The analogy rings startlingly immediate, and true, if only because of the occasion. To make a point, this 60-year-old man, who wears his thick hair like a white crown over his face of molten chocolate, offers, “It is like your chand raat,” the night of the moon before Eid-ul-Fitr - the annual festival that celebrates the end of the holy fasting month of Ramazan. Sharafat Masih*, a resident of the Colony, shakes his head in disbelief as he says, “The delay in salaries has been going on for years now, but to not pay poor workers on Easter is callous.”
On this day before Easter, all that everyone here in Christian Colony in the Old City of Peshawar - and Father’s Colony in the Tehkal neighbourhood along the Jamrud Road - wants to talk about is the “grievous” omission that is the failure of the Water and Sanitation Services Peshawar (WSSP), the local government’s municipal utility, to pay sanitation workers salaries on an occasion as august as Easter.įor the last four days, the workers have been on strike - the city and its various garbage collection points drawing rodents, flies and strays as waste rots everywhere, under a lingering miasma of decay. It’s the Saturday before Easter, the “Joyous Saturday” of the Christian tradition. Tonight, more than ever, they need their luck. To separate a semblance of winking joy from the muck they toil in every day, sometimes he strikes gold - literally - in the deposits dredged up from the garbled veins of the Old City.Īround him stand men from the colony in a tight knot, watching him pan for gold, their dark faces animated by quiet anticipation as they wait to exhale a whoop of exaltation, should something shine in the sandy grey sediment that the prospector is busy stratifying - soaking and combing through with fingers, busy hands agitating the water, as if cajoling his luck to rise, to rise from the dregs of the drains of this city. The profession of cleaning, this knowledge of the city’s drains and what flows through them, has taught him how to extract a modicum of luck from misfortune. Scrupulously, he sifts layers of sand with running water in a stainless steel parat. He sits in the narrow street between a tangle of tiny houses, a path so thin no two men could walk it side by side comfortably.
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