KARACHI: The balloon man fills up one shiny pink foil balloon after another until there are 50 of them. “They are for a baby girl not yet born,” says Imran Ali, the balloon man, laughingly as he goes about his work at the main point of the gas balloon sellers at the KPT underpass in Clifton. “The gas balloons have a five to six day life so hopefully the baby would be born before that,” he says as the driver of the car which had come for the balloons pays him Rs2,500 as he himself struggles to fit all of them into the vehicle.

The place in Clifton where the balloon sellers do business is one of the two major balloon markets in the city, the other one being the Bahadurabad roundabout, where they are only in the evening. At Clifton, they are from morning till evening. The most popular balloons these days are the foil balloons. The favourite shape is the star but during February, especially the days around Valentine’s Day, the entire place is full of shiny red hearts.

Meanwhile, a few feet away, Aslam Malik fills gas into green rubber balloons with white polka dots. “The balloons are for a kid’s birthday party and I’m only filling them. The balloons they brought themselves. I’m only filling them with gas for them,” explains the man who owns Super Communication that arranges jumping castles, slides, etc at children’s events and decorates stages and shopping malls.

“The jumping castles and slides,” he says, are filled with air with a pump, of course, but the balloons look nice floating upwards.”

The gas, the balloon man insists, is helium. But it is hydrogen of course when he says that they prepare it themselves by mixing caustic soda with water and aluminium powder.

Mohammad Hafeez, who also sells gas balloons at Clifton, says that it is not very dangerous as they are very careful. “See, we have these sturdy cylinders for holding the gas in. They are made from pipes of ships coming for breaking at Gadani,” he says. “Then if we realise we have gone wrong somewhere in preparing the gas, we release it into the air to release pressure.”

Just then someone asking for some balloons lit a cigarette while he waited. It was time to run and take cover!

Published in Dawn, November 30th, 2014