Water Pressure

In the middle of the summer of 2024, when the temperature in Karachi was skirting 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a man was walking past my paternal aunt’s house. The sun was high in the sky at midafternoon, and he had just returned from offering his afternoon prayers at the nearby mosque. He did this every Friday, the holiest day of the week for Muslims, and the day on which the week’s main sermon is held. When he passed by my aunt’s home, he saw that water was overflowing out of her underground tank and onto the street. This annoyed him a great deal. Water envy is common in Karachi, a city that doesn’t have enough water for its twenty million or more inhabitants. Water comes through the municipal pipes for only an hour or two each day and sometimes not at all. Many homes that are not apartments have underground tanks in which water from the pipes can be stored. In most ­single-family homes, including my aunt’s, water must then be pumped to an overhead tank on the roof so it can flow out of the faucets.

When the man saw water coming out of the underground tank and onto the street, he knew it meant that the underground tank must be full. Such water abundance in such heat was a bit too much for him to bear on his own, so he stood there calling out for someone to complain to about the terrible waste of water. No one emerged from the house. My paternal aunt is a widow, and even if she did hear him on that scorching afternoon, she chose not to come out and listen to what he had to say. In general, women in Pakistan do not answer the door for men they aren’t related to. However, in his frenzy, the man seemed to have forgotten this. Even though his home was just a few houses farther down the street, he had great trouble obtaining water. It irked him that this was, by chance, less of a problem for my aunt. There was nothing he could do about the water that was flowing out onto the street, but he complained about the situation to anyone who would listen, which meant mainly to his wife.

A few weeks went by and the temperature in the city would not relent. Pakistan, which contributes less than 1 percent to global carbon emissions, is now listed by the Climate Risk Index as the country most vulnerable to climate change. The average temperatures have risen by several degrees to create almost uninhabitable conditions—­except that millions of people do inhabit Karachi. The dense population, the proliferation of concrete surfaces, and the fumes from millions of gas- and diesel-­burning vehicles make the temperatures in some areas, including the one my aunt lives in, several degrees higher than those near the shore. There are few trees and almost no shade, and these facts—combined with the lack of water with which to cool oneself and the frequent power outages that have long plagued the city—mean that midafternoons in summer are hotter than hell itself.

One day not long after that sweltering Friday afternoon, so hot that even birds would not fly, this man—who is the sort of vigilante that retired men of a certain age can be—passed by my aunt’s house again. He was stunned to see that, yet again, water was flowing out of the underground tank and onto the street’s parched asphalt. If last time he had been annoyed at seeing this largesse of water, this time he was angered. In the past week, no water had flowed into his own tank at all. By Thursday the lack of water in his home had become so acute that he had had to purchase a private water tanker in order to shower and do household tasks like laundry and dishwashing. The tanker had not arrived until 9 p.m. the previous evening, an hour by which he would have liked to have been settled in front of the television. As a result, he was cross not only about having to spend money—something he truly disliked—but also about having his routine thrown into disarray.

All this exacerbated his indignation, added to which was the fact that he felt he “deserved” the water more. Why, after all, should a reclusive widow’s home be blessed with such a bounty of water when he was being denied his fair share? This time he decided he would not leave until he could deliver his own sermon on waste to the homeowner, loud enough for all the other neighbors to hear. For this to be possible, he needed someone to answer the door. Standing on the street, as the rivulets eddied around his sandals, he began calling out and ringing the doorbell. He would not, he resolved, leave until and unless someone responded to him.

Ten and then twenty minutes passed as he pressed hard on the bell, hearing its muffled ring tearing through the inside of the house. No one responded and no one came to the door. He was not deterred, the wet waterway from house to street feeding his sense of noble perseverance. Still, there was silence. Other men from the neighborhood who were also returning from the mosque passed by and offered silent greetings. He tried to enlist at least one of them to stand with him in his valiant cause, pointing to the water, the waste, but the men just nodded and kept walking. This was a widow’s home, and if she was being blessed with an abundance of water, they likely concluded, then who were they to tell her what to do with it?

