The wind whips up the fine dust of this wasteland, obscuring my vision as I try hard to keep the vehicle on a path which will take us to the village, where we are to stop for the night. In the distance I can make out the vague form of a young girl struggling to make her way in the storm. She balances a water pot on her head; her silhouette wrapped in a faded maroon veil is a mirage on the horizon.

We drive past her, the wheels of the jeep churning up more dust, a shroud around the slight figure of the girl, erasing her existence from our sight, from the contested space of memory.

I never forgot that little girl — I had seen many like her on my many journeys across the length and breadth of this beloved, blighted homeland. There were girls carrying firewood, fodder, milk, food for their fathers and brothers working in the fields across Pakistan. I had seen tiny girls carrying on their backs children smaller than themselves. I had seen them with bags full of books, a purposeful air about them as they walked to school. But this little girl in the maroon chaddar always came back to me with an intensity of a gnawing guilt.

She was from a village in the remote district of Awaran, Balochistan, and she must have walked miles to the nearest source of water, possibly every day of her young life, from the time that she could balance a water pot on her head. I don’t know where she is now, whether she survived the drought which had hardened the earth, making it impossible to dig the soil or to plant seeds in it, hoping for a harvest which would quell the hunger that consumed the people living here, leaves in a storm. I don’t know if she lies beneath the rubble of homes destroyed in the recent earthquake that killed almost 400 people. I lost her in that sandstorm.

Perhaps in these 11 years she had grown up, gone to school, married of her own accord, worked alongside her husband, given birth to a boy and a girl whom she had every intention to educate, undoing her own deprivation. For some reason I cannot believe that this was the path the little girl had taken.

Late that night, after losing ourselves in the storm and barely managing to negotiate the desert in temperatures which had melted the tar on the roads of the nearest town, we arrived in the village of Kahan Zeelag, a hamlet in the middle of nowhere, an impoverished settlement of a few mud houses huddled under the summer sky.

When we arrived I clearly remember the dog barking at us and then lingering around the vehicle, tail wagging, curious to identify these strangers who had come from parts unknown. The children had come running too, their faces pale, hair sun-bleached, stomachs distended with hunger. My interpreter asked for the village headman, and we were taken to the largest of the six houses which made up the village. It was there that the women had gathered, taking turns to smile at me shyly, veiling their faces as they beamed in amusement at this stranger in their midst. I was filming the Participatory Poverty Assessment of Pakistan, and I had chosen to come to this village to record the voices of the men and women who lived their lives here in total obscurity, not mentioned in any development plan, not acknowledged by any government, not even in Quetta. These were people who seemed to have fallen off the edge of the earth, had there been one. Their lives, like their deaths, did not matter to the state, and today, as they salvage what remains of their bleak world, the state wakes up after a lifetime of abrogated responsibility.

I cannot forget that little girl; she haunts me on days when I cannot bear the suffering of a society struggling to cope with so many other storms. Perhaps it was her mother who told me that the landlord in their area would take away their animals as well as their daughters if they were unable to give him a share of their meagre harvest. It may have been her sister who said that they have buried so many women who died in childbirth. And was that her grandmother, that aged woman with the lined face and eyes hooded with sorrow who said, over and over again: “The land belongs to Allah, dear daughter, it belongs to Him alone”. Perhaps they were her family, but I shall never know, for I was just passing through that desolate land where the earth finally shook in anger, waking us up from a deep slumber.