Footprints: GRAVE SITUATION.

THE morning Super Highway drive to Bahria Town is mostly uneventful, except for the piping hot potato samosas we have been nibbling on. Bahria Town, too, seems to have come into view too soon, probably due to the city having stretched so much in that direction that one doesn't realise the distance travelled. We are not going in the main 'shark jaw' gates. We are making a detour via Kathore City. The people of Haji Ali Mohammad Goth, Dad Mohammad Gunder Goth and Ali Dad Gabol Goth have sent word out. They want to share something.

It is a well-known fact by now that the area where Bahria Town and several other such projects are coming up had many ancestral villages or goths. There are even native settlements there that are over 100 years old.

You spot a couple of straw huts surrounded by a three-side Bahria Town wall. Saima and her children have only recently moved here after being uprooted from another area where heavy construction work allegedly forced them out. 'Now they are building a wall here, too. Whatever of our belongings comes in the way of their construction work they throw away,' the young mother reports.

Even the dead have not been spared. Entering Bahria Town from the back, you can see Ali Dad Gabol Goth's ancestral graveyard. Across from it you see rows of neat-looking town houses, which are still unoccupied in Bahria Phase-III. They look like nice, cosy dwellings with open front areas. But then a gap between a row of town houses grabs your attention. What at first looks like a vacant plot covered by wild plantation, including a lot of thorny keekar, has something far worse than the thorns sticking out. There is a reason for the weeds to be allowed to grow wildly. They are there to hide old graves.

'All these houses, the sidewalks, roads ... have been built over our ancestral graveyard,' says a local. Suddenly you realise that you are standing on the graveyard that you thought was across from you. More houses will soon come up over that side of the graveyard, too.

The funk of forty thousand years

And grisly ghouls from every tomb

Are closing in to seal your doom...

In his famous music album and accompanying scary video 'Thriller', did the late Michael Jackson foresee Bahria Town?

Suddenly you don't know where to stand. You can't breathe. Those samosas in your stomach, too, want to come up for air. What to do? Throw up? But not here, not in the middle of a graveyard!

According to Abira Ashfaq, a human rights lawyer, 'Where does...

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