Now ends the wide lap of land and the suburbs scramble to enclose the road. No more fields, baked dun under a burning sun, and farther along, the charcoal parapet of a mountain looming on the right. A breathing vista choked and obscured by shops and houses on both sides; a blurry stretch of nondescript settlements along a speeding coach.

Behind them rise villages; stairs and streets cut into low hills, some neat and open, others narrow and chaotic. Occasionally, where markets give way to paddy fields and open car sale compounds, the road in the afternoon is dappled with sunlight sieved through canopies of leaf-shedding poplars. Now and then, fruit sellers display large baskets full of apples, the pale-pink bounty of the season. They will be replaced by persimmons soon, one expects, on seeing orchards glinting with the yellow-orange of them, ripening in sun-drenched valleys all over.

Life flashes by through the hazy, autumnal light, busy hurling, rolling, tossing, lifting and straining through its travails, resigned to a cycle of drowning and surfacing. It exists, unconscious of itself for the most part, under the crushing and numbing of displacement and returning, of losing to finding a semblance of itself again.

And now the azaan, like clockwork from minarets, its chorus at appointed times. Men busy mending their thwarted lives, rebuilding shattered houses, rush to wash and gather in damaged mosques to pray, touching brows to rugs coarse from sands deposited by the flood. And everywhere the rubble and dust.

Swat was once the idyllic postcard for nature’s beauty. Now it seems to be buried under the debris of nature’s fury on the one hand and the eyesores of ill-conceived human development on the other. And the spectres of militancy and displacement constantly loom around its frayed edges…

Approaching Swat is witnessing a postcard promise gone wrong. The wreckage of flood and the eyesores of ill-conceived development. A sad spectacle of human encroachments into nature, environmental degradation and deforestation, with islands of precious, threatened nature spared somehow.

Over its rivers and valleys, the wet blanket of low skies, the grey omen of an imminent downpour. And suddenly the sky wrung: drops clattering over the vehicle-top like darts. In sheets pours the rain; like sheets rippling in the wind. No more the dust but gushing streams of water from the valleys above, gurgling in the narrow, plastic-choked throats of drains.

Life runs to find shelter under trees, in abandoned houses with cracked, gouged walls where the flood entered them with its crushing cargo of sand. The broken, jagged nothingness of villages; a fractured map of tents drawn over the ruins of once bustling habitations.

Entering Swat is entering a scene of tragedy — reenacted. A domicile for disasters manmade and natural, climatic, political and strategic where, amidst the pouring rain and the gathering gloom of an early winter evening, sits a hungry, emaciated mutt in the middle of the street, raising its shaggy snout to howl at a merciless sky. Its long, miserable wail curdles the chill, brought on by the rain and the wind howling through the abandoned remains of a village flattened by the flood.

At Fizzaghat, there’s little of the Swat river but a trickle. Large sections of the dry riverbed, stark in their sandy greyness from a bright morning sun, jut out between puddles and streams. The river has run out of steam, its fury spent into a thin, tame flow as if exhausted in the wake of floods. From the unified force of a deluge, it has shrunk into benign, scattered streams.

One could cross the wide riverbed without fear, from this end at the Fizzaghat Park to the Mamdheri village on the other side, from where Mullah Fazlullah rose to global prominence, taking violent religiosity to the rest of Swat on horseback and radio waves, invoking Operation Rah-i-Rast and the deluge that was the displacement of 2.5 million people from these parts.

At its peak, the number of people displaced by fighting between the army and the Taliban insurgents in Swat, and the neighbouring districts of Dir and Buner, touched about 85,000 people fleeing per day.

Vaguely, you spot two men on horseback, coming down a village path to the riverbed below. The sight sends a frisson of panic, a furry moth crawling down your spine, stirred as much by the sight as the news of the Taliban resurfacing in Swat. But it is only villagers on mules, sand-miners coming down to haul sand. Like the sedate river, the village appears harmless, the mules almost somnambulant in their descent down the path, unlikely precursors of a deluge, be it flood or blood.