Over half an hour passed and no one responded. Then he heard footsteps and shuffling behind the front door of the house. Ha! He congratulated himself prematurely, preparing the first few sentences of his homily. The door opened, but prior to any words leaving his mouth, he felt a small rock graze his elbow. Before he was able to overcome his surprise, he felt another. He soon realized the rocks were coming from inside the house. He cowered, and then moved away. And without having said anything at all, he had to turn around and leave.

I heard about this incident on a day in November 2024. It was still very hot in Karachi then, around 95 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. Karachi has never had real “winters,” though when I was growing up, temperatures in November used to be at least nine degrees cooler. The evening hour had arrived, but the breeze that blew over the porch of my maternal grandmother’s house, which was only a couple of miles from our own, was still warm. My maternal aunt told me the story. She had heard it through the snakes and ladders by which gossip travels in Karachi. The man who was jealous of her water supply had told his wife, who had told another of my maternal aunts, who had then told the aunt who was relaying it to me.

It was my paternal aunt who had thrown rocks at the man. She had never been one to suffer moralizing interlopers gladly, and this man, considered annoying by most of the neighborhood, had received exactly what he deserved, she decided. Her water was not his business, and his persistent harassment of a widow in her late seventies made him the guilty party. Throughout her life, she had often become the unwitting and unhappy subject of neighborhood gossip. If people talked about her now because she had thrown rocks at a man who annoyed her, they could go right ahead.

It is perhaps also true that heat and envy, and the unrelenting nature of both during a Karachi summer, can make you act in wild, reckless, and unpredictable ways. My aunt has never been a violent woman. As a matter of fact, she is usually subdued, and she eventually became reclusive.

Most of the research on climate-­influenced mood disorders has been done in the West, and largely on white subjects. Everyone knows about the winter blues caused by freezing temperatures, which are a regular part of life in the rich and temperate areas of the world. Less, of course, is said about the summer furies that plague people in places like Karachi.

The little research that has been done has shown that older adults in fast-heating environments like Karachi are especially vulnerable to mood disorders. One 2021 report found that there was a 2.2 percent increase in mental-health-related mortality and a 0.9 percent increase in mental-health morbidity for every 1.8-degree-­Fahrenheit increase in temperature. This study found that these effects are even more acute for people over the age of sixty-­five who live in tropical and subtropical climates.

Temperatures in Karachi have shown sharp increases since 2018. A report published in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn in September 2024 quoted a Karachi woman, who pointed out exactly why: “After working all day, our walks back home used to be pleasant as a gentle breeze would blow from the sea. Now, high-rise buildings around our neighborhood have hemmed us in a hot bubble where it is difficult to even breathe.” This is exactly what has happened in my aunt’s neighborhood. The street she lives on is surrounded by what is now a busy commercial area. The main road adjacent to her formerly sleepy side street has a huge banquet hall, high-rises, restaurants, and other local businesses, all of which release exhaust fumes and carbon dioxide.

A study on the growth of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, revealed that its surface area increased from 257 square miles to 276 square miles between 2015 and 2023, an average growth rate of 13.35 percent over those eight years. All uninhabited land, whether agricultural or vacant, has been swallowed up by the concrete jungle. This in turn creates a bubble effect, officially named an “urban heat island” (UHI). UHIs are essentially microclimates created within densely populated cities where heat becomes trapped and has nowhere to go. Roadways, concrete surfaces, and industrial and transportation activities all have thermal properties that amplify the warming. Add to this the fact that high-rises and commercial establishments like those that have popped up around my aunt’s street use air-­conditioning units. As if the heat were not enough, these buildings release hot air directly into the outside air, making it still hotter.

This contrasts with areas of the city that still have parks and vegetation, and that are spared from urban sprawl because they are either home to the very wealthy or maintained by the country’s all-powerful armed forces (which have their own supply of water). Last summer, when the incident with the rocks occurred, the concrete- and asphalt-ridden areas where houses are close together were shown to be much hotter than those areas near the ocean that boast palatial mansions encircled by green spaces and military bases with sprawling colonial-style lawns. Overall, the temperatures recorded in June 2024 in Karachi were the hottest the city had experienced since 2015, when a historic and punishing heat wave killed thousands of people.

