ADEEL BABREE

In the gentleness of dawn, when the sun is still hiding behind tiled roofs, water tanks and elder trees – Islamabad exhales. It is a deep, knowing breath. The kind that belongs to cities with old souls. The kind of breath a mother might take while watching her children sleep.

Geez.

Lay off the sauce, Slow!

I make Islamabad sound as if it were carved into the annals of time alongside Mesopotamia, Babylon, or Cybertron.

I’m well aware — Islamabad is still a babe, barely out of her cradle. A city dreamt up by Army generals only some 60 years ago — in smoky private clubs, over BBQ Tuesdays and tambola nights. Her bones are young concrete, yet she wears an elderly perfume: earthen and woody-sweet. It’s that blend of Chir Pine, motia, moldy boxes in the attic, and rogni naan fresh from the tandoor, wrapped up to go in last week’s newspaper.

The soul of a place shouldn’t be bound by birth certificates.

Some things just feel older than they really are.

Like the eyes of a stray dog.

The ugly floral patterns on the bed-sheet — sun-faded, pilled, and clinging on like a bad decision from 2005.

A fan stuttering somewhere behind the neighbor’s wall. Crooked, tired, sounding like it’s chewing gravel — or maybe just the indifference of the Universe.

The sickly glare of the porch light, still on. Buzzing, slick with bug guts — refusing to give in to the morning.

That slice of last night’s pizza, lying on a paper plate. Cold and stiff. Rigor mortis setting in.

A bunyan left out on the clothesline — forgotten overnight. Drenched in the sudden rain. Now heavy, sagging, as if it too had dreams once… but gave up halfway through the rinse cycle.

The scent of your own clothes, after a long day outside. Now slung on a chair. Earthy, sweaty — a little like regret and adventure rolled into one.

It’s the smell of stories — dust, sunlight, worn stairs, and hospital waiting rooms. That faint trace of dried chutney on your shirt from an afternoon roadside bun-samosa.

It’s 5 a.m.

The clock ticks—a slow, mechanical rhythm, a conductor raising his baton to summon the haunting highs of an Adagio. Its hands slide into place, reaching for something just out of grasp — like the cookie jar your mom hid on the top shelf. The sun doesn’t just rise gently—it rages in, spitting fire like a dragon, on the backs of mumbling air conditioners, rattling water coolers, and the drooping shoulders of kids waiting for school buses—late as always.

On top of an old window AC unit, stretched like a wad of old chewing gum, lies Willie—our orange cat. Long and lean, with the sleek, bulimic grace of a supermodel. I call her Willie because she looks like Willie Nelson—and meows like him too: nasal, twangy, always a little off-key. She’s always scheming for more food, never satisfied with her bowl’s offerings. And more often than not, she’s on the run from the neighborhood bully cat: Obama. Suave, smooth, and ruling the alley with quiet menace. But right now, she’s asleep. Her belly rises with unhurried grace, twitching slightly. Dreaming, perhaps, of chasing mice, hunting pigeons, or orchestrating a global terrorist takeover— where humans are forced to wear silly little bows, eat from plastic bowls shaped like fish, and answer to humiliating names like Fluffy, Cuddles, or Fatso.

Beyond the sleepy fuchsia of the bougainvillea, the bristles of the jhaaru rustle against the grass in slow, practiced strokes. Farzana baji’s gardener moves without hurry or fuss— as if he’s done this a thousand times. And he certainly has. His hands, dark and lined, know the shape of early mornings: the cool air, the wet grass, the lonely call of the distant koel, and the hush before the city fully wakes. Like a cup of chai before the noise sets in.

Farzana baji stands at the edge of her balcony, peering down at the dew-drenched garden and the gardener — like an old-world vizier surveying her sleepy province. In her hand, a big mug of coffee—never tea; she’s made that clear many times, and with great conviction.

The usual tales—meandering gossip about cats and dogs, her hot takes on morality and ethics, the struggles of motherhood, Hania Amir’s latest antics (“She’s a good girl,” she once concluded, “just says and does silly things on the internet”), pointed critiques of my vegetarian ways (“It’s stupid,” she scoffed), and, of course, the beaten refrain about her daughter studying at LUMS. She drops it twice, sometimes thrice, in every conversation.

