By Raphic Burdo

Some distances are measured in miles, and other distances are measured in longing.

Between Islamabad and Karachi lies not merely the span of a country, but the stretched fabric of a man’s life, pulled between duty and desire, between provision and presence, between being there and not being there. For over a year, I have lived in this in-between.

In Islamabad, I occupy a small house that is functional but not lived in. It has walls, furniture, and the bare necessities of existence, but it lacks the noise that makes a home: the echo of laughter, the unfinished conversations, the small arguments that dissolve into familiarity. Here, silence is not peace, it is absence.

Karachi, on the other hand, is everything Islamabad is not. It is chaotic, hotter, less forgiving. The air is heavier, the streets more crowded, the systems less reliable. And yet, it holds what Islamabad cannot offer me, my wife, my daughters, and my sense of being anchored in something real.

My life, therefore, is divided, not metaphorically, but materially. There is a certain arithmetic to this life. A return air ticket costs nearly a quarter of my monthly income. A journey by road or train demands over fifteen hours one way, a time I do not have, energy I cannot afford to expend. What remains is a compromise: late-night flights, early morning returns, and compressed weekends.

Read: Understanding Pakistan Through the Story of Karachi

I leave on Fridays, often after office hours, sometimes boarding flights close to midnight. The body protests, but the mind overrides. There is urgency in departure is not because of distance, but because of deprivation. On Mondays, I start before dawn. To catch a 7 a.m. flight, I have to rise by 5 am, even if I have not been able to sleep due to dread of departure in few hours.  I take a hurried drive to and from the airport, and around 9 a.m., I am back at my desk, present in body, if not entirely in spirit. Between these departures and arrivals lies a life lived in transit.

Each airport is at least forty-five minutes away from where I begin or end. Each journey is layered: from home to airport, from airport to city, from city to airport, from airport to residence. Time dissolves in these transitions, and yet I endure them—not out of obligation alone, but out of a need that is harder to articulate. I travel not because it is easy, but because not traveling is unbearable.

There is a tendency to measure sacrifice in financial terms. The cost of tickets, the burden of maintaining two households, the visible strain on resources. But the deeper cost is less quantifiable. It is the slow erosion of mental ease. The constant undercurrent of worry. The awareness that one is missing something irretrievable, not events, but moments. The kind that do not announce themselves as significant, but later reveal themselves as irreplaceable.

My daughters are growing, quietly, steadily, irreversibly. The teenage years are not merely a phase; they are a transformation. A delicate, turbulent crossing where presence matters more than provision. I have often felt that I am absent at the very moment I am needed most. Not absent in intention but in proximity. There are questions I do not hear, silences I do not notice, and shifts I do not witness. My wife carries the weight of these transitions, often alone. I have wanted to stand beside her, not as a provider, but as a partner navigating the uncertainties of raising daughters in a world that is changing faster than we can fully grasp. Yet, I remain here.

What complicates this further is the nature of effort itself. Provision is visible. It can be counted, acknowledged, even expected. But there is another form of contribution quieter, less tangible, and often unnoticed. It lies in the act of choosing discomfort over ease. In boarding a flight when the body demands rest. In spending a significant portion of one’s income not for luxury, but for proximity. In refusing to let distance become detachment.

Each journey I make is not merely physical. It is an assertion. A refusal to let absence define the relationship. And yet, I have often wondered: is this effort seen? Is it understood? Not in a transactional sense, but in a human one.  Does my wife recognize that beyond the financial provision lies a continuous, deliberate effort to remain connected? That each trip is not routine, but a small act of insistence that I belong there, even if circumstances place me here? There are moments, usually in the stillness of early mornings or the fatigue of late-night returns, when the weight of this life becomes fully visible to me. Not as complaint, but as awareness. I realize that I am living in fragments. That my presence is always partial, never fully here, never fully there. And yet, I continue. Not because it is sustainable, but because it is necessary.

Love, I have come to understand, is not always expressed in grand gestures. Sometimes, it is embedded in repetition, in showing up again and again, despite inconvenience, despite cost, despite the quiet possibility of being misunderstood. There is, in this, a kind of silent resilience.

I do not know if my daughters will fully understand this phase of my life. Perhaps, in time, they will. Perhaps they will remember not the absences, but the returns.

The Fridays that began with fatigue but ended in warmth.

The brief weekends compressed with affection.

The effort to remain present, even when presence was structurally difficult.

As for my wife, I do not know if she sees this journey as I experience it. But perhaps that is not the point.

There is a quiet dignity in enduring what one must, without certainty of acknowledgment. Between Islamabad and Karachi, I have learned that life is not always lived in ideal arrangements. Sometimes, it unfolds in compromises that test not just our patience, but our understanding of love itself.

If there is meaning in this, it lies not in being seen, but in continuing to see—to remain attentive to what matters, even when circumstances make it difficult. I have not exhausted the limits of what is possible. But I have come to understand that possibility is not always about expansion. Sometimes, it is about holding together what distance tries to pull apart. And in that effort, quiet, repetitive, and often unseen, there is a life being lived, even if only in parts.

