Wild boars, plazas, and theology of parking

2026-03-15 - 22:53

How I-8 Markaz prayed, parked, and lost its road! Urban Bystander We remember places by what disappeared from them. I-8 Markaz, old-timers will tell you, once had wild boars crossing the open stretches after dinner. The sector has since become something the boars would not recognise, and would probably avoid out of self respect. The sports shops are gone, the bookstores closed, the library shut and never reopened. What moved in was diagnostic: eateries and pharmacies, appetite and its consequences, like old business partners who have finally admitted the arrangement. The wild boars, in retrospect, were the better planning outcome. Dozens of high rise plazas crowd I-8 Markaz, towers that arrived without a parking plan, a traffic plan, or any theory of what comes next. None came. The road responded as any reasonable road would, by collapsing into permanent, philosophical gridlock. The cranes are confident. The traffic below has moved into something closer to a spiritual condition. By late afternoon in Ramzan, eleven hours of hunger compress into thirty metres of road. An aunty in a Fortuner takes a three lane U-turn with the serenity of someone who has never once been contradicted. The jalebi cart becomes a flashpoint. A price magistrate appears, opens his clipboard, closes it, moves on. Ramzan, I-8 has quietly established, is a month of restraint for everyone not actively trying to park. Constable Tufail and two colleagues are in the main square. Tufail raises a hand. A motorcycle goes around it. His colleague starts a conversation with a driver parked across two lanes, a bag of samosas on the passenger seat. The samosas wait. The car does not move. “Sir,” he once said, to no one and everyone, “this city doesn’t want rules. It wants mercy for breaking them and applause while doing it.” He was not complaining. He was filing a report. Then Maghrib arrives. Three of them, simultaneously. I-8 Markaz sits at the intersection of three theological certainties. On the western stretch, a boundary wall has quietly extended some 500 metres into the public right of way, the kind of extension that takes patience, conviction, and the reasonable expectation that no CDA official will come. A little ahead, a second institution has drawn identical conclusions. On the eastern side, a third has absorbed not merely the road but the green belt beside it. Complaints were filed. Noted. Acknowledged. Transferred to a department that has since been restructured. Three traditions. One understanding about public space. The loudspeakers begin. A tea cup vibrates. A resident turns the television off. Nobody has declared this a crisis. It is simply Tuesday. Tufail does not raise his hand. Some situations call for enforcement. Others call for witnessing. After iftar, filled bellies and hungry eyes inherit the night. Every karahi counter is running. The Quetta tea stalls are on their third urn. Tired babus, ties loosened, hold tables until ten. Boys discuss startups with the certainty once reserved for jurisprudence. The massage men circulate, bottles clinking: “Sir, head massage, foot massage, heartbreak massage?” The khwaja sira performers understand the evening economy better than most planners ever will. One stops at a table, four chairs, one chai: “Beta, two hours on one chai. Even I charge more than this.” None of this is in the development plan. All of it is open past midnight. A committee once reviewed I-8. It recommended a feasibility study. The study recommended a committee. Somewhere along the way, the violations were reclassified as ground realities. Mirza Chughal Khor filed it under ‘pending’ in 2019, which in Islamabad is another word for approved. The plans sit in the master plan file, complete, laminated, and entirely unvisited. After midnight, the two motorcycles arrive; no silencers, full conviction, circling the streets as if sleep were a negotiable civic right. A windowpane shudders. A dog on Street 109 replies. Shah Mehmood Khan, night chowkidar, cycles his rounds when they pass, whistle in hand, as he does every night. It has made no measurable difference. He pedals on anyway. Tufail, off duty on Street 104, drinks the tea he has earned. In this city, devotion and influence are permitted what citizenship is denied. The small vendor moves by morning, the cart disappears before breakfast, the settlement is bulldozed under administrative vocabulary. Where occupation arrives wrapped in confidence or sensitivity, the files slow down. The CDA this week issued eviction notices to Rimsha Colony, which the CDA itself built. In I-8, the same authority has simply acquired better karahi. A tea vendor near the roundabout gestured at the darkened lanes. “The only parking left,” he said, “is in heaven.” The writer can be reached at bystanderinthecity@gmail.com