One Nation Under Water
KARACHI, Pakistan—In this part of the world, the monsoon is feted, greeted with song and dance, enshrined in poetry, featured in romantic fantasy. A celebratory menu even exists for the season: in the cities, vegetables deep-fried in chickpea-flour batter, corn on the cob roasted over glowing embers; in the villages, mushrooms stir-fried with fenugreek, spiced slow-cooked lotus roots; and everywhere, mangoes. In rural Pakistan, the monsoon rains are a lifeline. But this year, they brought death, devastation, and disease.
Floods from the torrential rains caused rivers, canals, and lakes to overflow; wiped out entire villages; inundated highways; devastated millions of acres of crops; and made millions of people homeless. We ran out of adjectives to describe the rainfall: unprecedented, incessant, epic, biblical, apocalyptic. We ran out of intelligible numbers to capture the predicament: 15 inches of rain in a day; 44,000 square miles of land flooded; two fathoms of water over towns, homes, and schools; nearly 1,700 dead; some 33 million people affected. And now, after a brief spell of international interest, we are running out of attention.
The spectacular images of people and animals being saved from drowning and people fleeing homes carrying possessions in bundles on their head are past. The tempestuous velocity of water, the menacing
