Temporary Stalls, Permanent Ashes

Permanent enough to burn, temporary enough to evade safety Urban Bystander At 8:37pm, the fire tender posted at Gate No. 5 remembered an appointment elsewhere and left. At 9:47pm, the fire arrived, punctual as a clerk. For seventy minutes, H-9 Weekly Bazaar was guarded by the strongest force the capital keeps in reserve: the assumption that nothing will happen until a committee says it has. Gate No. 5 opened, closed, and prepared to cooperate with the inquiry. By morning, roughly 380 of the bazaar’s 2,749 stalls were gone, along with garments, shoes, ledgers and the arithmetic of stock bought on credit. No one died, which in this city is filed under success. The losses remain preliminary, the word Islamabad uses when arithmetic becomes politically flammable. Block C looked less destroyed than translated: cloth into smoke, plastic into stench, ledgers into grey feathers. Men who had lost everything still owed money by evening. The bazaar had learned the city’s oldest language, which is ash. Since 2017, H-9 has burned in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2024 and now again; the record may decide which count as major. The flames have returned often enough to Block C and its combustible neighbours, followed by the one structure H-9 reliably produces afterwards: an inquiry committee. Prosecutions, at least in public view, are so well hidden they deserve their own inquiry. The committee is the capital’s most dependable fire response. It never runs out of water because it carries none. The bazaar was never meant to burn like this. Vendors were to come in the morning, citizens to carry home onions and school shoes cheaper than the market allows, and by evening the ground was to return to ground. “These are temporary stalls, not shopping malls,” an official informed, true the way a wish is true. But Islamabad likes the poor temporary. Temporary stall. Temporary roof. Temporary claim. Temporary grief. Only the rent is punctual. Rent is about Rs1,200 a month, Rs100 for each of its dozen