This is a street in Islamabad. No Photoshop, no AI. I walked up and down this street many times when I was a young student there. I interviewed the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz when he was staying with a friend in a nearby street. When you come out of these clusters of trees, you get an even more stunning view of the Margallas. And I, being crazy, ran all the way up to the Margallas for almost eight years.
When we moved to Islamabad, the city had fewer than 200,000 residents — not the 1.5 to 2 million who live there now. There were miles of open space everywhere, vast stretches known as the green belts, giving the young capital a sense of air, distance, and quiet possibility.
We often spent entire nights on Daman-e-Koh, singing:
Dasht-e-tanhāī meñ ai jān-e-jahāñ larzāñ haiñ
terī āvāz ke saa.e tire hoñToñ ke sarāb
“In the wilderness of solitude, O beloved of my life, trembling are the echoes of your voice, the mirage of your lips”
And:
Mujh se pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang
And:
“Do not ask of me that first, unreturnable love, my beloved”
Night jasmine — its scent arriving after dusk, almost like a memory choosing to return rather than fade. In those evenings, Islamabad felt less like a capital and more like a garden that had been carefully persuaded into becoming a city.
And above it all, the long curve of the Margalla Hills — that familiar silhouette which, depending on the light, looks almost like a reclining woman leaning over the valley, watching without judgment. In spring, the jacarandas would break into their soft purple bloom, turning entire stretches into a faint, almost unreal haze of colour — beauty so light it felt temporary, like it might vanish if spoken of too loudly.
There was always this quiet layering of images: the “weeping widow” trees bending slightly in the wind, the ordered streets beneath them, and then, underneath everything, the restless energy of youth. Nights when anger and hope were almost indistinguishable. Young men and women who believed — completely, recklessly — that the world could be rewritten if only one stayed awake long enough.
We moved between small eateries, tea stalls, and late-night conversations that never really ended, only paused with the arrival of dawn. Food was simple, but the talk was not: politics, poetry, exile, revolution, love spoken in fragments rather than declarations.
And when the summer heat pressed down too heavily, there was always the escape upward — driving through winding roads to Murree, where the air changed its temperament. The city below would fall away, and with it the urgency of everything left unresolved.
Those nights now feel like a single continuous thread: night jasmine, distant lights, defiant voices, and the steady presence of the hills — quiet, patient, as if they had seen all this before and would continue to see it long after we had stopped speaking.
Writer Anwar Iqbal is a senior journalist based in the US.