“I shudder whenever my mind recalls the thunder in the clouds that accompanied this August’s rains,” Syed Zishan Ali tells us as we ask him about the record rains in his hometown.

A 35-year-old medical store owner, Mr Ali’s forefathers had settled in Padidan, Nausharo Feroze district after migrating here from India, following partition.

“Believe me, I get frightened whenever I see even the smallest dark clouds hovering on the horizon… and when I do, I pray they don’t come any closer. We have never experienced rains like these in the recent past,” he says, pointing to his store, located in the town’s main bazaar, which remained flooded as long as the downpour lasted.

The Nausharo Feroze area has a rich history and is perhaps best known for the epic clash between the Kalhoro and Talpur dynasties — who ruled Sindh in different eras — at Halani in 1783. The battle of Halani proved to be the Kalhoros’ Waterloo, as the Talpurs eventually defeated them and established a kingdom here.

This small town nearKhairpur district in the heart of Sindh on left bank of Indus river, usually remains drier than the rest of the province during monsoon season. But from July to August this year, the Met Office classified Padidan as the wettest place in the country with a record-breaking 1,763.9mm of precipitation — with 1,228.5mm coming down in August alone.

Sindh’s chief weatherman Sardar Sarfaraz attributed the excessive rains to unusual heatwaves from March to May. “Monsoon currents from the Bay of Bengal remained tilted towards the south, rather than their averaged position, which pulled monsoon currents more towards southern parts of Pakistan than the north,” he explained.

In an area that has never witnessed such extensive rainfall in living memory, neither the residents nor the civic infrastructure was prepared for the chaos that ensued.

In Mr Ali’s words, those fateful August days seemed like ‘doomday’ had come. “It looked like everything was over for us… we kept waiting for the rain to stop, but it kept testing our nerves. The first spell lasted well over 36 hours, and a second spell started shortly afterwards.

He remembers how his family passed a sleepless night in fear. “It still gives us nightmares,” he says as he tells us about his efforts to rebuild his home, which stood no chance against nature’s furious battering.

Two rooms of his house were completely destroyed, while a staircase made of reinforced concrete also collapsed after support beams and girders also caved in.

“This forced us to seek alternative shelter that night,” he recalls, adding that they heard the sound of other walls in the neighbourhood giving way as well.

Nearly every home in his locality suffered major or minor damages and the only saving grace was that the rainwater didn’t stagnate for too land. It started flowing out towards the farmland of veteran politician Syed Zafar Ali Shah, who had allowed waters to accumulate on his property in a bid to save Padidan.

Mr Ali’s friend Imam Deen agrees with him. “Our elders often shared memories of the rains they witnessed in 1992, but we will be telling our children about the 2022 floods, which really spelt disaster for us,” he says, almost jokingly, trying to coat the tragedy in levity.

“We kept hearing sound of walls collapsing, one after the other,” he says. The night of Aug 26 has been particularly etched into his memory. It rained for 50 hours that night.

Naushero Feroze was also among the worst-hit districts in Sindh; according to the Provincial Disaster Management Authority’s (PDMA) sitrep from Oct 11, it reported the third highest number of deaths — 69 — in the province after Khairpur and Shikarpur. Like the two Padidan residents we spoke to, at least 84,000 families’ homes were partially destroyed in the flood, while more than 19,500 were completely obliterated.

One gets a sense of this destruction upon venturing outside the city. In the Yusuf Shar village, Nazar Mohammad Shar stares pensively at his small acreage, all still submerged. His house reduced to rubble, the women in his family are busy taking care of the cattle — both camped out amongst the debris of what was once their abode.

Nazar had grown cotton on his modest holding of three acres, but now, everything had been washed away. With the water refusing to subside, he is not optimistic about the upcoming sowing of wheat.

“I don’t think the water will go away that easily, it will either be absorbed [by the soil] or evaporate,” he said, estimating that they may be able to grow cotton by kharif season in 2023, if the land is de-watered.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2022