When Talib Kachi was living in Ibrahim Hyderi as a young boy, he would often use his mother’s thin, gauzy dupatta as a net to catch prawns from the creek next to his neighbourhood. The water was so clear that he could see how many prawns he had caught even before he had pulled the dupatta back out. Many people of his generation remember how plentiful the fish were and how blue the water was. Children swam in the sea and dragged their nets to the coast to catch fish for dinner. This was over 50 years ago. Back then, Ibrahim Hyderi was a small village on the south-eastern edge of Karachi. Today it is a sprawling town. There are banks, several schools and hundreds of shops and other businesses here as well as piles of garbage lying everywhere on its narrow streets. The tricolour flags of a political party painted against dirty brick walls are the only means to brighten’ up the area a little. The strong wind blowing from the sea has coated everything buildings, vehicles, trees with a thick layer of dust. The administration of Bin Qasim Town, which is supposed to take care of sanitation and public hygiene in Ibrahim Hyderi, sends its trucks to collect and remove trash but, as Kachi claims, the task is performed only once a week. For seven years, Ibrahim Hyderi has also served as an unofficial landfill site where garbage collected from various parts of Karachi would be dumped. Soil has disappeared beneath thick layers of trash in those parts of the neighbourhood where the waste was thrown. The dumping came to a halt albeit partially only a few months ago after leaders of the local community brought it to the media’s attention. Even today, waste is being discreetly dumped on many empty lots of land. Quality of life has gone down drastically in Ibrahim Hyderi. Aside from many common waterborne diseases such as dysentery and rash being widespread here, a large number of local residents have been suffering from chikungunya, a mosquito-borne viral fever, for close to a year now. The creek next to Ibrahim Hyderi is an even sadder spectacle. Hundreds of boats float moored to jetties that seem to have been built on a bed of black sludge. A toxic mix of pollutants fumes spewing from boat engines, untreated sewerage water and other motley trash thrown into the sea turn its surface into a poisonous slush that spreads out into the sea. It sticks to the legs of a boy like slime as he wades through it. Fish cannot survive in such lethal environs so fisherfolk have to go far out to the sea for the catch. The time, money and effort required for fishing have multiplied. Ayoub Shan, a local, insists fishing used to be a job fit for a king in the past: fisherfolk would fish without having to worry about time and space constraints. It is difficult to envision the dirty creek as their bounteous kingdom any longer. Fisherfolk today struggle to catch enough fish to feed their families, he says…