“I mean, you do know, my daughter studies at LUMS,” she’ll say again, eyes fat with pride, just in case I missed it the first time—or the second. By the fifth mention, I’m already halfway down there in my mind, lugging a truckload of dynamite and a matchstick between my teeth.

Kaboom.

Somewhere between judging celebrities and dismantling my dietary choices, she’ll also dispense 100% guaranteed-to-work duas to cure heartbreak, banish the evil eye, treat my glaucoma, bring back lost Tupperware and possibly, the dead! I suspect she has a dua up her sleeve for rising petrol prices too.

Her usual voice—sharp and piercing, syllables on jet fuel, cutting through suburban static as she calls out to her cat, “Babloo, Babloo, Babloo”—is, for now, shushed, caught in that space between sleep and caffeine.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Farzana baji. With all her quirks and commentary, there’s a warmth to her—a kind that is rare these days. She reminds me of how people used to be, you know?

When someone would just show up at your door. A ring of the bell, a tea-cake in a strange box from a bakery no one’s heard of, and a cheery: “Bas socha mil lein.”

Back when families gathered in poorly lit drawing rooms. A 40W bulb dangled from the ceiling. It didn’t so much illuminate as it sighed—soft, dull, and uncertain, like an old man telling a bedtime story he barely remembers. And ceiling fans groaned like tired men with inflamed joints. Aunties had big hair, and wore wild, floral lawn prints. The ones that squeezed spring, summer, and a mehndi all into one single outfit. The Aunties sat around flipping through photo albums—each album beginning with faces and stories, then three-quarters, tapering off into blank pages, as if memories had stopped short. But each picture came with a story, and each story came with three more—so exaggerated and made-up, they bordered on science fiction.

“That’s Guddu bhai, the night before he was abducted by aliens.”

Out in the veranda, beneath the flicker of tube lights, uncles with mustaches and snug polo t-shirts brooded—taking a cigarette break from life, and all the madness inside.

But inside, chai flowed like gossip—milky, strong, poured into matching cups. And of course, pakoras—golden, oily, irresistible. And for the children: Pakola in sweaty glass bottles—some a toxic green, others a menacing chemical red—like soda-pop spells brewed in some swamp witch’s cauldron.

An Atiqa Odho drama murmured in the background, in homes smelling like Lifebuoy, Ovaltine, and damp laundry on the clothesline.

Across the street, a security guard yawns, as he rubs the monotony out of his tired eyes. His royal blue uniform—crumpled, slept-in, the shade of forgotten duty—hangs on him like a shadow that’s clearly not his. He adjusts his hat backwards—not for style, but like he’s about to spit truth—venom and howl—straight from some unwritten Ginsberg. A verse of cracked sidewalks, of broken windows, of red paan stains painted like murals across city walls, of big government cars with tinted windows crawling the streets in a drunken midnight waltz; of traffic lights blinking at 2 a.m., pulsing when nowhere’s left to go.

He scratches his butt. Scratches his beard. The rites of dawn. He takes a sip of tea from a chipped mug; the kind that has seen too many dawns yet not one worth remembering. He reads a week old newspaper; the paper that had come wrapped around his rogni naan. The brittle sustenance of day-to-day living.

Further down the lane, in a cheap, sun-bleached turquoise plastic chair—neither built for comfort nor made for rest—another weary guard slouches, holding open a pocket-sized Quran; its cover faded and corners curled, the spine softened by years of prayers—answered or not, still spoken with the same hope. In a voice, that could make mountains kneel, he recites a verse. A scent of smoky sweetness—part sandalwood, part something ancient—fills the vacuum. Blue ribbons of smoke from a mosquito coil drift through the dawn, clinging to his worn uniform and the ache of his morning prayers—as if smoke and spirit rise together.

Then comes the clink and clatter of the sunrise-men—tired legs hunched over the shaking frames of their old, faithful Sohrabs. Steel beasts with stubborn hearts, painted in faded hues of once-black and white. The paint sunburnt and worn, like an old soldier’s war medals. The chain sings a gritty, rhythmic blues—the soundtrack of working-class mornings. Their shirts cling to backs already soaked, as they pedal into the dawn not for glory, but for bread.

