deep creek. The movement he made gave the boat a uniform speed of five miles an hour.
I thought the calm of the backwaters was in sharp contrast to the raging fury of the seawater on the Sandspit beachfront only a mile away.
As the boat moved, the whistles of the warblers in the mangrove stands rang out in the still air. “If you visit this place in the morning, you will find the whole forest alive with the whistles of warblers and the noise the other birds make. It is amazing the kind of bird life one comes across. So far, we have counted 106 species of birds in the forest,” said Durrani said.
The pole-bearer had brought us into a portion of the creek which was narrow and a thick canopy of the mangroves covered the sky so completely that it was no longer visible. The only thing that we could see was the overhanging branches, some of which were thicker than the trunk of a man. Suddenly we saw that our path in the narrow inlet was blocked by a full grown mangrove tree about twenty feet tall which apparently had been cut by people who boat from across the villages.
“In the dead of the night they would visit and take the branches away of the trees they themselves had caused to fall down or they would tell us that the tree had fallen on its own they were removing the dead wood to keep the channel clean”, said Jehangir Durrani of the WWF, the fourth inmate of the boat.
It is for this reason that the residents of the Kaka Pir village, which is situated close to the backwaters, are going to receive gas. Once the villagers have this natural resource, a lot of pressure on the mangroves will end and they will no longer be obliged to cut the wood for use as fuel in their kitchens. “We shall monitor the results”, Durrani said.
We could form a fair idea during the boat ride as to the threats this mangrove forest in the Sandspit backwaters, which is an outstanding asset of the country, is facing. The sewerage water that is let off into the creek is lowering the quality of life and taking away much from the worth of the forests for the tourists. How many cities in the world have a thriving forest within their limits?
Never, perhaps, before a donor agency has done better than it would if it donated a water treatment plant. Countless human beings and 106 species of birds will be its direct beneficiaries. Dollar for dollar it will be the best possible investment that can be imagined.
Karachi has its own dense forests, if only somebody would care to notice 
