](http://archives.dawn.com/weekly/review/archive/040513/review4.htm)
The terrible divide between urban and rural or semi-rural Sindh was brought home on a weekend spent travelling from Karachi to Sehwan Sharif and Manchhar Lake in Dadu district. Those who haven’t ventured out of Karachi can have no concept of the mind-defying poverty in the barren countryside nor of the callousness of our political leaders and administrators.
You approach Sehwan from Jamshoro past Petaro and Sann (G.M. Syed’s birthplace, just off the highway) by a good, metalled road. The area is sparsely cultivated, and the few fields you see are only a weakly green. Men, women and children from the surrounding habitations wait for a wagon or a bus in the open, under the scorching sun. No minister or wadera whizzing past in his air-conditioned car has ever thought of building bus shelters at the most frequented stops. Those who wait cannot write letters to the editor or issue statements. Even a thatched roof over a few bamboo poles will bring relief.
**Through Sehwan town, you climb to the huge mound which is known as Ulta Qila, inverted fort, or Kafir Qila. According to legend Shahbaz Qalandar had become so incensed over the cruelties of the ruler with the people that he had turned the entire city upside down, including the ruler’s fort.
**
A team of French archeologists had tried to dig at the site, but was scared away by the heat. On top of the mound sits the irrigation department’s rest house, with its AC rooms. This has become a vantage point for sightseers, with the Sindh river on one side and the golden cupola of Shahbaz Qalandar’s mazar beckoning a few metres away. Below is Sheikh Mohalla, built on several levels so that sometimes you have this strange sensation of seeing water buffaloes tethered on a rooftop, which is actually the courtyard of a house built on a height.
The houses bake in the heat. The people living in them, depending for their livelihood on fitful periods of activity as farmers or fishermen or casual employment, are often so poor that they get the rotis for their evening meal from the mazar langar. The visitors at the rest house drink bottled mineral water; the residents of Sheikh Mohalla get their water from the river nearby or the occasional hand-pump. Many of the residents eke out a living by renting our portions of their abodes to devotees who come to pay their respects at the Shahbaz Qalandar mazar.
Half-an-hour’s drive away is Manchhar Lake, with its boat people and its fisherfolk. You take a boat and phut-phut past craft where families have been born, grown up and live. Each boat has a small “hindola”, hanging cot, for children. The lake water is polluted and smells. The air is dank and heavy to breathe. The beauty of a horn-billed stork cleaning the mouth of a water buffalo waddling in the lake is lost on you. The boat people cook with the dirty water, they bathe in it and they drink it. They survive. But is this what the state is about — bare survival? Not a better life?
It is argued that fishermen’s families everywhere live on boats, that those in Manchhar have known no other life, and even if they were offered better facilities on land, they would not give up their cherished boats, some of them lovingly decorated. But at least they can be provided with cleaner drinking water and some rudimentary form of health care and education for their children.
Probably they earn much more than those who toil in the fields or those who work as day labourers. But that is no reason to abandon them to their fate. At least a survey should be carried out to assess their living conditions and how their incomes have been affected by the pollution of the lake and its declining water level.
Everyone said you must buy some fresh fish when you go to Manchhar. There is a shed under which the catch is sold. It has dogs and cats lolling about, and the floor is littered with bits and pieces of flesh. It was a wise man who said you shouldn’t see how animals are slaughtered or fish cleaned; it’s best to eat quietly what you are served on your plate without being too inquisitive.
It was hot throughout the weekend. The mazar was crowded. Once the lights went out, and there was panic among the devotees. The mendicants inside the tomb impose themselves on those who just want to spend a moment of quiet contemplation. Everywhere there are signs of commercialization. At the dhammal session in the courtyard in the evening, in each group of women devotees, there are a couple of women doing the “haal”, swinging their hair in a trance. The mazar is clearly running out of space.
Perhaps those in places like Sehwan have open air to breathe, and they are not always cooped up in suffocating rooms in city slums. Perhaps they don’t have to spend hours daily commuting on crowded buses or perched on scaffolding, building houses for the better off to live in. Perhaps there can really be no dividing line in poverty. But why is it that you feel that the people in the countryside of Sindh have been left alone and forgotten? (I know because our ruling Jiyalas own their land at the time of election 
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