Dead men tell no tales. Makli, however, seems not to come within the ambit of this idiom as each king, queen, scholar or saint buried within its environs has a distinct voice, a story to tell if you just make the time to hear them.

Of course, the heat is a big deterrent towards achieving this as our group scrambles out of several overburdened cars. And so is institutional apathy which narrates these tales through blueprints, figures and drawings, and almost always in numbers. But there are a few present among the group who choose to ignore the black and white and focus on the varied coloured auras that arise from the structures that make up one of the world’s largest necropolises.

The tomb of Jam Nizamuddin II (d.1509), also called Jam Nanda — currently at the centre of attention from the Endowment Fund Trust for Preservation of the Heritage of Sindh (EFT) that works towards the preservation of historical sites peppered around the province — is under inspection from both amateurs and experts. It is being poked and probed, measured and commented on with brutal honesty. The findings don’t look too good, which is why experts have been roped in to come up with a strategy to slow down the aging of the tomb, or at least the appearance of it.

Jam Nanda, as well as his tomb, are much revered as the famous ruler of the Samma dynasty that brought the city of Thatta into the limelight, economically of course, but also by turning it into a place that provided patronage to poets, scholars and men of letters; an enlightened Thatta. Now, Jam Nanda’s tomb falls towards disintegration at an alarming rate, which has experts scrambling to come up with viable intervention strategies.

Warring against the usual suspects of wind erosion and rainwater seepage, a troublesome phenomenon has taken place with Jam Nanda’s tomb — there is a marked lean of the eastern wall as if under the weight of time. Due to weathering and the erosion of rock formation over the years, there is a drop, an absence of land that once provided support to the structure, but has now created a vacuum.

In the absence of viable data collection over years, it has not been possible to calculate the exact tilt, but this is estimated to be about five inches. According to a report published by the EFT, “some effort to stabilise the slope has been made in 1990 by constructing a retaining wall on the east side of the tomb. However, [this] is not adequate and prevailing conditions necessitate a proper technical solution of the problem”.

A similar lean has been observed at the stone canopy of Jam Tamachi, a few metres away from Jam Nanda’s tomb, calculated to be about six inches, while the western wall of the Shaikh Hamad Jamali brick masjid leans by 18 inches.

It is imperative to halt this movement; unless that happens, the historical monuments at Makli may not be around for too long.

Architect Zain Mustafa, however, believes this disintegration is inevitable, but the greater lapse is how a site like Makli is “left forgotten and isolated from all our mainstream educational curricula”.

Mustafa’s association with the necropolis as an educationist began five years ago after which he decided to incorporate the site in his learning and teachings. “My interest has been to bring educated footfall to the site and use it as a platform for pop-up classrooms for an informal learning and teaching method that could benefit anyone. I have brought design and architecture students, practising professionals and history and culture buffs who wanted to learn about Makli within the framework of Pakistan’s historical identity,” he explains.

Lamenting the negligible and questionable conservation work done so far, he stresses on the need for the culture department to incorporate newer methodologies to garner support for the site. “Educational institutions, local and international conservation experts, academics and researchers, all need to be involved to mentor younger-generation enthusiasts and build a programme, a culture that can carry on in the future too,” he believes.

The monuments at Makli are not a medium of attaining profit; they are devoid of the stamp of commercialisation. And as such, they have been left on their own, to fend for themselves against the relentless elements of the weather and the crueller footprint that man leaves behind, be it in the shape of plastic or paper, wall chalking or compromises on the quality of conservation.

As the inspection teams start to file out from the site, and visitors are done taking photos of the ruins, silence once again returns to Makli Hill — a silence that is welcomed, no doubt, by its original inhabitants.

Published in Dawn, May 10th, 2016