To be a Karachi Bugti who yearns for watan and dry wood

Twenty years ago this month, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti was killed in a military operation in Dera Bugti, and Meerdali Bugti has been displaced ever since. He fled with nothing but the clothes he wore, expecting to return within days; instead he settled among thousands of other Bugti families scattered across Sindh, now working a Karachi farm and still mourning the mountains, springs and quiet of home. Dawn reports that a Human Rights Commission of Pakistan fact-finding mission estimated nearly eighty-five percent of Dera Bugti's roughly one hundred eighty-two thousand residents were displaced at the conflict's height, with no camps, registers, or resettlement program ever tracking where they went. Two decades on, families like his remain scattered across quarries, roadside settlements, and rented rickshaws on Karachi's edges, still without a homeland to return to.

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