“I belong to the Gujar Khan village, and am the fourth of nine siblings. My eldest brother is the only one of us to have cleared his matriculation, while I only studied until the eighth grade and then left because I couldn’t concentrate on my studies – my family was very poor and my father, a labourer, was very strict with us.

After I left school I began to look after our cows but that was not enough. One of my relatives got me a job at a travel agency in Saddar which I did for a couple of years, and then left for a job at a medicine company in Blue Area. I did that for a couple of months and left that too, and then I was jobless. My father was already upset that I left my studies, and he got even angrier when I became unemployed. He was harsh towards me and because of that I ran away from home, to a cousin in Lahore.

He found me work in the transport sector. I began working as a helper on a route from Kashmir to Rawalpindi and Lahore, and then I travelled to various parts of Punjab – Fort Abbas, Multan, Faisalabad, Bahawalpur, Rahim Yar Khan, Kot Addu, and then on to Sukkur and Karachi.

I have travelled to many cities, met different kinds of people, seen their culture and localities, but the three cities that impressed me the most and changed my way of thinking and living were Karachi, Lahore and Bahawalpur.

The transport job was very difficult. You could not go home for two to three months, and you would eat and sleep on the bus or at a bus stand. I spent almost seven years doing it, and when I returned home I found my father and my family quite changed. I had earned some money so my family arranged my marriage, and then my father asked me not to go back to the transport job and do something else. I left that work and was unemployed again, and then my elder brother asked me to help run his dairy business, and so I have been running a milk and yoghurt shop for the last four years. I receive a good income and even own a vehicle.”

Published in Dawn, February 4th, 2017