Officially, Christians are equal citizens of Pakistan, represented by the white band on the national flag; in reality, they are treated as an undeclared lower caste. The ‘Christian colony’, near my house in Islamabad, was a cluster of ramshackle houses perched over a foul-smelling sewer and jammed between the spacious homes of the well-to-do. Its residents cleaned houses, swept the streets and cleaned drains – work shunned by Muslims. A friend told of how his landlord, an elderly civil servant, refused to accept a glass of water from a Christian domestic worker because it was ‘unclean’. In
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