Under the stained mats, in the dirt and sewage lines, another economy exists for those who have the patience to turn dirt into gold. They wait in the streets, collecting the dirt that has been discarded from the tables of master goldsmiths who spend hours designing, moulding, cutting and polishing gold ornaments.

Fifty-year-old Asif Masih wakes up at five in the morning in an Islamabad slum and rushes to board a van to reach the jewellery market of Rawalpindi’s oldest Bhabhra Bazaar, the heart of the area’s goldsmith business for over a century. He makes it there by seven, and by the time the shops open, his job here is done: collecting the dirt containing traces of gold particles.

His business tools comprise a bucket, a broom and a brush with which he gathers dirt off the streets. After collecting a good amount, he sits next to an open sewage line and starts washing it. Having separated the dirt from trash, he takes it to a small room he rents that is tucked above a jewellery shop.

There, he pours his booty into a pot, mixing it with silver and mercury and then adding some chemicals before putting the whole mass on a coal hearth.

After a while, more dirt comes to the surface and the gold and silver particles stick to the walls of the pot. Masih scrapes the particles out and once again puts them on the grate, where they melt together into a lump. This he takes to a jeweller and sells at the daily price of the gold.

“It’s a business of fortune,” says Masih as he starts sweeping for the day. “You may not earn anything for several months, and then you may get thousands of rupees on a single good day. Last Easter was the worst day of my life. I earned only Rs50 from a very tiny piece. I could not give money to my children, could not buy them anything for the big day, even food. But the very next day, I found a piece of 13 grams and earned Rs47,000.”

Masih says that it’s almost an addiction: “You never know when Lady Luck may smile on you. You get almost addicted to this, rendered unable to do anything else.”

“It’s a separate industry, a fully-fledged economic system,” says Zahid Yaseen, who turned to this when his eyesight weakened after years of embroidery work. “When we don’t earn money for weeks and months, we borrow from the jewellers with whom we trade.” He says that this profession is as old as the jewellery business itself is and has been passed down the generations.

These niyariye, the scavengers who sweep the goldsmiths’ streets, have to depend on fate to find the gold.

“We even buy dirt from jewellers,” explains Yaseen, who helped his brother carry on with his education until the Masters’ level and arranged his sister’s wedding through money earned from this profession. “They accumulate the dirt for the whole year under the carpet and then sell it once a year on a mutually agreed price. We wash it, collect gold particles, melt them into a nugget and then sell it back to them. We depend on very small, micro-particles of gold in the dirt which comes out in the street with the shoes of the customers and shop owners. Each scavenger collects around 200 milligrams of gold every day. In terms of money, you can say that on average we earn around Rs700 every day. But sometimes we can’t work for many weeks. For example, we can’t find anything in the rain and we lose our business during the monsoon.”

With the passage of time, other challenges have also emerged for this community. Yaseen says that “now, the latest machines have been introduced in the jewellery business. These machines don’t produce waste and shape the jewellery without any wastage of gold, unlike the artisans who would wash, rub and scrap the gold in order to shape it. That used to produce a lot of ‘gold dust’. In addition to this, the number of scavengers has also increased. In just our market, there were some 40 niyariye a few years ago. Now, there are more than 250.”

“You never know when your good day comes,” Masih tells me. “You may find a good piece of jewellery from the street even on a rainy day. That is why every member of our community keeps his eyes on the dirt while walking in the street.”

But sometimes that also brings trouble. “If we find a big piece of jewellery, there is danger of being charged with theft,” says Ali Ijaz. “And when there is a robbery in the market, we are the first ones to be investigated.”

Ijaz chose scavenging over a factory job. “I was getting Rs8,000 as salary in a Sialkot factory,” he explains. “Here, I earn at least Rs16,000 a month. If destiny is giving me more money over here, why should I think about any other job?” He speaks, of course, while his eyes scan the ground.

Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2014