KARACHI:
There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a Pakistani city at three in the afternoon. The streets empty. Shutters come down. The heat presses against the walls and refuses to leave, even after the sun has gone. For a growing number of us, this is no longer the exception of one bad week. It has become the shape of half the year.
Pakistan has always known heat. What has changed is its cruelty. In towns like Jacobabad, temperatures now climb past 50 degrees, high enough that the human body begins to lose its ability to cool itself. In the last two summers, heatwaves arrived earlier and stayed longer, closing schools, filling hospital wards and pushing the national grid to its edge.
Cruelly, the heat is not shared equally. It falls hardest on the brick kiln worker who cannot stop for shade, the woman cooking in a tin roofed room, the child walking home from a school with no fans. For the poorest, there is no cool room to wait out the worst of the afternoon.
Doctors in Karachi and across Sindh have watched this play out in real time. They see the dehydration, the workers who collapse, the elderly who quietly do not wake. Much of this suffering goes uncounted, because a death from heat rarely announces itself as one. It hides inside a weak heart or a failing kidney, and the family is only told their loved one was old, or tired, or unlucky.
This is why the story of heat has to be told as a human story, in the voices of the people living it. That is the work Voices from the Roof of the World, an award-winning environmental documentary series, has taken on, carrying the testimony of communities on the front line of a changing climate to the audiences who need to hear it.
Voices from the Roof of the World is a joint initiative of the Aga Khan University, Aga Khan Agency for Habitat, Aga Khan Foundation, and the University of Central Asia, made possible through the support of several families and foundations dedicated to the cause of environment and philanthropy.
Nyal Mueenuddin
Karachi