This river and that village across, on a cloudless morning when the sky is leached grey out of blue, shouldn’t, but somehow juxtapose Swat’s troubled past with its present precariousness, a continuum of twin-fear, where one man’s anxiety that “climatic episodes like the floods may now be an annual event” is an extension of another man’s concern that “the Taliban are here again, regrouping in the valleys.” Not unlike the unease of authorities, as betrayed by an official.”We were already grappling with a law and order situation when the floods took us by surprise,” he says.

The rows of hotels along the Fizzaghat-Bahrain road stand quiet, abandoned by tourists. Across the park, the Burj-al-Swat soars sullenly above the road, its multi-storied edifice looking at the river and the village across, silently wondering at its possibilities. All along the road, guards sit at the gates of empty hotels, lulled into tooth-picking torpor by the humming traffic.

Men on feet and men on wheels, on this road winding through Swat, flowing through uncertain times. Time, its passage stamped on to stone a relic; time frozen and fossilised into the etchings of a praying Buddha on a rock face. The past a Buddhist stupa, the remains of Alexander’s town of Bazeera, by elements and age eroded. Of time’s ravages and history’s footprints, remnants everywhere in villages and valleys.

The present? It coexists anxiously, precariously, alongside the past; a flood, an earthquake, a target killing, a bombing or a suicide attack away from becoming one. As for the future, Swat is Sisyphus multiplied, rolling up the boulder of lives rebuilt every few years, only to roll down just when it approaches a semblance of stability.

Beyond the threat of recurring floods, beyond years of militancy always threatening to resurface, beyond the pandemic, a crashing economy and the crushing inflation, it is the worsening poverty and the state’s indifference to the predicament of the poor in Swat and elsewhere, that diminishes the dignity and capacity of those on the shaky ground of socio-economic precariousness, whether in urban Swat or out in the rural settlements, and to cope with crises both contained or cataclysmic.

The flood did more than just wash away settlements; it crippled the local economy, cutting through the land and its prospects “like a sickle”, as one shopkeeper in the town of Madyan puts it.

Above Madyan is Bahrain where the local market, one of the biggest in Upper Swat, is in ruins, a haunt for strays. Farther up, the road to Kalam is rubble; the three-hour journey from Mingora to Uthrore now takes 12. Remote villages in upper valleys, among the worst affected of settlements, are virtually inaccessible through land, phone or internet. The canal irrigation system is wrecked, as are 43 bridges on River swat, according to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sohail Ahmad Khan.

This being the cultivation season for vegetables, a local produce that feeds national and international demand, the flood ravaged agriculture sits alongside the hospitality industry and fish farming. There is talk of rebuilding hotels away from the river, but there is little land available in the mountainous Swat.

In the wake of floods, a sense of stagflation — spiralling prices but little economic activity — prevails, and its worst manifestation is food insecurity, especially among the women and children, a section of the population already struggling with rampant malnutrition in the mountains.

Given the history of floods in the region, people fear it may become a regular phenomenon. For such an eventuality, the district’s institutions are least prepared. Though the government’s rescue efforts have been timely and extensive, its capacity for relief and rehabilitation is anything but.

Even more worrying is the resurgent militancy in the district, where development initiatives, opportunities and efforts — independent or on part of the authorities — for revival of population and infrastructure destroyed by the flood may be constrained or thwarted by the threat. These days in Swat, locals rallying against militancy is as common a sight of them gathering at an aid distribution site, a glimpse into the district’s struggle against a twin-threat.

In Madyan, in the first week of October, women followed an authorised agent of the Benazir Income Support Programme like a flock, as he got them to daily access the internet at the town’s Civil Hospital. For nearly 25 days at the peak of relief efforts, there was no data connection in Upper Swat — with authorities giving no reason why it was disconnected.

