Holding back the Lai by hand
In the eyes of Rawalpindi, every single tear has become the Nullah Lai
اکھ دی راولپنڈی دے وِچ اکّ اکّ اتھرو نالہ لئی اے
—Master Altaf Bahrawana, Punjabi poet
It was 6:30am on the first of September in Gawalmandi and Shazia’s mother was making breakfast in the courtyard. Her feet were immersed, her clothes were soaked but she persisted with the fire even though the wood was so damp it barely responded. Shazia, 40, was sitting at the doorway, keeping one eye on the drainage pipe that opened into Nullah Lai. Their house sat on the banks of this tributary of the Soan River that functions more like a stormwater drain for Rawalpindi. Shazia kept her other eye on the tree, which served as a marker for rising water levels as it rained.
They and the other families by the banks had been hoping it would not get bad. But sure enough, the water inched up past the mark (nishani) to rise over 20 feet, and the nullah started to top its banks and begin pooling into the houses.
“Shazia, bachyan nu utte chuk ke lai ja,” her mother hollered. Take the children upstairs now.
They moved the children to the roof first, then the parents, and then the precious mattresses, charpai and, most importantly, the fridge.
Shazia and her family have lived here for six decades, so they know the nullah’s moods, its sounds, and the signs by which it warns them. They are also familiar with the accompanying drumbeat in their veins as adrenaline and anxiety flood their bodies in response to the monsoon.
Nullah Lai drains a catchment of about 235 square kilometres, roughly three-fifths of it in Islamabad, before cutting through Rawalpindi’s most crowded neighbourhoods on its way to the Soan River. A funding proposal to the UN’s Adaptation Fund counted 19 floods in the nullah over 59 years and estimated that some 400,000 people in the city suffer every year.
The worst came on July 23, 2001, when 620mm fell on the twin cities in roughly half a day. A study of that disaster put the death toll at 74 (64 of them in Rawalpindi), and found that nine in ten surveyed households had lost property, often down to their pots and pans.
But the record cannot show what decades of living beside Nullah Lai have taught these women: not simply how to survive a flood, but how to make a life around its return.
Master Altaf’s verse, ‘In the eyes of Rawalpindi, every single tear has become the Nullah Lai’ reads like reportage. It is the story of the lives of the women of Gawalmandi and Arya Mohallah, repeated year after year and resurrecting their coping mechanisms each late summer.
From the roof, Shazia’s mind turned to a neighbour who was pregnant and alone. She called out but got no answer. So she went down, reached the woman, helped her to safety and stayed with her until the water fell.
When it finally did, there was no drinking water and nothing to eat. The wood was soaked, the open-air stove useless, everything covered in muck. The mattresses were left to dry on the roof and the family came downstairs to begin the clean-up on empty stomachs. Eventually, food and water was sent by the youngest daughter from her home.
As always, the floodwater brought its own cargo. Snakes are common, and one night Shazia’s mother felt something crawling on her back. She swatted it and found a large centipede. “This is not the first time we have seen this,” Shazia says. “I have been seeing it since I was young.”
Then she offers something that sounds less a complaint and more a law of physics: “When the water has to come, it comes. It makes its own way. No one can stop it.”
Nullah Lai knows the address
Rukhsana, 58, came to Gawalmandi as a bride. She measures the floods against one that predates her own memory, a flood her in-laws said had not been matched in two decades. Across the water in Arya Mohallah, Ambreen, 49, who also moved there after her marriage, counts the floods by year: 2001, then 2010. “And after that, we saw even heavier rains,” she says. Each flood settles on top of the last, bigger than before.
Ambreen laughs when she recalls what people tell them: “Log humain kehte hain…people say we have encroached on the Lai. We tell them we have lived here since the time of our forefathers. We and the Lai go back a long time, our bond old as time. Lai was here before, during the time of our fathers and forefathers but now it seems to have memorized our address year after year, it turns up at our door, as if to pay respect to our elders at their graves.”
The nullah has become part of their history. “Ab hum Lai ki auratein hain,” she says. We are now the women of Lai.
Ready before the rain
Pre-monsoon prep for the people living around Lai is in place before any official warning is issued.
“During the last flood, the deep freezer was too heavy to carry upstairs,” explains Nusrat, who is not spared damage even though she lives a kilometre away. “So this year we women decided to find a solution and raised it on the bricks.”
Sewage flows back into kitchen drains and toilets when their exits are flooded. The solution is to keep toilets covered. At the doors, barricades are improvised with wooden planks and sandbags. “We have to create barriers because there isn’t any proper system,” Nusrat says. When the rain is at its heaviest, the women work the drains by hand. “We try to make a path for the water to move out. When we use the wiper, the dirt moves with the water towards the drains. That helps a little.” Houses often stock up on good wipers, mops and toilet-cleaning acid as the season approaches.