Ah, bread.

Yes—Bakeman awakens. And with it, the air swells rich with the smell of bakkar-khanis, double rotis, buns with syrupy centers, and big, fat doughnuts that look like big, fat clowns on parade. Their smiley-faces in cheap pink icing, flaking, cracking like stage make-up on a washed-up mime. For now, they sit comfortably behind glass, in steel trays, but soon they’ll be tucked into sweaty lunchboxes, smuggled into classrooms, and devoured during recess.

By 6:30, the gears of the F-8 machine begin to whir. Office clerks, drivers, aunties, old men with newspapers tucked under their armpit and snot-nosed school kids in freshly pressed uniforms drift toward the glass cases—like moths to the glow of a toaster. The scent of bread—yeasty, warm, forgettable like biscuits that rolled off under the shelf-counters, never to return. Cream-rolls. Eclairs. Patties. Fruit cakes. Croissants—if you can call them that. They’re really buns in disguise. It’s not even clever. But who’s asking for clever at sunrise?

Bakeman’s burgundy-shirted crew is already at it—sleep still hanging off their eyelids. They shuffle crates from trucks to glass shelves, each movement rehearsed a hundred mornings before. Their faces read like resigned poetry: not joy, not pain—just simple duty.

Bakeman has never been the best, and it doesn’t bother pretending. It doesn’t aspire to be some Le Monkey Butt Éclair French patisserie or beg the approval of some pretty-face Instagram influencer— who wouldn’t know baguette even if you beat them bloody with it. And that, oddly, is Bakeman’s charm. It is reliable. Steady. Spectacularly unspectacular.

And Holy Peptic Ulcers, Batman!

What a name—Bakeman. Like Batman.

Instead of batarangs, batclaws, Bakeman’s armed with buns hard as rocks, and dinner-rolls that crumble before you can put them in your mouth. Bakeman is the dark, brooding antibakery of Islamabad. A vigilante of injustice. And burp, indigestion.

Nearby, under the lazy shade of a leaning Neem tree, a freshly washed yellow Hiace dozes. Its driver leans back on a worn-out Rexine seat, eyes half-shut, lost in an old Habib Wali Muhammad ghazal trembling out through a blown-out 3-watt speaker.

The song is interrupted by a news bulletin:

““Aaj ka darja-e-hararat guzashtha roz se teen darje zyada record kiya gaya hai. Barah-e-karam, behtari isi mein hai ke zarurat ke baghair ghar se bahar nikalne se gurez…”

The driver turns off the radio.

He grunts—not surprised, not impressed—just quietly disappointed in the sun.

Then pulls a damp towel over his face, and slips back into his nap.

Next—the milkmen arrive. The daredevils of the dawn. Like acrobats in some Dionysian nightmare. They juggle ungainly steel canisters of milk and fate, as they dart through morning traffic on their Honda suicide machines. Their steeds snort and cough, wheels wobbling like tightropes under delicate feet. Each delivery is a circus act—part ballet, part demolition derby—as they pirouette past potholes, traffic lights, cats playing chicken, and morning joggers weaving through traffic like fluorescent escapees from a psych ward.

As the haze of dust thins, the silent heroes in orange vests emerge—CDA sanitation workers moving in to brush away the city’s yesterday. Candy wrappers, torn exam notes, crumpled cigarette packs, empty gutka sachets, plastic bags fluttering like wayward spirits, lost slipper soles, bottle caps, rotten fruit, half-burnt love letters, ashes from roadside fires, fallen leaves and broken twigs, perhaps a dead bird—silent and small—and kites that never made it to the sky. All piled into neat, orderly piles. Their labor goes mostly unseen—except by the few: the poetic, the mad.

A dog limps past, a philosopher without disciples, nose in the wind, trying to smell meaning in trash. A Chinese man bends over his vegetables, fingernails dark with soil, growing things in foreign lands. His silence speaks to the earth, and the earth listens.

Where the street begins to fold in on itself, is Matiullah bhai. Sarwat Auntie’s driver. Already down on his knees beside his elderly taxi, scrubbing one of the wheels. Squish-squash. Squish-squash. Soap suds bubble up and flood the gutter, as he mutters under his breath—maybe a prayer, or just a mess of cuss words. Hell if I can tell which.