Locals suggested it may have been for security reasons as, in August, the Taliban were already patrolling highways in Swat. Even when they did eventually get connectivity, the unavailability of data connection inconvenienced the poor households, delaying processes and access to the Rs 25,000 flood package at a time they needed it most.

Moreover, many men from these parts, who work as labourers in the Arabian Gulf, had little contact with their families during the worst of the crisis. A young woman in Matta Tehsil learned of her husband’s death abroad after six days, when they brought his body home.

In the wake of the floods, a narrative emerged that the hotel industry is to blame for their own destruction, a comeuppance for building along the river in selfish disregard for environmental concerns. “That is quite the case, but the hospitality industry is the lifeline of Swat’s economy and, in the wake of floods, it is dead,” says Nizamuddin, the regional information officer at Saidu Sharif.

Environmental concerns apart, tourism is also a lifeline for the local people employed by the hospitality industry. During the time when the plague of militancy subsided and the pandemic spread to scare away tourists, visitors had returned to Swat due to improved peace and security, including foreigners.

While tourists come and go, no more loyal to Swat and its environment than rats to a drowning ship, Swat and its people need them, more than ever, to help revive a shattered economy. With the threat of floods receding but militancy looming large, there is no telling if they will return.

There were no women outside the Madyan Hotel at Sangota early that October day, just a heaving crowd of grumbling, swearing men. Hundreds of them, pushing and pressing to be let into the hotel premises where food distribution was underway. From behind the low peripheral wall, a man exhorted the crowd on a public address system: “God gives rizq to all so let’s be gracious and follow the Islamic principle of kindness to our fellow beings. Please let in the women and the elderly — speengeeri, the greybeards — first.”

After the flood, the TanzeemAkhun Khel Qaumi Ittehad, a community organisation of the Akhun Khel, a Pashtun tribe, put together a list with three categories. The mutaasireen are those left without fields and sources of income in the wake of the flood. The sailabwahalay, with damaged property, have been helped the most. The mustahiqeen are the general poor and the unemployed, more affected by the conditions in the wake of the flood than the flood itself. The mustahiqeen, like the men gathered outside the gate, get what is left.

“People from all over the country have been in touch to help the flood affected in Swat,” says Mian Gufranullah Tajik, a volunteer social worker at the food distribution in Madyan Hotel. In evidence is this spirit of help in Swat itself, where the owners of the hotel, an old sprawling structure dating back to the days of Wali of Swat, have thrown open their lawns and gardens for food distribution.

Close to the lawn, where aid workers are placing food packages in long lines, sit a knot of waiting women. They have come from Jopeen, Qandeel and Ingarabad — villages where the flood has inflicted extensive damage.

Tajik says the mustahiqeen, even though deserving due to the widespread poverty, were not directly hit by the disaster. They gather and create chaos at the distribution sites. “Maintaining order is key to equitable distribution,” he says.

Swat, its poverty and relentless disasters, as much as they keep life in an ongoing state of precariousness, also turn the valleys, into a “sea”— to borrow from Helga Baitenmann’s paper “NGOs and the Afghan Jihad: The Politicisation of Humanitarian Aid”— for all shades of “fish” to “swim” in, be it a state with a penchant for necropolitics, self-serving political parties or militants and their sympathisers. Often under the garb of humanitarian assistance, seemingly engaged in “life-sustaining” activities, but in pursuit of objectives that could well be construed as “life-taking”.

As observed in disasters in the past, active among those offering aid in Swat are political and religious groups and their local affiliates. While the flood-affected population and the poor could do with help regardless of who offers it, these groups are known to turn disasters into opportunity for proselytising. Some insist they would only help their own constituency, the followers of their own party or “path”. Others direct more resources towards aid as a “preaching effort” than focusing on those in real need.