Then there are the politics of water, whose accessibility is intertwined with the experience of living in a hot and furious city. Insight into the mechanics of water supply in Karachi can underscore how the climate crisis has begun to weave through the city’s web of human relationships. In some areas, for example, the main city water-supply lines don’t automatically supply water to homes on side streets. At my father’s house, where I was born and raised, water must be suctioned from the main lines into the underground tank. 

The problem is that no one knows when there is water in the city lines, so the suction pump must be turned on at various hours to test if there is anything to pull up. Figuring out when water can be sucked in and stored has thus been one of my father’s central preoccupations during his retirement years. When my mother was alive, one of the most frequent questions I heard them ask each other was “Did the water come?” Whoever was indoors did the asking, and whoever was outdoors did the answering. If the answer was yes, there were exclamations of satisfaction, and if not, expressions of consternation. Full tanks meant water security, and empty ones meant nagging uncertainty.

In summer this game of pulling in water became even more stressful. On many occasions, my father, who is a light sleeper and often wakes in the middle of the night, would use that groggy moment of broken sleep at 3 or 4 a.m. to go outside, walk all the way over to the underground water tank, open its heavy cast iron lid, and turn on the pump to see if water was being sucked in. If it was, he could not go back to sleep right away, or else the pump would keep running even after the water ceased to flow. The motor could then overheat, and the pump would burn out. A burned-out pump meant there would be no way to get any water at all. If the pump did not yield anything, however, worries set in about when the water would come.

These pump games, as I call them, are strategies of the middle-class. There are millions of people who live in tiny apartments and do not have private underground tanks. Sometimes these densely packed neighborhoods are not supplied with water for days, completely disrupting any semblance of normal life. Unlike the wealthy, the poor cannot purchase private water tankers to solve the problem and so are often forced to share single kitchens and bathrooms with multiple generations of family members, and are unable able to regularly wash dishes, flush toilets, or wash themselves.

For this, the residents of these areas blame what they refer to as Karachi’s “water mafia.” According to them, the Karachi Water and Sewage Corporation (the municipal board whose job it is to supply water to the city) is selling the water it should be providing to residents through city water lines to the operators of private tankers instead. These private tankers then capitalize on the plight of citizens who have been deprived of water for days by making them purchase the water they should have received from the government for free. The tanker mafia not only sells to citizens what it has stolen from them, it also is responsible for water price hikes during periods of intense heat, which in Karachi last for many months.

Those who cannot afford the pricey clean water are sold polluted water. No one knows the source of this polluted water, though it is sometimes rumored to be wastewater. Depending on one’s level of desperation, ignorance is sometimes better than knowledge. Consumption of this water has led to disease outbreaks, but because the heat also leads to disease outbreaks, it is difficult to assess which can be attributed to which cause. Many Karachi residents, however, do not have the luxury of asking questions about safety and potability. Even dirty water may be more welcome than the stench of waste stopping up toilets and of bodies ripe with sweat and odor.

In 2024, a new form of protest against the tanker mafia took hold. Residents of an area of the city that had not received water for over a week came out onto a major thoroughfare, where they waited for and then began to hijack tankers. The drivers, scared of the mob, soon absconded. Young men in the crowd opened the taps on the tankers, flooding the highways and disrupting traffic. When news crews arrived at the scene, the rioters explained that for days they had been contacting city councilors, representatives to provincial parliament, and anyone else that could have come to their aid. Nobody had responded, and in the meantime, their children were getting sick from the lack of hygiene, bacteria and viruses adhering to their soft, sticky bodies.

This form of tanker hijacking has become more and more prevalent in recent months. In late December 2024, the Karachi police began to register cases against the hijackers. The police in Karachi are also notoriously corrupt, and not at all invulnerable to being paid off by the very mafia that the hijackers are protesting. For its part, the Karachi Water and Sewage Corporation seems adamant about simply denying the widespread nature of the problem. In a statement made to a news organization after the registration of rioting cases began, one spokesperson from the municipality insisted that an “uninterrupted water supply” had been restored to all the localities whose parched residents were revolting on city streets.

