Stay at home, say officials. Where do the homeless go?

KARACHI -- On Saturday morning, the gentle rays of dawn hit upon Yasmeen, nudging away the remnants of sleep. She tossed and turned, desperate to catch a few more winks, but it was to no avail. There wasn't enough shade at her usual spot on the pavement near Abdullah Shah Ghazi's shrine.

With gnarled fingers, she rubbed her eyes open, and joints cracking, lifted her body off the footpath. Some of her neighbours followed suit but the addicts among them remained unperturbed - the substances they used last night had not yet worn off. A few grubby children played at their feet.

Yasmeen rolled up her belongings in the sheet that sufficed as her bedding. Neither soap nor sanitiser were among her possessions. She made her way to work - another spot on the dusty road, some blocks away from the pavement.

There she sat, a few hours later, the sun scorching down on her back. But the sun was the least of her worries.

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'It's the police. They used to ask us to leave [before] but it wasn't as often as it has been over the past few days,' bemoaned Yasmeen. 'You see there,' she said, gesturing aimlessly in the distance, 'they just beat up a boy over there. He lives with us [on the footpath] and refused to leave.'

Yasmeen was a fairly recent addition to the shelterless inhabiting the pavements near the shrine. She only shifted to the footpath three months ago. Like many others who lived on the streets, she looked at Abdullah Shah Ghazi's shrine as a place of respite. It offered free food and could be approached easily when nature called.

Meanwhile, her ailing husband and two unemployed sons continued to live in a rented shanty dwelling in Orangi Town and she would visit them once a week.

Here, said Yasmeen, she was at least able to beg and collect money for her husband's treatment.

Since the shrine closed on March 14, though, she found her worries exacerbated. Chief among them was finding a place to relieve herself. 'Now since the shrine is closed, I either go home to home, begging people to let me use the washroom, or when no one is around, I urinate in the bushes. What else am I to do?' she asked.

The shrine was closed as a measure to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. Hundreds of people visited it each week, making it a hotbed for contagion.

On Sunday, a week had passed since it closed. However, Yasmeen and her neighbours had continued to sleep side-by-side on the...