Contented, she stood on the balcony of the little flat her beloved husband had bought for her after the wedding ceremony three months ago. The smiling couple held hands, gazing at the flashing lights below. Life seemed a bed of roses.

Sehrish and Salamat Gulzar live in a small flat in Dhoke Kala Khan – a lower middle-class locality in Rawalpindi – with three brothers, their wives and a sister.

Hardly a kilometre away is one of the most upscale residential sectors of the federal capital, I-8, located behind the infamous Ojhri camp in Rawalpindi, where a blast in 1988 destroyed weapons and ammunition worth trillions of rupees.

One day Sehrish was asked to cook for the family. It was a test every new bride in Pakistan is put to sooner or later. Cooking came easily to her, but this time it was a Herculean task because there was no gas.

The locality where the couple live is inhabited by the lower middle class — government and private companies’ employees, small businessmen, etc. The people toil the whole day, and pay indirect taxes through utility bills and surcharge on products they purchase daily. Sehrish’s family can’t afford liquid petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders to cook or to buy food from the market daily. So Sehrish has built a hearth using bricks in a narrow alley behind their bedroom. Her youngest brother-in-law, a low-grade employee at an Islamabad government school, collects firewood from the capital’s forests after work.

Sehrish sifts through the pile of wood, extracting dry branches from the bundle. Unfortunately, it is not dry enough to burn without the aid of kerosene oil. The gas loadshedding has marred the start of her married life. “I was not used to cooking like this, but now it’s the only option,” she says, putting more wood in the hearth to raise the flames. “While I cook, we remain terrified of the landlord because he has forbidden us to burn wood inside the house. He thinks it damages the walls. But we have no other option when natural gas is not available. We can’t afford LPG.”

“Whenever there is a knock on the door while we are cooking, we fear it’s the landlord. Thank God, he is unaware that we are burning firewood here, otherwise he would throw us out,” says Sehrish’s husband Salamat. And despite the fact there’s no gas, Gulzar has to pay the bill every month. “The Sui gas people keep sending me a bill of around Rs1,000 every month without supplying gas. The landlord tells us to deposit these bills otherwise the gas supply will be disconnected. We protested against gas loadshedding and even blocked the Islamabad expressway, but the authorities, instead of supplying gas, tear-gassed us.”

Next door, a middle-aged woman is busy chopping up a log to burn in an iron hearth on her kitchen floor. She calls her daughter to the kitchen, asking her to kindle the fire. But the young lady refuses.

Rasheed Nasir, a driver in a car rental company, is struggling to manage the rising cost of keeping his kitchen going. “In winters I have to arrange for wood and kerosene. This means extra money and time. When I am away, ferrying my clients, it’s tough for my wife and daughters to arrange all these things,” he says.

“We were getting gas at night until October. We used to cook then and store the food. But now for almost two months, we are not getting it at all. We go hungry for more than 24 hours when my husband is not at home because we can’t arrange for wood in his absence,” says his wife.

Siddique Gill, another resident, was snubbed by the gas department. “The director at the gas department told me to go to Nawaz Sharif and complain. He said the department’s duty is to send bills and it will continue sending these to receive rent for gas meters and taxes imposed on connections,” Gill says.

His words have broader implications.

On Rawalpindi’s Peshawar road, the Koh-i-Noor textile mill has been a source of employment and a fine production unit for decades. There used to be rows of trucks waiting to take away the produce. Now, the long wall along the Grand Trunk road remains hidden behind a longer queue of trucks loaded with firewood to be burnt in the factory in place of gas. The use of wood instead of gas is not only affecting the quality and quantity of production but also proving costly for factories, besides raising the spectre of an ecological catastrophe as we recklessly cut down our jungles to meet energy needs.

Also read: Gas shortage: consumers start feeling ‘heat’ of winter

“There is no gas for us. The wood is damaging our standards and delays export consignments, resulting in the loss of billions of rupees,” says Shahid Basheer, a manager for the factory. “We have been getting gas two days a week for the past two years. Now we’ve been told there will be no supply for us at all this season.”

Government officials acknowledge the problem has worsened. “We are short of gas. There is congestion in the pipelines, demand and theft are increasing and there are no funds to streamline the system,” Hassan Mehmood, a senior official at the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources, says. “Right now there is shortage of over 2,000 million cubic feet of gas per day. We hope to plug this gap by importing LNG in the next two years. But what will happen to the increasing demand then is another question.”

Behind the Ojhri camp, from where the new Metro bus route turns towards Islamabad, Taj Muhammad is thinking of closing down his business of making bread. “I face huge losses in winter because I can’t meet the costs of baking bread on firewood and LPG. This government is unaware of public issues. Instead of providing gas, electricity, health and education, it focuses on publicity projects such as Metro buses and missile technology,” he says.

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2014