ENVIRONMENT: PINING FOR THE PAST
Once upon a time, even as late as the 1960s, a small-time hill station was considered to be a prized posting station for both civil servants and soldiers alike. Today’s tourists plying the Karakoram Highway look the other way as they enter Abottabad. In a haze of dust, mobile oil and ear-splitting noise, heavy traffic obstructs the horizon of mountain slopes now shorn of indigenous pine trees. Smaller vehicles jostle for space on a perfectly-built road. Plastic bags litter every available inch of the land. Shopping plazas stand perilously domineering against mercilessly-chopped mountainsides. And, to complete the picture of downtown cacophony, ugly flat-topped houses sprout up daily.
The filth and environmental cacophony of the original linear settlement of Abbottabad leaves nothing for the imagination in terms of degradation, social apathy and the state’s ennui. The torture of braving the road stretch es from the entry point to finally managing breathing space once the town is left behind — a sad reminder of environmental dispiritedness.
In another time, on another day, the early summer rain would play a torrential symphony all night long on the slopping tin roofs. The haunting sound of a regimental band would waft downhill as the aroma of fried eggs cooked over wood fires assailed the nostrils. The sound of the occasional motor vehicle, laboriously shifting into low gear as it came up the tarred incline, would jolt one back to the world one had left behind in the scorching plains. The day would end on a peaceful, silent note as the hilly horizon became one with the darkening sky and the valley settled down to a soft slumber.
A lament on how urban development has wreaked havoc on the once pristine hill town of Abbottabad
This year as routine load-shedding plunged the hillside town into darkness — yes, Abbottabad dutifully adds its own pound of flesh to alleviate the national cacophony of waning utilities — my granddaughter Dania Fatima finds me out on the ragged stone steps leading off the verandah of our old family house. A good thing too, because her innocent intrusion is a fourth-generation call, finding its way across decades. I fall into a reverie and begin to sing a sad requiem for this city of Abbott-planted cedars and hillsides carpeted with pine needles and cones. In so mercenary a manner has crass commercialism wreaked its vengeance on the valley that it brings tears to my eyes.
Tonight the one beautiful thing about my relationship with Dania under the starry skies on this moonlit night has been the replaying, in mellow tones, of a symphony that had been ready to become the swan song of a lost world. Gently, I take her hand, bidding her to sit beside me on the stone steps that have borne the footprints of four generations of the family. And before that of the good Major General Roberts of the Gurkhas, whose love of pine trees must surely have been the cause celebre for building this quaint little house in the hills, with its curiously-crafted ceilings and gables galore. Indeed to the very undulations of these ceilings — at places so high, at others so low that when eight years old, I could stretch out an arm to touch the sloping end and show off to my little brother how big I was — do I owe my most fanciful dreams.