It is not only water that Karachi thirsts for. Electricity has become just as elusive in the past two decades, even while many of the country’s other urban areas enjoy an uninterrupted supply. When I was growing up in Karachi, and electricity had yet to become such a precious resource, a power outage was a rare and exciting event. The sudden disappearance of all light in the middle of an otherwise ordinary activity, such as a weeknight dinner, gave everything an air of specialness. One moment our family was sitting down to eat rice and fish curry, and within minutes the regular meal was transformed into a mysterious and thus fun candlelight feast. The shadows, the darkened house, the candlelit table, the unusualness of it all—it was a treat. In those days, the power would be out for barely half an hour before coming back on. The last fun bit was blowing out the candles—something we otherwise got to do only on birthdays—­and watching the plumes of smoke dissipate as the ordinary world was restored.

This changed a few years later, as the ’80s slipped into the ’90s. Power outages became more frequent, and a headache. In a telling counterpoint, this was also the time when my family was able to afford our very first air conditioner. It was installed in my parents’ bedroom on a momentous day that came only after workmen had smashed a hole in the concrete of which our two-story house was made. Once the air conditioner was set up and the edges around it filled in with plaster, we finally experienced the incredible magic of air-conditioning. It did truly feel like magic. A few hours after turning on this new appliance, my parents’ usually hot and uncomfortable bedroom (it bore the brunt of the afternoon sun) was transformed into a cold and relaxing haven. Like most middle-class families, we could at that time afford only one air conditioner, which meant that we kids, who had only just started to sleep in our own room, now spent nights in the deliciously cool air of our parents’ bedroom.

But with great ease came great discomfort. The power outages that became more frequent around that time, in part because of air conditioners, felt particularly onerous when they happened at night. Nothing was worse than walking from the bedroom onto the first-floor balcony—it was like stepping into an oven. But staying in the room with the air conditioner, where all the windows were shuttered to keep the air in, also felt suffocating.

My brother and I often chose the balcony over the bedroom with its closed windows. From the first floor, we could watch how our neighbors were dealing with the outage. If we saw the kids from across the street pile into their car and leave, we felt jealous and terribly sorry for ourselves, because our father would never think of doing that. Often, he tried hard to sleep during the outage, but even if he was awake, he never (unlike our mother) joined us on the balcony. Bitten again and again by mosquitoes who must have loved that our flesh was now so easily available to them late at night, we waited for the moment when the power would return and our neighbors’ houses would suddenly light up.

As the mid-’90s approached, that wait got longer. We started to call the outages “load shedding,” which meant that the city’s electric grid could not meet consumer demand. Nearly every summer night, the outages did not just interrupt sleep but often occurred earlier in the evening. If you happened to be studying for an exam, you had better have a flashlight and batteries on hand, because working by candlelight was difficult if not impossible. Exam season now brought the trepidation of not only the tests themselves but outages that might last hours and leave one in poor shape to do a good job.

My father probably suffered the most from all this uncertainty. While the inconvenience of studying for tests without electricity was considerable, my father had to be at his job at eight in the morning, taking meetings and making presentations all day long. The late evening and night were precious, since they were the only times he was at home. Of course, we never thought then about how the outages that so often took up these hours likely incurred a much bigger cost for him than for any of the rest of us; we just grumbled when he asked us to open the shutters that had been closed while the air conditioner was running. As it was for millions of other men and women in the city, the demands of the encroaching workday would not go away just because there had been no electricity the night before.

One outage changed our neighborhood dynamics forever. It happened in the summer and lasted for days. The food in the deep freezer threatened to go bad, its ice melting into puddles of water on the kitchen floor. All our food had to be taken to my maternal grandmother’s house, where there was still power. The lack of electricity meant that the water in our underground tank could not be pumped into the tank on the roof. So to flush the toilets upstairs, water had to be taken from the underground tank and brought through the yard and up the house’s two flights of stairs. On one such trip, I slipped on water that had sloshed out of the plastic bucket I was carrying. For days, my shins and knees were covered in spectacular bruises. It was around then that we learned to continually call the electric company to complain about the outage. The local office, which was just a block from our house, seemed to deal with this by taking its phones off the hook so we would encounter a perpetual busy signal.