“They cash in on the tragedy to publicise themselves,” says a resident of Madyan town. “Where they give 500 rupees to a flood-affected family, 5,000 goes to those who are not, though poor. The population is targeted to create sympathies for one group or another. The flood-affected population is not huge. Their lives can be rebuilt through a focused relief effort. If there is no self-promotion, no discrimination, no chaos created by followers of a certain group because they think only they have the right to assistance from that group, their needs can be fully met.”

On a Friday in early October, when shops in the sprawling Mingora Bazaar were closed, the poor and the flood-affected had gathered around an aid-distribution truck in Green Chowk, lined up to receive aid brought by a religious group.

The fact that, during the Swat insurgency of 2007-2009, a number of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leadership were linked to religious groups and parties in Pakistan who either refused to criticise the Taliban or stayed silent about their activities, lends a sad irony to the sight. Especially when one considers how the aid distribution is happening at a traffic intersection where, every morning, the TTP displayed corpses of people summarily executed and where they killed Shabana, a local female artist, heralding an occupation marked by brutal and bloody oppression.

Among all this, there is the matter of human dignity, often a casualty of disasters, neglected by donors “who throw packets of biscuits at desperate crowds, creating chaos with desperate people fighting each other for crumbs,” says one man who had come to receive aid at Madyan Hotel.

“They provide us assistance while stripping us of dignity. For a kilo of sugar, I am forced to take on the garb of one group or another. From one day to another, I am a follower of [Tehreek-i-] Labbaik, of PTI [Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf], of this group and that party, just so that I can access aid.”

The itch is maddening. It is old, perhaps as ancient as the dust, as disaster itself. Your acquaintance with it goes back decades; it comes to you as a constant, like the seemingly perpetual cycle of conflicts, disasters and displacements haunting the region.

From the forcibly evacuated Afghan refugee camps in Peshawar’s suburbs, on whose ruins were built IDP [Internally Displaced Persons] camps for the displaced of the former FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas], to the tent villages in Hazara and Kashmir in the wake of in the 2005 earthquake, where it was as rampant as the stink of death from the mouldering carcasses of cattle entombed under collapsed roofs.

You encountered it again, in the camps of Jalala and Jalozai, where millions displaced from Swat, from Mohmand, Bajaur and Khyber had found refuge from militancy. And later in Bakakhel, that pit of snakes and scorpions in the burning plains of FR [Frontier Region] Bannu, built for the displaced of North Waziristan. Dirty children in camps and tent villages, standing and scratching themselves by the road, driven out of tents by power outages but finding no respite under the unrelenting sun of the plains.

Again and again, through disasters manmade and natural, you catch it, the itch; during the floods of 2010, the 2017 homelessness of Chota Datakhel, a tent village close to the district headquarters of Miranshah among the abandoned or occupied houses with cracked, mortar-blown and bullet-riddled walls standing tentatively. And now again, in 2022, it is here. Invisible but for the agony of the itch this dogged tormentor, following the displaced and the distressed, wherever they flee to safety and refuge.

Pin-pricks in the pores. Scattered scarlet prickles that recede as fast as they stab, on wrists and inner elbows. On the chest when exposed to heat, to sunlight. The warmth of woollies or a blanket. Then follows the full-blown itch, the rash of scabies that makes one want to scratch one’s skin off.

There is a boy here in Ingarabad, a village in the scenic Upper Swat region of Madyan, with a spade and a wheelbarrow, emptying a shop of sand. Having lost 120 houses to the flood, Ingarabad is an essay in the fury and destruction of floods. Reduced to messy piles of debris, it is a ghost of its former self, struggling to rise from under mounds of sand deposited in the houses and shops.

At the entrance to the village, huge rocks cleared away from its streets have been piled into a hill. Tons of water, yes, but it seems unfair somehow that the flood should bludgeon villages with rocks, leaving walls with gaping holes. The boy, beavering away in the shadows of his shop to clear the sand, stops and looks at you standing by the door. Warmed up by his labours, he scratches his wrists and elbows, raising his arms to reach his itching back. You know it is here, sarcoptesscabiei var. hominis, the human itch mite, lurking in the ruins of Ingarabad.

