Perhaps that explained the pervasive sense of decay and rot. Unlike stately Lahore or modern Islamabad, Karachi resembled the set of a dystopian thriller. In the city centre, the stately Raj-era buildings cowered behind tangles of power lines and garish neon signs. Rubbish was piled outside elegant mansions in upmarket Clifton. In the summer, when power cuts were frequent, slum dwellers slept on the rooftops, and clouds of flies swarmed around people as they walked to work. Every day, 400 million gallons of untreated sewage poured from the city into the Arabian Sea. Karachi’s conservationists
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