The women prepare for the possibility that staying home will no longer be safe. Neighbours alert one another when levels turn critical, while families call relatives to higher ground if they need to leave. For Saima, 23, of Arya Mohallah, one precaution proved especially important. “Thank God I had kept a bag with sanitary pads, underwear, a chaddar and a spare shalwar kameez. Otherwise, it would have been very difficult because I had my period the day before. Our house was flooded with 12 feet of water.”
Rukhsana cuts straight to the heart of the matter: “Things can be replaced. But a life lost cannot be.” Ambereen’s circle of care extends even further. In every flood, before saving her belongings, she carries her birds and cats to safety. “Now we don’t panic as much,” Shazia says, “because we know what work has to be done.”
A solidarity has developed especially between the women. “When floods like this happen, everyone becomes one,” Shazia says. “People check on each other. They ask, ‘Is everything okay? Do you need anything?”
Managing life next to a nullah that floods is labour, even if no one calls it that. The women joke that the flood doesn’t wait for a time when the men would be at home. Inevitably it’s the women who are at home when it happens and even when the waters recede. They are the ones cleaning out the diapers, waste, sanitary pads, and rubbish. “I took a shower today, after five days,” says Shazia. “And I saw bruises and marks all over my body. Something hit me here, something else hit me there.”
Power and gas supplies take days to return. Ambereen’s household spent four days without electricity after its meter was damaged.
In Master Altaf’s verse, the eye is where the flood gathers. In Rukhsana’s answer, it is also where the strength to face it is found.
Why the water keeps coming
In the opinion of town planner Abida Parveen of Shehersaaz there is no single fix here, least of all widening the drain which can’t solve a problem built into an entire catchment. “Open and permeable land has been replaced by roads, rooftops, concrete surfaces and other impervious areas,” she says. “Even if we widen the channel, we are still dealing with a much larger and faster flow of stormwater entering the system.”
Rain that runs off the capital’s roads and rooftops ends up at the doorsteps of Gawalmandi. The channel carries more than rain: about 600 cusecs of sewage flow into it every day, which is why what comes up through Nusrat’s kitchen pipe is never just water but contamination, the possibility of disease, both acute and chronic.
That detail is where the story refuses a simple villain. Officials point to encroachments and to garbage and debris dumped into the channel, and they are not entirely wrong: residents of some neighbourhoods along the banks have been photographed dumping waste there in defiance of bans. But Parveen cautions against letting that diagnosis harden into a verdict on the people who live there.
“Calling a settlement an encroachment may describe its legal status, but it does not automatically solve the housing problem of the people living there,” she says. “The objective should not be simply to remove people from the nullah. The objective should be to reduce flood risk while ensuring that vulnerable households are not made homeless or pushed into another unsafe settlement.”
Danyal Chaudhry, the member of the National Assembly for NA-57, does not dispute that response has outrun prevention. He calls for a shift “from a purely reactive approach — responding after water levels rise — to a preventive approach based on risk mapping, preparedness and timely evacuation.” For him women should not only be treated as beneficiaries of disaster-response programmes; they should also be partners in designing them. “Their experience at the household and community level can significantly improve the effectiveness of official preparedness plans.”
While it sounds like the right diagnosis, for now it is also a description of something that has not yet happened. In the women’s own accounts, the early-warning system is a marked tree; the relief operation is a relative arriving with food and water; the evacuation plan is a bag packed by the door.
The fear that stays
Shazia’s mother no longer sleeps properly when it rains. She lies down, drifts off, and just as sleep begins to take hold, wakes and reaches for the floor to check if it is wet. Nusrat copes differently, “Haha, I have gone crazy, I keep washing the dishes again and again.”
For Saima, the fear is tied to the uncertainty of what might happen to the house and the family. “Thunder, the sound of water hitting the pavement grips me with fear…I can’t help but tremble…because the memories come flooding back, the anxiety to face it all once again…it’s like life imprisonment.“
Rukhsana’s answer suggests an anxiety that has found a home in the marrow: “We stay scared and alert. That fear has never really left us.” For these women, eco-anxiety is not an abstract fear of a distant climate future.
Where the tears meet the Lai
The harder question is whether resilience is simply the name given to the labour people perform when the systems fail them. “There isn’t any proper arrangement to stop it,” says Ambereen. “There isn’t really a solution. If the water rises, it will come inside anyway, no matter what we do.” What they ask for is smaller than an expressway, and harder to argue with. “How can we make ourselves safe when we cannot afford the cost?” she asks. “If the government wants us to move, then give us money or land and let us build somewhere safe.”
When the next heavy rain comes, the sequence will begin again in Gawalmandi and Arya Mohallah: the tree, the dash for higher ground, the children first and the mattresses after them, the toilets covered, the bag sent upstairs, the cleaning begun before the smell has settled.
“We know this can happen again,” Shazia says. “We have learned how to deal with it because we have been facing it for years. We carry on. Life goes on.”
All photos by authors
