This is my first newsletter of 2018. This year has already been difficult and we’re only just into March. I missed the January email because of heartbreak, and since then I’ve been meaning to catch up but I haven’t known what to write about. I’ve been preoccupied with pain.

I’m writing this in Karachi, on my first trip back to Pakistan in about fourteen years. There’s too much from this trip to include in one letter – expect more later this month or next month. It’s been very emotional for me (what isn’t?) with plenty of nostalgia and warmth (physical and metaphorical) and pain, too. Pakistan is another home for me, even after all this time, but home for me has always been complicated.

Yesterday, I went to Clifton Beach, somewhere that seems to epitomise all my difficult feelings about Pakistan. It’s a beautiful place, with a cool sea breeze and golden light and grey sand. It’s also the site of one of my worst childhood memories in Pakistan, so being there again stirred up a storm of conflicted feelings.

There was an oil spill at the beach several months ago, the after-effects still vivid during my visit yesterday. I’ve never been to a beach after a spill before but it was exactly as painful as I would have expected. Seeing the pollution and the damage hurt me. I’ve written before about the power of the sea to comfort and ground me; at Clifton, I couldn’t feel peaceful despite the mellow light and the sound of the waves.

Around the spill, the sand had turned plastic, feeling fake and crusty under my bare feet. Approaching the water, the blackened sand became gluey, moving in big plates and covered in footprints: birds, camels, people. It felt like there was water underneath the weird melted sand, that any step could collapse the entire structure and I’d sink down into unknown choking depths.

I had hoped that a trip to Clifton would soothe my battered heart. I had hoped to find relief here, a reminder that pain does not need to be all-consuming in the way it so often is for me. Instead, the inky beach and dirty waves seemed to reflect the pain I’ve felt since January. Like me, the land is struggling to breathe. The waves, visibly polluted, were small and weak, taking on strange rhythms like the spill had slowed them down.

Let’s be real: Pakistan is not a particularly clean country. Anyone who’s ever heard me talking about my favourite places knows that I have a soft spot for shitholes. I like grime and unpredictability and roughness. For me, Pakistan has an ideal blend of dramatic countryside and lush greenery and varied local wildlife and lived-in urban centres. It’s a fact of life: where there’s people, there’s trash. But capitalism and globalisation have fuelled this country for most of its young life, bringing smog, traffic and poor infrastructure as society prioritises vehicles, status, machinery, money over nature and slow living. Like most of the world, Pakistan feels the need to compete with western capitalist societies, believing the great white lie that being richer makes for happier, more productive people.

When I was young, it was evident to me that Pakistan chose speedy growth over the long-term preservation of its culture, its land, and our traditions. Now, after a decade, Karachi looks mostly the same – with extra development in some of the richer areas – but deteriorated. It looks exactly like I’ve been gone for fourteen years. The flats and shops from my childhood are still there but aging, crumbling in parts and discoloured. Trash is piled up behind houses and next to the railway tracks. If there’s some kind of refuse collection service, nobody’s running it (at least not in the poorer areas). The traffic has always been hectic here but it’s worse than ever, fumes clogging the air and my throat as I sit in the back of rickshaws.

I still love this city. I was unsure how I’d feel about it and whether change would make it alien to me in the same way that London is becoming. Karachi is still a home of sorts for me. But it’s obvious here, more than any other city I’ve visited on this trip, that Pakistan is still charging ahead with its development plans, with industrial growth, with motorways, with little care for natural beauty or the environment. I think maybe, deep down, I had expected to see more positive change alongside the inevitable gentrification and increased wealth gap (thank you, capitalism). Whilst Punjabi cities have implemented public transport, the country’s railway system is falling apart from under-funding and a national preference for ratbikes and bimmers. Despite a sizeable wind farm in Sindh, smoky factories and power plants dominate much of the roadside as you make your way down from Lahore. And although the WWF investigated the oil slick at Clifton and deemed it relatively safe for wildlife six months ago, there has been no clean-up whatsoever.

Nature in Pakistan means so much to me. The climate here fosters unique flora and fauna that have an immense personal significance for me. Pakistan’s nature is, to me, what makes this land so special. I can joke about Pakistani drivers, crave the food, sweat over beautiful desi people – but it’s the land itself that grounds me. It’s my love for this land that tells me I’m Pakistani.

Over the next few decades, I know that this same land is going to be ravaged – by mass growth, by capitalism, by increased tourism, just like many parts of Asia have already been corrupted beyond recognition. Yesterday, standing on blackened sand at the edge of a sickly sea, I felt hopeless. I remember one of my first existential crises: at age nine, I learned about global warming and how it was destroying natural habitats and fucking up our animals and insects. I’ve never much panicked about the future of humanity – if we’re set on destroying our ecosystem, we might as well go down with it – but I remember crying about those animals and trying to understand how nobody was doing what we need to take better care of the world. How could people so blatantly disrespect our planet?

Yesterday, despite the despair, I went up to the groggy waves and I touched the water. It was really important for me to be able to do so, back here on Clifton Beach, regardless of pollution. Standing at the water’s edge, cool waves lapped over my feet and washed away the mulch from the oily walk. I noticed that with each lick of water, particles of black grime would stream away from the shore, revealing the brown sand underneath. I realised that the sea was cleaning the beach. This land is healing itself.

With or without us, our planet will adapt and survive and heal. If we want to be around to see it, we need to help it out – take our trash with us, recycle whatever we can, grow and nurture plants, live sustainably wherever possible (within our financial and physical capacities, because capitalism and Tories are destroying this planet faster than anyone). Ultimately, this world is resilient. Life finds a way to flourish.

In that dirty, cleansing water, I felt that I can heal too. My heart needs time and patience – and maybe a little outside help as well. Like our beautiful and overwhelmed planet, my heart will bear the scars of damage done – but it can bear them. On the beach, there were wild dogs enjoying the sun and kites soaring overhead, occasionally standing around on the sand. Some men were opening out a fishing net – I’m not sure what they were hoping to catch in the inky shallows. All of us in this one place, trying to survive, trying to heal, looking for some kind of peace. I remember to take my time. Let the waves come, one crashing pain at a time. Let the hurt happen and then let it go, over and over again, until I am clean.

Heavy Machinery is written by Zainabb Hull and powered by smiling doges and breakups.

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