Boulders from the mountains and cracks in the land. Floods and earthquakes. Scabies and the squalor of crowded displacement. The men here would tell you that Swat is cursed because of sin. In mosques of Hazara and Kashmir, you heard the same refrain from clerics and religious groups after the 2005 quake, when they put up banners on roads proclaiming it.

Now you see them out again, some of them banned by authorities, motivated by duty to provide relief to fellow humans in distress, but equally by the opportunity to proselytise and convert the stricken poor of Swat to their cause through the optics of that relief. In repeating this refrain of disaster as penance for sin, in reinforcing this, they blame God, when they should be holding accountable the state, the leaders and bureaucracies, the governments, for natural disasters that could be averted through action, environmental or administrative.

And what about disasters manmade? The Sufi Mohammads and the Fazlullahs and the rising tide of militancy in Swat again? If disasters are a penance for the wicked ways of Swat, is Islamabad any less a den of sin, a capital less in need of shariah to restore it to piety? Are Lahore and Karachi urban paragons of piousness?

You look around at the ruin that is Ingarabad and wonder: If this be divine punishment, then nature is colluding with man to destroy Swat.

These days, the boys come here for picnics. They bring pots for cooking and, afterwards, bang them to make music. They dare you to climb up the sheer cliff at Jahanabad, with the Buddha carved on its face.

Among them is Abdullah from Mingora, neither a moderate nor an extremist. By choice. “If you are a roshankhayal (“enlightened moderate”) the Taliban come for you. If you are an extremist, it is the army,” he says with the cheekiness of a lad who knows his Swat.

The rock Buddha above him didn’t have a choice. It fell on the wrong side because it symbolised moderation in a place where, for a thousand years, people embraced the faith it represented and, when they didn’t, they accepted the statue as their historical heritage. Late one night in September 2007, the militants came here to warp the face of that heritage.

“They came in the night and said don’t be afraid, we won’t harm you,” says the man who lives on the mountain terrace by the brook where his daughter washes pots and fills water. “There were quite a few of them, standing on the roof of the house, along the road and the paths up the mountain. They said, ‘be quiet, don’t argue, go home and don’t come out’.”

The men came through the village of Manglawar below where, by the bridge, Sufi Mohammad of Tehreek-i-Nifaz-i-Shariah-i-Mohammadi (TNSM) had rallied men to march on Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001. Late that night, Parvaish Shaheen, a Buddhist scholar who lives in Mangalwar, had just dozed off on the sofa while reading a book. A high-pitched whine, that of a drill against the rock, startled him awake at 3am. “It was like a scream resounding in the dead of the night. And I knew they had come for the Buddha,” he says.

For 1,400 years, the statue had watched over wheat fields, autumnal orchids of the Japanese fruit persimmon and walnut trees, benignly surveying the valley of Jahanabad along the road to Malam Jabba. That night, they drilled a hole in the face of the 22-foot rock statue, filled it with explosives and left the sentinel above Jahanabad without a face.

The valley is at peace now, ablaze with shades of autumn. Above it, a restored Lord Buddha meditates in stony silence. Goats scurry along the mountain paths, where girls in bright shawls play house with dolls made out of rags. The man who lives below the cliff speaks with the resignation of old age and helplessness in the face of violence, bewildered at the way the world has turned out, but sure-footed in his response to it.

“I am not upset anymore, but for us here it is a matter of honour,” he says about the defaced Buddha, betraying both fear and loathing. “It was in our neighbourhood, entrusted to our protection. The idol doesn’t want anything from us, it doesn’t ask for food and drink. It doesn’t stop us from prayers. People say, if we destroy a place of worship here, or damage idols others hold in reverence, they will do the same to our worship places there.”

Aurangzaib Khan is a journalist based in Peshawar

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 30th, 2022