Inside every Pakistani city, are three other cities. The first is the city of walls, the second is a city without walls and the third the city that exists between the walled city and un-walled city. The city of walls is the most noticeable, not because of its size or its beauty but because of its concrete wrought, strength and its well defined boundary; one that defines those inside it and those outside it. If you walk along the many walls of the walled city in Karachi or Lahore, you can peer over the tops of shorter walls. Standing on tiptoes you can even snatch glimpses of the life beyond the walls. It seems like the good life, the life of verdant gardens bursting with well-tended flowers, of tea-trays resting on the arms of faithful servants, of easy laughter and fitful hospitality.

Because no one outside the walls can really see the life beyond the walls there is a lot of conjecture and speculation regarding the specific nature of the good life lived by the inhabitants of the walled city. Since wonder is by nature bendable and flexible, life inside the walls can be imagined as anything, and because it is not seen by anyone, everyone generally loves this unseen life and would like very much to live. The variety of the walls is staggering, marble walls, and brick walls, shiny painted walls and plain brick walls, walls that are very high, topping even the topmost branches of trees and the peeking second floors of houses, walls that are still low and give away a lot of details, the edge of a shiny car, a blooming bush, a different life.

The second city is the city without walls, or with barely any. This second city, amoebic and sylph like lives under bridges and behind markets, in the lost middle spaces between school buildings and office buildings. If the lives of those who live in the city of walls are hidden, the lives of those who live in this city are exposed. If you wander around them, you can see nearly activity of living, eating and sleeping and cooking and even some acts of dying. There are many things here that try to pass as walls, scraps of cardboard, old bed sheets, pieces of plastic and doors of broken cars all conspiring to be what they are not. If the lives of those who live behind the walls are secret and open to speculation, the lives of those living without walls are known to all. No one wants to live in this city; no one wants to be them. They exist only to remind everyone else of the crucial necessity of walls, of the importance of their power to limit, to keep out and hence keep safe.

Between the two cities, one with walls and one without walls is the city in the middle. This is the city of those terrified of having no walls and aspiring to have higher walls. In their limbo, they cannot be classified either as those who do not have walls, or those who decisively have them. In their hapless frenzy to have walls, they build structures that look like them and can almost, very nearly pass for them. To anyone else, looking from the outside in, there are differences. These thin walls enclose smaller spaces, tiny apartments cramming many lives and many wishes.

Within these meager enclosures that keep out neither the neighbors’ shouts nor the din of traffic, or the stench of the drains flowing outside; the middle people try to live out life in the manner of how lives within walls must be lived. Many versions exist in a single space and each tries to reign supreme. One small room can hold a giant television, a fridge and a freezer and microwave and a father, a mother, a brother and his wife, mother in laws and father in laws and three or four children. Crammed together inside their cherished walls, they try to be satisfied and fail every day. They breathe stale air, for thin and paltry as the walls are, they do not allow for any healthy circulation. They drink dirty water, for it has to flow through the city without walls to make it to their taps and faucets.

When they cannot bear the cramp of their quarters, the pettiness of their bosses, the CNG strikes and the vexing absence of good connections, they watch TV. The people on television help them imagine a life behind high walls, and also to mimic it. The betrayals and romances of the screen they replay in their daily dramas, the mother in law reigning over a flat imagines herself as the matriarch of a large feudal clan, the young college student is convinced that her cellphone boyfriend is really the son of a wealthy magnate. The half aped lives of the middle are, like the walls that bind them, an imitation of something else, always hesitant, always incomplete and always wanting.

Every Pakistani city is made of these three cities, these cities defined by walls. The barriers that are present, the ones that are not and the ones that are wished for define collectively the story of a country and of all the people in it. Whether you live behind a wall, without a wall, or are busy building a wall, you bow before this singular structure, whose presence can grant safety and security and respect, and whose absence can reveal an unparalleled haplessness, an unmitigated misery. The love of walls, the dependence on them, becomes thus the worth and value of life itself.

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Zakaria is a columnist for DAWN. She is a writer and PhD candidate in Political Philosophy whose work and views have been featured in the New York Times, Dissent the Progressive, Guernica, and on Al Jazeera English, the BBC, and National Public Radio. She is the author of Silence in Karachi, forthcoming from Beacon Press.

————————————————————————————————————————————————— The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.