Many of our neighbors took things into their own hands. The large business family that lived behind our house and whose children were permitted to stay up a lot later than we ever were (we knew this because we sometimes heard them playing in their yard when we were brushing our teeth) obtained a large diesel generator. Now the pain of not having power was heightened by the fact that, if the bedroom windows were open, we could hear the loud, incessant drone of this machine, which felt very much like a dentist’s drill boring into our temples.

Within a few years, the generator trend had become so popular that our neighbors on each side of the house had procured one. When we walked onto the balcony to brave another evening of high temperatures with humidity levels above 90 percent, we now also had to endure a domino effect of generators, which were constantly being upgraded to ever-larger capacities. As if this wasn’t awful enough, seeing the lights and fans coming back on in their houses was worse. They were comfortable indoors and had little concern that the noise of their diesel-guzzling contraptions was making life unbearable for our family.

My father still refuses to get a generator. By 2000, my brother and I had both moved to the United States. Two and a half decades later, this refusal has, in some ways, torn our family apart. In the States, we set about establishing careers and families abroad even as our hearts remained in overheating Karachi. We got used to water in our faucets and a largely uninterrupted power supply. We also got used to a more temperate rather than a subtropical climate. We left behind the disorder and frustration of a city where no one seemed to have enough, where the heat ensured that people were always in a bad mood, where obtaining water and power required a constant struggle.

We also became wealthier. When we were little, in order to save money, the air conditioner could be turned on only after 9 p.m. and was never allowed to stay on after 6 a.m. Now, our incomes earned in dollars meant that we no longer felt like we had to heed these strict rules when we visited Karachi. Around the time of my brother’s wedding in 2009, this led to a big family showdown.

The wedding and weeks-long festivities that preceded and succeeded it were to be held in Karachi. What would be the first of many climate-related fights between my father and brother took place over the couple’s decision to have their wedding in July, in the middle of summer and the unpredictable monsoon season. My brother had forgotten what summer in Karachi was like, my father bellowed. He had forgotten the water problems, the electricity problems, and all the other problems that were caused by the combination of those problems.

For his part, my brother insisted with equal obstinacy that the “problems” were all in my father’s head and could be solved by throwing money at them. He wanted to install a high-­capacity generator. He wanted to install several additional split-unit air conditioners. He would make sure that water could be delivered by private tankers, and he wanted to make plumbing updates and repairs so that he and his wife could take showers in the upstairs bathrooms.

This response only made my father dig in his heels. Shouting matches erupted over the telephone as my brother threatened not to spend any of his time at the house at all, which sent my mother—who saw my brother’s wedding as a dream come true—into a near nervous breakdown. My father had little compassion. The house belonged to him. No one would install new air conditioners or showers or diesel generators without his permission.

I felt stuck in the middle. My brother in his ebullient mood wanted to pull out all the stops. In marrying someone who had initially been introduced to him by our parents, he felt he had already fulfilled all the obligations of an obedient son. He saw himself as the new “man of the house” and felt he could ignore the constraints my father put on him. One of his tactics was to make a change—such as purchasing a microwave for the kitchen—and then to leave to go hang out with his fiancée at her parents’ house. My mother, paternal grandmother, and I would be left at home to bear the brunt of my father’s rage. If we did not bear it quietly, as I refused to at least once, it only fed his eruptions. “I am going to throw this microwave in the trash right now,” he threatened over and over again in the hours after it had been installed. He had it uninstalled and put on a table outside the kitchen. Eventually, my brother would return in a great mood, but we, after tolerating a conflagration all day long, would be sullen and morose. This annoyed him. “Why can’t you be happy for me?” he would demand.

During the wedding in July, the mood between my parents and my brother was still tense. The sole concession my father had made was to permit the installation of a large-­capacity air conditioner in the room where my brother would stay. The bathroom was fixed up and the existing shower repaired to the extent possible. These were not at all the modernizing renovations my brother had hoped for, which would have equipped the house with the workarounds that most affluent Karachiites were accustomed to. Yet for my father, it was not a matter of cost; it was a matter of respect—for his rules and for the value of money.

The monsoon hit the day before the wedding, when the henna ceremony is hosted by the bride’s family. As if on cue, the power at our house went out and the streets of the city flooded, as they do every time there is a downpour. My father felt smug. My brother decamped to his wife’s family’s home. My mother wept the entire time he was away. For her, this was not a weather event but a metaphor for having lost the son she loved, whose affections were now forever usurped by his new wife.

