"Too much, it is simply too much," thinks a security guard at the magnificent but rundown Shahi Qila. He cocks his head to a side and then guesses that the population of Pakistan is roughly 25 crores. "Every year more and more people come to see what Akbar built 400 years ago and I can see that the population is growing, so it must be at least 25 crores by now."

The man selling pink, white and yellow candy floss on sharp sticks that I suspect are later used by tourists to graffiti the fort’s walls, agrees with the guesstimate. His logic is different though. He reaches this conclusion because the last time he heard anyone talk about the population was during the 2011 election, and if it was 18 crore then, it should have grown to 25 crores by now.

A guardian of the fort says he heard on a television talk show that the population may have swollen to 28 crores. A school teacher visiting from Islamabad who rides the train with me around one-fourth of the circumference of the new Greater Iqbal Park is shy to answer at first. She says she gets confused by numbers. I (lie and) tell her there is no wrong answer. She ventures 35 crores. The man who yells at me to cover my head before entering the courtyard of Badshahi Mosque also wages in the ballpark of 30 crore.

There are some modest guesses as well. The man selling fizzy drinks and chips outside Jahangir’s tomb thinks we should be a population of roughly 22 crores. He says that "since the PML-N is in power, things are going well and the population is growing at a good rate. The government is good to us, so we are good to them".

I am left confused by his explanation but the next customer, a young girl who is too shy to respond, looks at the teenage male accompanying her -- a brother perhaps. He says he has no idea. I ask them to list the provinces of Pakistan, to see if they really don’t know or are they too shy to speak to me. "Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan," he says.

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I leave and walk up to the man who has been guarding Jahangir’s tomb for 14 years. He thinks for a milli-second and then says, 20-21 crores. His explanation is that populations grow, but with all the bomb blasts and bad hospitals that keep killing people we couldn’t have grown too much from our last count at ‘18 crores’.

Two young women who have brought six small children to Liberty Market to buy shoes for all of them say that I should ask men these questions. "Hundred thousand lakhs," shouts one of young girls from their family.

Close enough, I think and move on to a bangle seller. He says he reads the paper daily, and hence he’s confident the census will reveal about 30 crores. An old woman, selling bobby pins, says she will tell me only if I buy her pins. I comply and receive an answer of 20 crores and a fresh packet of much-needed hair pins.

On social media, friends laugh and joke about our population, "Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s more than India’s. #pakisatanzindabad." Another says he’s confident it’s at least 200 million because we can’t possibly be lesser than the population of Uttar Pradesh. A third cleverly says, "Different sources give different figures. Lekin un main unnees bees ka farak hai".

Apart from learning that the results of the census will be exciting and eye-opening for many of us, during the survey I am also forced to revise some of our pre-conceived notions. These include that our men never falter to answer a question, our women, shrouded in self-doubt, rarely fail to double guess themselves and our children barely know anything.

Unlike the men who answer loudly, many of the women first smile and then say they have no idea, that they don’t read the paper much. After much coaxing they eventually, softly whisper a number. As for the children and teenagers, only a few were able to respond. Out of those, none of them came close to what we expect the census to reveal.

A teenager playing cricket in one of the lawns under Nawaz Sharif Interchange grew excited by the question, he asks me for pen and paper, which I supply to him. After scribbling down some numbers, making a multiplication and addition sign and a sign I can’t decipher he declares: 67 crores. I don’t wait for an explanation about how he reached that number -- I think by then I understood that the problem lies in our population, whether we know its number or not.