A walk in the park

It is early Sunday morning in Fatima Jinnah Park. Washed by the rain, the air is cool. The park glows a while in the saffron light of the early sun. Walkers stroll unhurried in its rising light. Joggers jog. Crows peck at the trash cans. Pigeons coo in nearby trees. Well-groomed dogs take their keepers for a walk.

You see and hear this daily – the interactions of flora, and fauna as you ramble along the park’s grounds.

Fatima Jinnah Park is an extraordinary place: a seven-hundred-and-fifty-acre paradise. In terms of scale, it is twice as big as Moscow’s Gorky Park, and almost a match for New York’s Central Park.

Now that it has had four decades to establish itself its built structures have blended into the landscape. It has become an urban oasis, a small-scale ecological victory, the city’s cooling mechanism. Its winding paths and manicured hedges create a breathtaking setting: along one path in its northern corner is a jacaranda neighbourhood which lights up in April with brilliant purple flowers.

The trees grow bigger and better as they age. Their canopies, now fifty feet or more across, give enough shade for a small village and plentiful perches for birds. Amidst the jacarandas is a string of tall yuccas, guarding over them like sentinels. Nearby is a clump of magnolias – the attention grabbers during May since their flowers are so richly scented. The bougainvillea have climbed up trees along the children’s enclave, making a visual barrier with a collage of vibrant orange, crimson, and white flowers.

But not all parts of the park are so poetic.

The sewage of people living upstream ruins a once-idyllic nullah dividing the park. The stench hovers over it like an invisible cloud. When you go near it, a constellation of insects surrounds you. Like the city’s other nullahs, it is filthy flowing water reeking with waste and undoubtedly, a rich source of diseases downstream and upstream.

We need legislation like the American Clean Water Act of 1972 to stop sewage discharges into our nullahs, set water quality standards, clean up our waters nationwide, and make them swimmable and fishable. And we need a big dose of citizen activism, and parliamentary attention to tell the polluters enough is enough.

Otherwise, the Fatima Jinnah Park has a clean, spiffy look despite large spaces left to their devices, which is a boon. It’s good to be left alone. The left-to-their-devices spaces are wild, enchanting accidental gardens, with hardy plants and biodiverse, having no planting scheme, and zero maintenance – a slice of what this place would look like had we not colonized it and called it Islamabad. Here trees, waist-high grasses, and wild bushes are in charge. In the rotting woods and decaying leaves are plentiful wildflowers.

It’s a fine place to anchor for a while and spend your spare time: away from the daily churning, and chaos of neighbours, clamour of road anarchy, inescapable skirmishes with reckless drivers, and tyrannizing motorcyclists whizzing like guided missiles on roads, footpaths, and everywhere else.

The wheels roll along the park’s borders, where traffic unceasingly pounds day and night. But inside Fatima Jinnah Park, it is calm – an ideal place to walk and engage in an inner dialogue, think through problems, and contend with the anger and sadness you may feel about the times. Or, air your plentiful grievances (to yourself), cauterize your psychic wounds, imagined or real, unravel the mysteries of national politics, refine your thoughts into hypotheses, and draw them out in op-ed articles for The News.

As you do so, you have uninterrupted views of Margalla Hills. While they remain the same, the city below keeps changing. Like many cities, Islamabad is ‘a growing fusion of hope and despair’. And though not yet a Titan of cities like Karachi or Lahore, it is a melting pot like them taking in escapees from stricken landscapes of KP, Galiyat, Azad Kashmir, southern Punjab, interior Sindh, and Afghanistan seeking opportunity and wealth. Moving to the city is their first step ‘to getting filthy rich in rising’ Pakistan.

As migrants pour in, Islamabad expands. Expanding skyward along Fatima Jinnah Park’s southern face gives the city its majestic skyline. Expanding outward, north-west towards Taxila, and south-east towards Rewat, gives it muscle. The high-rise buildings and new homes are symbols of prosperity, and wealth howsoever acquired.

But urban expansion has dire consequences: the concrete infrastructures, roads, and pathways uproot and demolish natural habitats and raise the temperature. Trees counter these harmful environmental effects, filter greenhouse gases, cool the surrounding concrete jungles, and improve our quality of life. This means we need more trees and parks like the Fatima Jinnah Park.

A lot of good can happen in any city when civic authorities recognize parks as a vital civic infrastructure and public good.

The writer is a freelance contributor. He can be reached at: Khwaja.Sarmad@gmail.com