Preparing for a research trip to Pakistan, I spent hours reading about one of the most water stressed cities in the world. Karachi, I was shocked to discover, missed its daily water demand by a margin of over fifty percent.
Within a few days of arriving I found the situation was far worse than I had anticipated. He refused to make eye contact, choosing, instead, to bang away at a piece of metal in his roadside garage. He took me through a narrow alley and introduced me to a few of his neighbors so I could talk to them about their water problems. An old lady told me there was an abundance of municipal water many years ago.
Now, with the number of people living in Shireen Jinnah Colony skyrocketing, people payed water vendors. These houses have official connections, Kauser told me as we walked away, but they have no water.
Later, as we drank tea and ate biscuits in his shop, Kauser wondered aloud whether the high-rise buildings in Shireen Jinnah paid for water tankers or got their supply through municipal lines. Access to water in Shireen Jinnah is not mediated by an idealized relationship between state and society.
But the more salient point is that at the level of everyday access, water is a substance that structures relationships between people. Municipal water creates citizens and representatives by literally connecting them so that residents of Clifton are made visible to the state and the state, in turn, is made accountable to them. But where these pipes run dry despite their obstructing presence water fleshes out everyday relationships between class, gender, neighbors, and informal market actors.