Read: The Door Stands Open

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Raphic Burdo is student of Literature and Psychology. His Podcasts can be seen on ‘Burdo Digital’ YouTube Channel

The post A Gentle Tale Unfolds in Shadows first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nazarul Islam | USA

My late father always had prided himself with the saying “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow “. In his youthful bliss, he had loved his city that was Calcutta. It offered enchanting tram journeys, the walks on the Broadway Esplanade, Dharamtalla Street, the restaurants Maharaja and Firpo’s! There was an indescribable charm in this city, purely inherited through British legacy beginning in the first half of the twentieth century. Visitors return from today’s Kolkata with bemoaning sadness. Fast forward 2025, the Bengali Calcutta’s charm has simply vanished.

Few Indian cities have aged gracefully, like a faded Bombay film star from the 1970s still applying rouge, reciting Urdu couplets, and sipping watery gin in a flat that’s seen better monsoons.

And then there’s modern Kolkata. A city so far removed from dignity that even its decay lacks romance. I have tried pairing it with India’s two other cities of Darjeeling and Gauhati where my father had once lived and worked before the great momentum gathered to free and divide India from the British yoke.

Gauhati today is reportedly an unintentional study of apathy versus ambition. The results have not been flattering for the “cultural capital” of India.

Kolkata spans approximately 206 sq. km, with a metro population of over 14.8 million. Gauhati is slightly larger at 216 sq km but houses barely 1.2 million.

Yet in every visible growth metric, be it airport expansion, real estate, or industrial revival, Gauhati appears to leash the punches of its demographic weight. Assam’s GSDP grew at 7.94% in 2025; West Bengal, a tepid 6.8%. Between 2012 and 2022, Bengal’s average trailed at 4.3%, its share in India’s GDP also quietly shrank. A slow eclipse, dignified only by denial.

This difference has revealed itself in a thousand small ways. Quite recently, Kolkata’s airport announced its intellectual poverty through its design choices.

Aluminum and plastic panels assembled with the aesthetic sensibility of a typical storage facility. In suburban Chicago. However, Gauha’s more modest terminal displays an understanding that space can be beautiful without being grand, that local craft can elevate function into art.

Of course, it’s not as if Delhi or Mumbai’s airports are paragons of design. Much of what the PWD builds, to borrow the erstwhile phrase from another architectural context, is “mean-spirited.” Formless, joyless, and engineered to offend no one while impressing even fewer.

Most cities in the subcontinent flaunt their redevelopment contradictions: glass towers beside crumbling havelis, IT parks next to temple lanes. From Dum Dum to Jadavpur, one sometimes sees long stretches remain untouched. Nothing is being demolished, and nothing is being built. The people have stopped expecting, the government has stopped pretending.

Even Belur Maat and Dakshineshwar are hemmed in by the city’s characteristic squalor. To reach these sanctuaries of spiritual grace, one must first trudge through garbage heaps and casual civic neglect.

To blame the lady Chief Minister Mama Banerjee and her Communist Party alone would be convenient, but unjust. The decades of communism before her gutted the place like a fish. One gets the sense that for some in Bengal’s intelligentsia, decay has become a kind of credential. Prosperity would be vulgar; poverty, on the other hand, signals character.

Truly Gauhati is no Paris, but it assaults you with ambition. It is raw, unplanned, and a bit gauche. But you can’t deny its energy. It is flush with money. The flyovers are ugly, but they exist. There are no sleeping bodies on every corner. Poverty here is transitional, not terminal. The city is laying gas pipelines and building a 5,000-bed hospital. There’s planning, even if imperfect.

This dissonance is cultural as much as economic. Kolkata has perfected the art of romanticizing its stagnation. It exports Nobel laureates, but imports basic municipal competence. Mother Teresa found it ideal to showcase purported sainthood, and Satyajit Ray immortalized its gutters with global acclaim.

Bimal Roy made his masterpiece Do Bigha Zameen here, possibly because only in Kolkata could the sight of a human rickshaw puller be considered both exploitative and artistic.

There is also a demographic undertow. Kolkata bears the weight of decades of Bangladeshi infiltration, an issue routinely acknowledged and rarely addressed. The city absorbs without adapting, expanding the population without upgrading infrastructure or enforcing order. Guahati faces this challenge too, but the scale is contained. The city at least for now, remains guarded and has yet to succumb to the demographic sprawl that has overwhelmed Kolkata’s civic bandwidth.

Most revealing was my conversation with a Bihari taxi driver who had worked across India’s major cities. Only in Kolkata, he observed with a mixture of wonder and disgust, could he treat the city like an open dormitory. No city in India gives a damn the way this one doesn’t.

This kind of entropy cannot be blamed on fate. The British had built the best of the city, the ‘London of the east’ and then Bengal just spent the next seventy-five years proving that nothing better could come after.

No wonder today, the bones of a great city remain visible beneath the accumulated neglect. The tragedy is that it has become the first city in human history to achieve moral superiority through municipal incompetence.

Somewhere along the way, the Bengali elite began to mistake cleverness for clarity, and theory for competence. Their rationality was always bounded but unlike Herbert Simon, they never admitted it. Instead, they designed their failures as philosophies.

If Gauhati is improvising its way into relevance, Kolkata is theorizing its way into oblivion. If the former plays its cards right—and that’s a very big if—it could be the gateway not just to the Northeast, but to all of Eastern India.

Kolkata had that shot 75 years ago. This fascinating city was once like a work of modern art. Today, it neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.

Read: People who travel are not lost….

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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.

The post Memoirs: A Tale of Two Cities first appeared on Sindh Courier.