If my brother was home and there was no power, he glowered; this being his told-you-so moment. To him, the fact that my father would not permit the installation of a generator that would so obviously make life more bearable for his parents, even after the wedding was over, was absurd. He had a retort for each of my father’s qualms, such as my father’s quibble that he did not want to be responsible for turning the generator on and off. My brother would install a self-starting one, he said, and ensure that a technician came to service the unit so my father did not have to deal with repairs. My father would not relent. “This is my house, and if he wants to disobey me then he should kick me out first,” he yelled as my brother slammed the door and left.

In the end no one won. The issue of the generator created a rift between my father and brother that still has not quite healed. My brother saw his expenditures toward making our childhood home comfortable for everyone as his duty. My father, like my paternal grandparents, was set in his ways. Even when we first got the air conditioner and were so dazzled by its capacities, my grandparents had refused to spend any time in the cooled room. The windows in their room provided cross-ventilation, which was enough for them. The power outages were a nuisance, but they preferred the natural temperature to one created by a machine.

Heat and air-conditioning became the center of our family tensions. My brother and I had changed after living in the West. My father had trouble getting to know us as adults. He wanted time to stop when we entered his house. He wanted us to be the teenagers we had been before we left for the United States. In those days, we had complained less about the heat in Karachi, about what didn’t work in the house, about his rules, the obedience to which he saw as the ultimate act of love. A happy trip home required us to regress into that earlier time, even as we and the city around us grew older and ever more complicated.

Fifteen years have passed since the wedding, and during that time my father has used every excuse in the book to explain why he still will not allow us to install a generator at the house in Karachi. Most of his excuses are familiar: he will have to turn it on and off; he doesn’t like the diesel fumes; it could cause a fire, it will eventually stop working, and so on.

When my mother was alive, the generator was a flashpoint issue. My father would insist that the heat did not bother him, as if he were the only one living in the house. But my mother, who had a slew of health problems, also lived there. Her rheumatoid arthritis had destroyed her joints and then attacked her lungs, giving her asthma, which the heat intensified. There was an inherent unfairness to all this: My mother, who had never smoked a cigarette in her entire life, developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She became especially vulnerable to the many respiratory infections borne by bacteria that thrive in high temperatures. My parents’ experiences of the city, the heat, the problems it bred were entirely separate even though they shared the same little piece of home. Their situation is an apt metaphor for the isolation of climate change. Even in crowded environments, the experience of the jagged edges of suffocating smog, particulate matter, and exhaust smoke is singular, and its costs unfairly distributed.

High temperatures also make chronic pain more difficult to endure. Studies have found that blackouts in periods of intense heat, when there is no access to fans or air-conditioning, cause sharp increases in the mortality rates of vulnerable populations, like my mother’s. Naturally, the poor bear the brunt of these disruptions, with little access to cooling resources. In the summer heat waves, hospitals fill up with patients with heat stroke, but once they are there, they become prey to hospital-borne illnesses and bacterial infections. Newspapers can hardly keep up with reports of the number of bodies in Karachi’s morgues.

It was one such summer when my mother contracted a severe case of pneumonia. One day she was complaining over FaceTime of a slight cough and exhaustion and the next my father was calling from the respiratory intensive care unit at one of the private hospitals in Karachi. After a mad scramble of tickets and layovers in various parts of the world, I arrived at her bedside thirty-six hours later. It was the kind of trip all migrants dread, because it is impossible to tell during so many hours in transit whether there will be an improving or dying parent waiting at the end of the journey. Even at 11 p.m. the temperature was over 89 degrees Fahrenheit with nearly 100 percent humidity. The sweat poured down my face and back as my cousin picked me up in the car to take me directly to the hospital.

I was lucky. My mother was improving and conscious, if still seriously ill and in the intensive care unit. I could see her, touch her, and talk to her, even though the tubes made it impossible for her to talk to me. I spent the night at my maternal grandmother’s house, grateful for the air-conditioning that brought the temperature of the room down a few degrees. It was still too hot for me at 2 a.m., so I took a shower and put on my clothes without drying myself. This is an old trick, and it works only if you fall asleep while your clothes are still damp. That evening I was exhausted enough for the trick to work, but even as I fell asleep, I worried about how I would endure the heat of the city.

