Ismail

What we have already decided We speak of the future as if it were open. This map suggests otherwise. The children on it were under five when they were measured. In the 2040s they will run our farms, offices and factories; in the 2060s they will be the parents and taxpayers on whom an ageing country leans. Two in five of them are stunted. Whatever we choose to do now, for them this part of the future has already been decided, before they could choose anything. A child’s height at two is a kind of ledger. It records, with no possibility of appeal, whether her mother ate, whether the water was clean, whether someone helped when she had diarrhoea, whether anyone thought she mattered enough to reach. The ledger in Gujrat reads one way. In Thatta it reads another. In Haripur and Kohistan, a hundred and fifty kilometres apart, the same province records two different countries. We like to believe this is history, or geography, or poverty, things that happen to us. But the greenest districts were never the richest land. They were the places where girls went to school, where men found work beyond the village, where the state and the market arrived. The map is not a record of what nature gave us. It is a record of whom we chose to reach. We are a society that discounts the future heavily. We defer, we borrow, we promise. But children cannot be deferred. The first thousand days do not wait for a better budget year. Somewhere in Jamshoro a girl stunted in 2018 will be a mother by 2045. What we failed to give her, she will not be able to give her child. The question this map asks is not about them. It is about us.