Once the car gleams with a renewed sense of purpose, he moves on to the real mystery: wood. Not just a few sticks, but piles and piles of it. Branches, logs, long uneven pieces of timber—that look like they were dragged out of a forest in screaming protest. He hauls them one by one, tying them with rope onto the roof of his taxi cab. He’s done this every day, and no one really knows why.

Some speculate he sells firewood on the side, a humble hustle in a world that burns. Others suspect he is a profitable owner of a matchstick factory. And few insist he’s building a raft to escape to foreign lands.

I suspect something stranger though.

There is in Matiullah bhai’s face a curious resemblance to a beaver. Restless, big-toothed, always busy, and forever chewing on a miswak. And what do beavers do? They gather wood. Lots of it.

Or perhaps, he’s an avant-garde sculptor.

Matiullangelo.

Every branch is a symbol. Every log a brushstroke of rebellion. The taxi is his moving gallery. No one understands his work. Neither does he.

Nearby, a gaggle of crows congregates around a puddle—a mix of mud, Surf Excel, and yesterday’s stains. They take turns drinking, occasionally cawing at each other like disappointed uncles at a wedding. One glances at the timber on the taxi and squawks something that sounds like ridicule—something like,

“Get a load of this guy, eh?”

Who knows with crows.

The city sleeps still. The loud, cruel parts—the ones with horns and hurriedness—are still dreaming their capitalist dreams. But in this strange hour, this preamble to chaos, Islamabad remembers herself—neither city nor noise—just the stillness. A stillness once stitched with birdsong and Juniper trees, when the Margallas looked closer, and the streets still breathed. In the quietness, you can almost hear the opening notes of PTV’s morning transmission—thin, sorrowful music that seemed to know the silence wouldn’t last. Like a prayer recited too late. It was slow, repetitive, almost hypnotic—a sad violin dragging its battered bow across the soft tissue of your soul. A sound that knew something we didn’t: that time was passing, that a way of life was ending. Quietly. Like a sigh no one heard.

7:30 a.m.

And so begins another day in Islamabad, where cats lay sleeping on top of air-conditioners and dawn smells like stories waiting to be told—mingled with the warm, inviting fragrance of parathas drifting softly from greasy kitchen windows.

A low, thundering rumble rolls in — familiar, serious, like dark spit hawked from the city’s lungs.

The sound creeps ahead of our mystery rider.

Chugga-chug-chugg.

Chugga-chug-chug-chugg.

And the image staggers in.

A bike—red, if you could still call it that, the way dried blood is still almost red. A beat-up Honda CD70, with sweat on its wheels, yesterday’s juices still clinging to its frame. Tied to the back are large overfilled bags of garbage, pushing out the plastic seams in stifled yuck agony. With each pothole, they bounce with the rider, like a cheap wind-up toy about to come apart. The air fills with the stench they carry—rot, grime, and human excess.

And there he is. Hat askew, keffiyeh flapping wild in the wind. He scoots into the scene—sharp, sudden—like a bird caught in a plane’s spinning propeller, as we watch, breath held. We—all the silent watchers of morning. Willie. Farzana baji. Matiullah—the beaver-man. The guards. The crows. Me.

And perhaps even the sun, now fully risen, pauses—for just a second—to take it all in.

He pushes the horn. At a bunch of sleepy-eyed schoolchildren shuffling across the road. But it sounds more like an apology—soft, defeated. Like a polite cough at a funeral.

The kids barely flinch.

The bike keeps rattling forward, pushing against the hush until it comes to a dead stop outside my house. Not a dramatic entrance, no coronation trumpets, no choir of angels singing or cloud-parting light—just the ordinary splitter-splutter, rickety-racket of a tired machine and the firm plant of a worn-out Puma on tarmac.

And from the soft hues of morning, he emerges.

Abdul Qadir.

The garbage-man.

The poet of waste.

He looks like he stepped out of a Mad Max fever dream, shot on a JVC GR-C1. His beige shalwar-kameez, once perhaps new, once perhaps not even beige, once perhaps a vibrant color like blue or even neon chartreuse, now bore the patina of years—of grease, garbage, gutter oil, of toil, and a thousand other stories that all probably stink just as much. His sleeves hung loose and gray at the edges, like flags at half-mast. The cap on his head, weathered and weary, barely clinging to existence—like an old soldier who has long since forgotten what war he signed up for.

