The good, the fasted and the furious

2026-02-22 - 22:03

A tale of fasting, frying, and forgetting Urban Bystander Ramzan arrives in Islamabad as a month of restraint, compassion, and spiritual repair. The city responds by testing how quickly a human being can become holy and furious in the same afternoon. At 2:30 a.m., a loudspeaker clears its throat and summons the city into piety by force of voltage. Sleep breaks in instalments. In G-9, Salim, in sandals and a shawl, hurries to the dairy for yoghurt. The price has risen overnight, and the yoghurt shines with such moral brightness that one suspects chemistry and deceit arrive before devotion. By noon, the capital is spiritually evacuated. Offices move at the pace of drained batteries. Young men perform abstinence horizontally. Women ration energy like flour for buying, frying, and serving a feast they barely taste. By evening, pakoras return to public life like elected officials: oily, inevitable, briefly adored. By late afternoon, Constable Tufail is at G-6 market with a handwritten list: onions, tomatoes, lemons, besan, dates, cooking oil. He has handled protests, accidents and peak-hour tantrums. Never a tomato. Above one stall, an official rate list flutters like revelation. Below it, reality is retail. Besan behaves like an asset. Cooking oil rises quietly. Lemons are no longer fruit. They are a policy failure with a fragrance. Tufail points at the crate. “Rate list for, decoration?” The vendor shrugs. “Ramzan season.” “There is supposed to be mercy in Ramzan,” Tufail says. “There is,” the vendor replies. “Just not at retail.” A price control magistrate appears with a clipboard like scripture. The bazaar becomes a morality play. Then Mirza glides past. “Relief bazaar, sir. Consider it... adjusted relief.” The magistrate pauses. His clipboard loses confidence. By 5:30 p.m., Islamabad’s roads are tests of character conducted with horns. Tufail is wedged into a friend’s ageing Suzuki, cloth bag on his lap, date in palm, Maghrib twelve minutes away. In eleven minutes they move forty metres. The city tightens. Horns harden. A motorcyclist discovers a lane where none exists. A car noses across another by faith alone. The child with the blue plastic bottle moves between cars and is waved over again and again for dates, water, packets through half-open windows. For a few minutes, the road remembers it is fasting. Tufail checks the time, closes his fist around the date, inches forward, stops. The azaan approaches while the signal does not move. Not noble hunger. Trapped hunger. The indignity of breaking your fast in a steel box while anger idles and some lanes move faster than others. After iftaar, the state regains its paperwork. Street iftaar, dates and water for strangers, now requires registration, inspection and clearance. The poor may feed the poor, provided the file is complete. On the same roads, another arrangement unfolds with greater confidence. Near some mosques, Taraweeh overflow and madrassa camps spill into roads with generators, loudspeakers and cooking. Parking spreads into lanes with stubborn entitlement. The administration that regulates a citizen’s tray of dates goes blind when the pavement hosts an institution it will not argue with. Selective courage, which is another word for policy. There is grace too. Food is shared with tenderness. For one month, a child at a signal becomes someone’s responsibility. The city sees the hungry. It is not clear what it does with what it has seen. Late at night, after Taraweeh, traffic, tea and the day’s final quarrel, Tufail empties the bag in his kitchen. Less than the list. More than the budget wanted. Enough for tonight. The pakoras are gone in minutes. The oil smell stays till morning. In April, on that same Expressway, the child with the blue plastic bottle is still at the signal. No dates now, only heat. Just a hand at the window, and Islamabad, which fed him so photographically in Ramzan, suddenly very interested in the light turning green. The month taught mercy. The city ate the pakoras and kept the impatience. Well before dawn, the loudspeaker returns. The lesson doesn’t.–The writer can be reached at bystanderinthecity@gmail.com