Poverty is given only the road. And the road does not end. It simply continues, milestone after milestone rising from the dust and falling behind; never marking arrival, only marking distance travelled, distance yet to come, distance that will outlast the traveller himself.
Mohammad Ehsan Leghari
The mountains of Khirthar do not care for schedules.
When the rains come, they send walls of water crashing down through the ravines, swallowing roads, livestock, and sometimes people. When the rains do not come, the land cracks open like a wound and people beg the sky for mercy. Kacho exists at the mercy of both; a rain-fed world cut off from the great Indus irrigation network, stranded at the edge of things, forgotten in the way that only the poor can truly be forgotten.
Chacha Abdul was seventy-four years old when he buried his granddaughter.
She had been young. Healthy. The kind of girl who carried water on her head and still found reason to laugh. But childbirth does not forgive the absence of doctors, and the government hospital near their village had no lady doctor — had never had one, in memory. No male doctor either. Not even a compounder who showed up reliably. There was a dresser. One dresser, playing every role medicine requires, doing his honest best with what God and the government had given him, which was very little of either.
She bled. And then she was gone.
Chacha Abdul sat with her three days. Then he picked up his pen.
He wrote in Sindhi, in a hand so precise and careful it embarrassed men half his age. The application asked for one thing only: the posting of a doctor; and a lady doctor, at the government hospital. He walked it to every home in the village and every elder pressed his thumb or signed his name. Chacha had taught them this years ago — that one voice is a complaint, but many voices are a demand. He had been doing this for as long as anyone could remember. Applications for roads. For schools. For water. For the ordinary dignities that other Pakistanis received without asking.
He folded the application. He began walking.
The first few kilometers he walked on foot, on a track the flash floods had half-erased. Then a motorcycle, a neighbor’s, dropping him near the FP bund. Then public transport; the cramped, lurching kind, rattling to Johi. Then another bus to Dadu. Then Hyderabad.
By the time Hyderabad’s lights appeared it was already dark, and Karachi was still hours ahead. He had nowhere to sleep. The mosque where he used to spend late nights had started locking its doors after Isha, a small cruelty of new times, and so he sat in a corner of the bus terminal with his application folded against his chest, and slept the way old men who have walked all day sleep: without dreaming.
Friday morning he boarded the first coach to Karachi.
He was at the door of the Health Secretary’s office at five minutes past nine.
The secretariat was still waking up. Staff trickled in from government buses at nine-thirty. Officers arrived in their own cars, unhurried. After an hour or so, Chacha was told that the Secretary was at a meeting at the CM House (so, it was futile for him to sit and wait for Secretary). The PS, a young man with kind eyes, looked at the old man in the threadbare shalwar kameez, standing patiently in the corridor, and said nothing unkind. He didn’t have the authority to say anything helpful either.
“No problem,” Chacha said, offering a smile of such complete and undefended humility that the PS had to look away. “I will wait.”
He waited.
He prayed Zuhr in the corridor, spreading his handkerchief on the marble floor, drawing brief stares. He ate nothing; perhaps because he had brought nothing, perhaps because hunger had become a companion so familiar he no longer introduced it to others.
One hour. Two. Five. Eight.
The secretariat hummed its daily theatre around him: files migrating between rooms, doctors angling for transfers to cities, MS of hospitals negotiating, special guests bypassing the chit system and walking straight to the inner door. In the files, paper under consideration, notes, remarks and ultimate notifications, doctors were flowing toward hospitals already drowning in them, and away from hospitals that had none. The mathematics of access, practiced fluently by those who understood it.
At four o’clock, the Secretary arrived; and the corridor became a current. Phones, attachés, section officers, a tide of urgency in every direction except toward the old man on the wooden bench.
At ten minutes to six, the PS gathered himself.
“Sir.” He caught the Secretary mid-stride. “The old man has been here since nine. He has come from a village three hours beyond Johi, sir. He has been sitting more than nine hours.”
A pause. A calculation.
“Send him in.”
Chacha Abdul stood in the office for a moment and almost believed it was over. Then something older and quieter in him remembered: journeys do not end in offices.
He pressed both palms together; not the greeting of a supplicant, but of a man who has learned that dignity survives everything, even nine hours on a wooden bench.