With terrible heat come terrible tempers. As the crisis of my mother’s sudden hospitalization dissipated, our family was once again riven with the same arguments that had begun over a decade ago. In the respiratory ICU, she fought for her life with lungs weakened by pneumonia. Outside the hospital, my father and brother resurrected their old feud, positions unaltered.

The day she came home from the hospital, the temperature was 102 degrees Fahrenheit and the power was out. The only air-conditioned bedrooms were on the first floor of the house, which still could be reached only by climbing two flights of stairs. It took almost half an hour of supporting her as she climbed them, with her ailing lungs. Once we were in the bedroom, we were all dripping with sweat. The room felt claustrophobic, and the relentless sun beating through the windows seemed like a callous torturer, scorching and insistent.

It is true that as immigrants who had become used to the luxuries of the first world, my brother and I felt life in Karachi was broken. At the same time there are reams of data to show that Karachi’s heat patterns have changed since we were little. Power outages were never the norm in the way they became in the 2000s and 2010s. The intense growth of the inland city has created UHIs that mean that Karachi cannot benefit from the sea breezes that had cooled us in the past. Nevertheless, to me and my brother, the fact that we could afford to buy privatized power and water in Karachi presented a clear and easy solution to all this. When we got to Karachi as adults, we felt entitled to use the air conditioners and water as much as we wanted. Jet-lagged for at least a week of the two-week vacations we spent at home, we slept until noon or later and (if we had power) with air conditioners running full blast.

My father seemed to identify more with the millions of Karachiites who endure the heat without electricity and water than with us, his children, who had by now internalized the Western ethos of unexamined consumption. He and my mother saw sleeping beyond 8 a.m. as rude and regarded flouting his still-standing rules of running the air conditioner only between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. as gluttonous. Karachi’s current climate conditions are due in huge part to global warming, a direct consequence of the West’s overconsumption of resources. Like other people in the West, we had become comfortable with the premise that we were somehow entitled to these resources, and that people in places like Karachi were accustomed to privation and thus used to discomforts that we could not—and really should not—endure.

My mother passed away in 2015 during another unbearable summer of high temperatures, power outages, and water shortages. The heat and the Islamic prescription for immediate burial meant that neither I nor my brother could get home in time. Without the glue that she represented, our family scattered emotionally and geographically. If my brother and I had become used to justifying our overconsumption, the families we had raised were even less accustomed to the vagaries of scarcity that Karachi presented.

Naturally, our relationship to our hot and poor city suffered. Due to the heat, we no longer visited in the summers. In the monthlong winter when I do visit—Karachi’s winter now lasts only from mid-December to mid-­January—it’s possible to avoid a confrontation about comfort, consumption, entitlement, and climate change. There is still no generator, but my father has installed a rechargeable battery that allows a single fan and a couple of electric lights to be operated.

My daughter does not know Karachi in the way I wish she did. Unlike the parents of so many of my friends who moved to the West, our home never became a place where we could safely and happily spend time. At the end of the day, this is not one individual’s fault or responsibility. My father is not liable for what has happened in Karachi, or for the vast forces of climate transformation and involuntary migration that have altered the dense urban hinterlands where most of humanity now lives. Our attenuated family ties and our meager, specific gripes are one tiny illustration of what is happening on a much grander scale, a forbidding and frightening change that has already remade the world. This hotter world, thirsting for water, for electricity that can make a too-hot city bearable, is already a reality for people at the periphery of the world’s political and literary imaginations. And yet there is no global war on this terror, which has almost completely engulfed the parts of the world less thought about.

The last time I bathed in Karachi, hours before my flight out, I used a bucket and a cup like millions of other people in the city. You use one bucket of water if you are not washing your hair and two if you are. You get your body wet, you soap up, and when that is done, you wash the soap away with water. There is no standing under the shower to cool yourself or to warm yourself as water runs all over you—water that is terribly scarce. It is the most efficient way of washing oneself.