Still in my Gobots tee and falling pajama bottoms, I chew on a pizza crust hard, stale and serious as coffin-wood and toss a quick “hullo” to Abdul Qadir.

It was, and had always been, our quiet morning ritual. A smile. A nod of acknowledgment. Sometimes a comment about the nasty weather we’re having lately. He’d lift a hand, fingers calloused and cracked, and say,

“Salam, bhai jaan.”

He’d pop the lid off the trash can like a chef lifting the cover on a slow-roasted masterpiece — eyes gleaming, nostrils flared — as if expecting braised lamb, mashed potatoes on the side, and other simmered secrets. But ours were only offerings of wilted peels, empty milk cartons, fruit rinds, a misplaced spoon, a bottle of mustard expired in 2012, and ink-smeared pages of my discarded drafts. Words I’d wrestled with at 2 a.m., now abandoned to the bin, collected by a man who didn’t know he was holding fragments of bad poetry, and dead metaphors.

He never paused, never sighed. There was always that wide, cheeky grin – as if he was onto something I wasn’t. Like he’d cracked the code and I was still scribbling bits from ‘Mind at the End of Its Tether’ on napkins. As if to say: “You write about life. I carry it.”

He would tie up the bag, sling it on the back of his Honda, and zoom off, becoming once again a blur. He had done this—every day—for ten years. Never late. Never early. Just right on time. Like the sun itself.

And me? I’d just be standing there, daydreaming, still trying to make sense of a world that did not bother making sense. He labored. I languished in thought. He moved. I mused. He lived. I lingered. Life’s strange arithmetic.

Then again, balance is always temporary.

One ordinary Tuesday, the rhythm we’d grown used to felt tampered with, like someone had nudged the turntable—not enough to stop the music, but just enough to make it wobble.

The doorbell rang—metallic, urgent and heavy like it was carrying a bag of guilt.

It was about 5 p.m.

Strange, I thought—Abdul Qadir belonged to other hours, quieter ones.

The sun, dulled to bronze, began its slow resign—like an old painter rinsing his brush at day’s end.

I opened the door.

There he stood. Not smiling this time. Not scowling either. Just still. That kind of stillness that comes before big things.

He looked at me with eyes I hadn’t really seen before—eyes usually half-hidden under the weighty shadow of his crumbly cap. A cap that looked like it might blow up in a puff of smoke with just a touch.

With a quiet murmur, he said:

“I am leaving.”

Perhaps my eyes lagged behind, and in that slow blink, the world slowed down—like a stereo losing power, the tape warping in its spool.

“It’s my last day.”

That was all. No drama. No speeches. No “my commiserations to the English team.”

And in that moment—how serious those words felt. Like tombstones, or the sound of footsteps dragging back to the pavilion after defeat.

He stood there, nearly disappearing into the afternoon light—his brown and beige clothes, still stained with grime, dissolving into the muted hues of the fading day.

“But why?” I asked.

He didn’t move, like the question passed through him without even leaving a mark.

“The government wants us out.”

That was it. Five words. Thick and dense—like the last drag of your day’s final cigarette.

I stared at him—our Abdul Qadir—thinking I’d misheard. He, who had come every morning like the rising sun, was suddenly a stranger. A name on a deportation list.

I didn’t even know he was Afghan.
Because I never thought to ask. Because I saw him as one of us.
As real, as rooted, as necessary as the air.
Because he was Pakistani in all the ways that mattered—

Like the crackle of jalebi, spinning sweet in the halwai’s kadhai,

The foamy mustache on your lip from a glass of lassi on a hot summer afternoon,

The THWUMP!?! of an inswinging yorker knocking out the middle stump into a cartwheel,

And the low moan of a diesel generator when the power of the city gives out.

But now, with the clarity of law, and borders etched by men with pens, he was being erased.

They want them gone.
All of them.
The poor, the tired, the stateless.

I don’t know how policy works. I really don’t.
I don’t understand why things are the way they are.
Maybe that’s just how the world spins — on power, fear, and maps drawn by men with good suits and bad hearts.

