1/3/2002
Gul - The Oil Boy
by Akhtar Soomro and Peter Sain ley Berry

Gul is an 11-year-old Afghan boy, a refugee in Karachi, a teeming metropolis of ten million souls perched on banks of the Arabian Sea. The city is Pakistan's greatest port. Virtually all of mankind's various artefacts pass through here and a great many raw materials as well. Among these is oil. The oil tankers come into the terminal at Kymari and it is here that Gul - the oil boy, makes his living.

In the English language his name means 'flower', but his name is a satire on his appearance. Just as friends of a giant may take to calling him 'little,' so Gul, unkempt and dressed in rags, illiterate and frightened, is called 'flower.' It is all that links him to higher things.

The chimney sweeping urchins brought to life by Dickens were paragons of cleanliness besides Gul and his equally wretched companions. Soot may be dirty, but at least it is dry and can be washed away with a modicum of soap and water. Gul's duties are infinitely dirtier.

Chimney sweeps clean chimneys but Gul cleans the very ground. And not of soot but of the slimy, clinging mess that is heavy fuel oil.

In Kymari it is everywhere. It leaks from the oil tankers in the port, and from the tanker trucks on the quay; it leaks from the oil hoses and from the storage tanks wherever there is a joint or connection. It leaks into the earth and into the drainage canals. In many places waste oil has turned the earth into nothing less than greasy black slush - like a film negative of a snow scene.

Who, except the desperately poor, could ever imagine that such filth could ever be worth salvaging? Not only is the oil dirty; clinging and sticking and creeping into and over every possible crevice, not only does it give off fumes that are poisonous, but it is toxic and carcinogenic as well.

On the other hand it provides a ready raw material with which the owners of small refineries can make a sort of axle grease, to keep the wheels of Pakistan's trucks and factories turning for another day. So there is money to be had for this spilt oil. Not much - it sells for 5 rupees a litre - that is less than a dollar for a full 10 litre canister - but even a few rupees are worthwhile when you are a refugee child like Gul.

If his luck is in he can sometimes fill two canisters in a day, but usually there is only time to fill one. For his work is not a swift process. Each drop of oil has literally to be rung out. Gul's only tools to soak the oil out of the ground are old rags. Soak and ring out, soak and ring out. The oil, spilled by the barrel, is won by the ounce. And often he thinks there is more oil in his hair and on his face, in his eyes and throat and mouth and on his frail, stunted body than in his canister. In summer the fumes are almost overwhelming. "Work in oil is not an easy task in hot weather," says Gul.

A block away, the drainage canals are filled with thousands of cubic yards of the thick black sludge, a small carcinogenic river moving leisurely into the Arabian Sea. Nearby, Karachi's beaches are unusable, blackened by this and other oil spilled by the huge tankers anchored in Karachi's harbour.

And of the 50 hard-won rupees worth less than a dollar, eleven-year old Gul keeps only 20 and gives the rest to his family. They have to survive too. What about education? School? Gul scratches his oil-soaked head. "Going to school not give food," he says.