آزادی : Stateless in a Valley of Flags
I’m writing from Chitral, a valley cupped by the Hindu Kush where glaciers breathe, the river runs glacial green, and the bazaar still carries the cadences of many tongues. Once, people say, this was a thoroughfare of ideas and salt and wool; a frontier that behaved more like a meeting ground than a border. I’m tempted to romanticise that past—cosmopolitanism as folklore—but the present keeps tugging at my sleeve. It has a name and a face. Let’s call him Zakaria.
Zakaria was born here, raised here, and loved here by Afghan refugee parents from Badakhshan and Nuristan. He does not hold Pakistani nationality. He has no papers that wrap his life in official grammar. “My mother found me near our house,” he told me once, in that flat tone people use when a story has been told too many times to strangers with pens. I imagine the unanswered questions that wake him at night: the invisible ledger of sacrifice and small mercies, the way dislocation settles in the joints like old weather. He is brave and tender, stubborn and funny; I recognise in him the mountain’s stoicism and the river’s persistence. And yet, under everything, a frustration that trembles my heart.
We spend a day together. We walk through the bazaar where the scent of naan puffs around tandoors and the clang of blades at the poultry stalls keeps time. I remind him—though I shouldn’t have to—of the Afghan imprint in this valley’s everyday life: who kept the furnaces of bread going, who carved livelihoods out of exile, who taught some of us the discipline of starting again. The contributions are so ordinary they’ve become invisible. What remains too visible is suspicion.
It is a hard truth for some of my neighbours to hear. Educated friends, people who quote poetry and donate in Ramzan, will lower their voices and say the Afghans should go. They say it the way people mention a plan to re-tile a bathroom: inevitable, practical, neutral. There is a difference between geography and belonging, they argue, as if belonging were a certificate you laminated and slid into a wallet. The contempt isn’t even carefully hidden; it carries the easy confidence of majority comfort. And then where does that leave Zakaria, who for 27 years thought of Pakistan as his home?
We sit down for lunch. He unfurls the dastarkhwan with a practised flourish—the fabric a portable idea of family—and the room fills with the steam of rice and the sharpness of green chillies. I live alone in Chitral; he arrives like kin, filling a quiet that never announces itself as loneliness until it is lifted. We talk about stray dogs and work and the embroidery we want to design next. Then he mentions, lightly, the betrayals that have stained the last few years: friends who used him for favours, a landlord who decided foreigners should pay more, a clerk who promised a stamped letter and vanished. Betrayal is a big word, but it is often a series of small unkindnesses that add up to a verdict.
When I look at him, I feel an embarrassment that is both personal and political. The state has failed him—let’s call that what it is. But I have failed him, too, in the ordinary ways friendship sometimes does: my instinct to “fix” what requires a collective unlearning, my faith that paperwork is a puzzle rather than a prison, my habit of believing that if I make enough noise the right ears will eventually listen. He laughs at my plans. There is a kindness in his refusal to let me be the hero of his story.
Chitral is not what it is without people like him. The valley’s notion of “we” has never been tidy; it is a braid of tribes, languages and itinerant dreams. Cosmopolitanism was never the glamour of airports—it was and is the rough labour of living beside each other, sharing ovens and schools, knowing your neighbour’s grief. If you want to see a city’s ethics, look at how it treats the person whose documents are a question mark.
On 14 August, Pakistan celebrates 78 years of independence. The flags are already everywhere—green cutting into blue sky, white doves stitched into bunting by a machine that hums without shame. “Azadi,” we say, freedom, a word I love because it tastes of possibility and prayer. But freedom for whom? The poet Faiz taught us to distrust celebrations that do not widen the circle. Independence that breeds exclusion isn’t a revolution; it’s a mirror we’re scared to look into.
There is a policy argument to be made here, and it should be made clearly: create a path to citizenship for long-term residents who were born or raised here, who have invested their labour and love in this country. Stop punishing the stateless by design. Make documentation a duty of the administration, not a maze for the desperate. Protect mixed families instead of rendering them perpetually provisional. None of this is radical; it is basic housekeeping for a republic that claims to value dignity.
But there is also a cultural argument, which is perhaps more urgent: end the easy habit of suspicion. Refuse the jokes, the conspiracies, the whispered boasts of having had someone “removed.” Teach our children that home is a practice, not an inheritance. Admit that fear has made cowards of many of us, and that prejudice wears the costume of prudence because we let it. We are a country already frayed by earthquakes and floods; our social fabric cannot afford the extra tear of authorised cruelty.
I keep returning to one small scene. After lunch, Zakaria clears the dishes and sets a kettle on the stove. He tells me about a dream he had: he was crossing a bridge at night and the planks began to vanish behind him with each step, the river roaring underneath. “I kept walking,” he says, matter-of-fact. I don’t know if I can save my friend. That sentence sits like a stone in the mouth. But I can bear witness; I can demand that the state I love acts like the nation it claims to be. And I can say to my own community in Chitral: we are not who we think we are unless we learn to stand beside the people, we have made precarious.
Outside, the wind lifts the flags strung from rooftop to rooftop. Their snap sounds like applause; it also sounds like warning. Freedom is not a ceremony. It is the quiet, daily decision to widen the table, to grant the paper, to answer the door without suspicion, to let a life that began in uncertainty find a future with certainty. In a valley that once taught the world how to meet, we can do that. We must.