I’m not a political analyst.
I don’t understand diplomacy, or foreign affairs, or why some borders are velvet ropes and others cut like barbed wire.

But I do know what it means to feel.

And when you strip away the flags, the national anthems, the manifestos, the five-year plans, and conferences in luxury hotels with a complimentary seafood buffet — what’s left is just a person.

A man trying to feed his family.
A mother doing her best to keep her children from dying.
A girl who wants to learn algebra and listen to Van Halen without hearing gunshots in the distance.

Still — I’m not here to condemn presidents or lecture policymakers.
I’m not that clever.
I don’t have the credentials, the qualification — or the guts.
I’m just saying — quietly, maybe foolishly — there has to be a better way.

But that’s idealist talk, isn’t it?
And we all know what becomes of idealists.
Dreamers. Poets.

They shoot them.
Hang them.
Crucify them.
Put a bullet in the back of the head —
Then later, put their face on a postage stamp.

Martin Luther King had a dream — and a funeral.
Bhagat Singh asked for dignity — and got a noose.
Malcolm gave voice to voiceless—but was silenced himself.
Even Lennon got shot for imagining a world without borders.

The world doesn’t like people who imagine better.
It eats them.

We champion distant causes.
We raise flags for Gaza, chant slogans for Yemen, flood Instagram stories about Syria in vintage & retro filters.
We moan for the suffering of strangers a thousand miles away,
While people, like Abdul Qadir?
We toss him out, like the very same garbage he carried each morning.

“This just isn’t right” I protested.

He nodded slow, eyes swollen with worry. The kind that won’t let you sleep, no matter how tired you are.

“Yeah,” he breathed, voice low. “It’s sad.”

Then, out of nowhere, that crooked grin spread his face—like he was daring the whole damn world to try him.

“Y’know,” he said,
“these were the best ten years of my life.”

And man —
like a left hook I never saw coming,
it hit me.
Hard.
Sudden.

A man who spent a decade waist-deep in the rot and filth of a city that never thanked him, still had the grace to call it his joy—that was a lesson no school could teach, no textbook could explain.

It was a mirror held up to our bloated, gassy selves.

We who moan about slow Wi-Fi, about late FoodPanda deliveries, about air conditioners that take too long to cool, about traffic jams on the way to the gym. We who own more than we need and still want some more.

On the 4th of May, he was to leave with his wife and five-year-old daughter for Kunduz. A city caught in a relentless storm—bombs shaking the earth, gunfire in every alley, where peace is just a minute’s silence before the next blast. It’s a place where hope is fragile, and every dawn feels like a gamble with fate.

War steals life with fire and blood; garbage steals only your pride. One kills dreams, the other just wears them down, one bag at a time.

Which one would you choose?

I asked, concerned: “Are you worried?”

He nodded, eyes steady but heavy—bearing the weight of the trouble waiting for him and his family. Then that same cheeky grin spread across his face—the one he wore like armor.

“No, not really. I go wherever the wind takes me.”

He was no older than thirty, and yet he spoke like a mystic, like someone who’d already met death, had tea with it, shared a biscuit and told it he’d be back later. There was something eternal in his eyes. A serenity we spend lifetimes seeking. His wrangly, wispy thin beard, barely clinging to his chin, seemed more fitting on the face of a monk in a distant mountain temple than on a garbage collector in Islamabad.

I handed him my phone number—awkwardly—just in case. If he ever came back. Needed a hand. A gesture so small, so powerless against everything.

He folded the slip gently and tucked it into his worn-out pocket.

We shook hands. Hugged. Took a picture—to preserve the friendship. An absurd, final souvenir.

And just like that—no ceremony, no banners, not even one of those soggy, sad-looking office farewell cakes with “Best Wishes” scrawled in cheap icing—he swung a leg over his tired motorcycle, kicked the engine into its last growl, and disappeared.

Just like he came. Into the exhaust and silence

No one noticed.

No one wept.

No one cared.

But I stood there, still, in the fading sun, and felt the tilt of the world—just enough to know it had shifted.

The city still stirred. Security guards still scratching their butts. The crows still bickering in the trees. But something was missing. Something irretrievable.

There was a hole in the morning where Abdul Qadir used to be.