“Sain,” he said. “My daughter has died. Please help us; so that no other daughter has to die.”
The Secretary looked at him. Perhaps something moved behind his eyes; it is hard to know what moves behind the eyes of men who process so much human need that it must, for survival, become paperwork.
“Give me your application.”
He read it. He uncapped a pen — a pen that cost more than Chacha’s yearly expenses, a pen made for signing things that matter — and wrote a note. Then he held out the application.
“I’ve written to the DHO, District Health Officer. Take this to him.”
“Sain, I have gone to him many times.”
“He will act on this. This has my writing.”
“Sain, if you could…; post a doctor there, or telephone him yourself—”
“Chacha, I have already done what I can.”
Before Chacha had fully crossed the threshold, the Secretary was already folding himself into the back seat of his seven-seater. The engine turned over. The gate opened. The big car dissolved into Karachi’s evening traffic; toward a destination, as powerful men always have destinations.
Chacha Abdul stood on the pavement.
In his hand, a folded application. On it, a note in a hundred-thousand-rupee pen’s ink; a note addressed to a man he had already visited many times, in a city he had already travelled to many times, about a hospital that had been empty of doctors for longer than he could remember.
He stood there a moment, not in defeat. Not in anger. In something quieter and more permanent than either.
The PS appeared at his shoulder.
“Chacha — I am sorry.”
The old man turned and looked at the young man with eyes that held no bitterness. Eyes that had simply seen too much, too long, to waste themselves on bitterness.
“Son,” he said softly, “I am humbled that you allowed me to meet him.”
He adjusted his cap. He placed the application back against his chest, close to his heart, where it had rested for three days now; since the morning after he buried his granddaughter.
And then he began walking toward the bus stop.
It was only then — watching those slow, certain steps — that the PS understood something he could not yet find words for.
Chacha was not walking toward anything.
He never had been.
The road to Karachi was not a road to justice. The secretary’s office was not a destination. The DHO’s door, which he would knock on next, was not a destination either. The next application, the next signatures, the next journey from the mountains to the plains; none of it was a destination.
The journey was not something Chacha was on.
It was something Chacha was.
Power moves between destinations; offices, cars, meetings, signatures. It departs and arrives. It measures itself in outcomes.
But poverty? Poverty is given only the road. And the road does not end. It simply continues, milestone after milestone rising from the dust and falling behind; never marking arrival, only marking distance travelled, distance yet to come, distance that will outlast the traveller himself.
Chacha Abdul had not failed today. He could not fail. Failure belongs to those who had a destination to miss.
He had only continued.
Somewhere in Kacho tonight, the mountains stood in darkness, indifferent to everything below them. Somewhere, a hospital sat hollow and quiet, waiting for doctors who had been transferred elsewhere, to cities that already had enough. Somewhere, a young woman’s grave was completing its third night under the stars; a grave that existed because a dresser is not a doctor, and a note in an expensive pen is not justice, and a journey is not a road that leads home.
And somewhere on a late Karachi bus, an old man sat with a folded application against his chest, and did not sleep, and did not despair, and was already thinking of the next village elder whose thumb he would need, the next sentence he would write in careful Sindhi, the next morning he would rise before dawn and begin again.
Not because he believed the milestone was close.
But because the journey had long ago stopped being about the milestone.
It lived in him now; this journey. As permanent as his bones. As necessary as his breath. The journey of the poor does not ask to be completed. It only asks to be continued, carried forward in old bodies and careful handwriting and folded applications pressed to tired hearts.
Power arrives. Power departs.
The poor simply walk.
And in the walking; unwitnessed, unrewarded, unfinished, there is something that no secretary’s pen, no seven-seat car, no locked mosque door has ever been able to cancel.
A dignity so deep it does not even know its own name.
Chacha Abdul rode through the Karachi night, his eyes half-closed, the city’s lights moving across his face like milestones he had long since stopped counting.
He was already on his way.
He was always already on his way.
For every Chacha who carries the journey within; not as burden, not as hope, but as the only home the poor are ever given.
Read: From Vasco to Hormuz: Maritime Might
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The author is a water expert, for member of Indus River System Authority (IRSA), and a prolific writer
