ALTHOUGH it had not rained in a week’s time, poor Karachiites had become so accustomed to the gloomy and wet weather (because it had been raining, intermittently, for the last two months) that they had begun to find ways to come to terms with it. Mind you, a lot of water had already flown under the bridge, literally and figuratively.

By end of August 1967, Aug 29 to be precise, the shops in the city suddenly had a big number of ‘rain gears’. Raincoats and umbrellas — which were otherwise hard to find — were now prominently displayed at shopping centres. Some of them even had gumboots.

Walking sticks had also come in handy for probing manholes on flooded streets and pavements. And many car owners, in order for their cars to wade water-submerged roads, had fitted an ‘attachment’ (read: contraption) to vehicles’ exhaust pipes to lift them up so that the water did not enter them.

On Aug 30, the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation claimed that the KMC had patched many a battered spots on city roads during the previous rainless week. But there were portions on major roads that were not touched by its staff for they had been ‘battered’ beyond repair and the corporation had decided to let them as they were for the time being. The most affected of them all was Bunder Road (now M. A. Jinnah Road).

The All Pakistan Women’s Association too was doing what it could do to alleviate people’s suffering at the time. On Aug 30, a delegation of APWA, including by Begum Sharifuddin Pirzada, visited Orangi Town to distribute relief goods in the locality. They were immediately surrounded by a large number of women who narrated their tales of woe to the delegation. The complaints were mainly about lack of transport, medical and education facilities. The APWA members also went into a hut where an East Pakistani (now Bangladeshi) woman Hafizan had given birth to a girl a couple of days back without any doctor’s or midwife’s help. Hafizan’s husband had died in a relief camp the previous month and she was living in the hut with her other daughters. In a noble gesture, something Karachiites have always been known for, her neighbours had been collecting money to get a decent supply of milk for the underfed baby. The APWA team assured her of their assistance and the lady doctors accompanying the team gave her medicines and advice for future course of the child.

Speaking of newborns, on Sept 1, the KMC’s Births and Deaths Department (what a strange name!) released a report saying that it had recorded four times more births than deaths within municipal limits during a period of one year ending on Aug 22. In all, there were 39, 254 births and 9,221 deaths in 12 months, more than 107 births and 25 deaths a day.

And it’s not just human beings who died; buildings also had an expiry date; or so thought the KMC’s Department of Architecture Control. On Sept 1, the department declared no fewer than 312 old buildings dangerous for human habitation. Of them, thus far, 138 buildings had already been either vacated by those who were living in them or demolished by the KMC. The remaining structures were not razed owing to various reasons. For instance, in some cases the demolition had been stayed by the courts, and in some other cases the occupants just refused to vacate the buildings.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2017