Coughs! I am sorry, I have just returned from Karachi Mandi to my home, feeling sick. Journey began like any other super class journeys (Mandi = Animal Market [speaking specifically of Cow Market]). I was facebooking when my friends started texting me “lets go Mandi”, I delayed replying to think whether if I should choose to go there, then my brother came my room and asked me if I wish to come Mandi, “yes” I replied. My brother and friends were in hurry, calling me again and again, so I left everything and went without even looking at mirror.
We (friends and my brothers) walked to road side waiting for SUZUKI to pick us up and drop to Mandi. This Suzuki is not hired one or public transport provider, yet during season of EID ul Azha, SUZUKIS often drop people at request for quiet cheap amount (20Rs/person maximum) perhaps sometimes for free. This Suzuki has cows’, goats’ poo all around as its primary functional job is to help transporting animals (i.e. cows, sheep and goats), you can hardly think of sitting in Suzuki but you need not to. Suzuki is fun when you’re travelling while standing. Fast cool air at midnight while standing makes you feel so good and comfortable even more than sitting. Most people usually make a lot of fun noises while travelling over Suzuki while I and my friends remained calm enjoying cool air at such occasion. The place I live is not much far off from Mandi; one can sense stinky poo smell easily from my place. Suzuki was to drop us exactly at Mandi, but because of jam packed road, we got off from Suzuki earlier, and decided to walk till Mandi.
Too many people, animals and Suzuki if are not present at one place, that place is surely not Mandi. You can literally see huge crowd of people during pre days of Eid ul Azha. When we walked into Mandi, I found some people selling mask to cover nose and mouth from dust which was so usual there. I ignored that mask and did not buy. After walking just 400 meters ahead I started feeling sick. I went back to buy that mask. It was another wonder, Mask was actually made up of paper little harder than tissue paper and rubber bands around to support wearing this mask. This mask didn’t help me as much I was expecting, though I wore it but when I walked back into Mandi, quiet stinky smell of cows troubled my nose big time plus Suzukis' smoky emission made airy environment a lot polluted and mask was not efficient to prevent gas like smoky emission of Suzuki from entering my nose easily.
Mandi is fun in itself. Watching different kind of Cows is most fascinating and only interesting stuff there. Some were bigger than full Horse Size, and some were easily comparable with goats’ sizes. Some had beautiful patchy brown to orange color combination with white all over the body and some were attractive because of their full color either in black tones or others. In Mandi, one thing is for sure, you have to walk a lot. While walking inside, I found jewelleries for animals, though weren’t looking good when jewelleries were on shop but animals I saw with jewelleries were looking more beautiful than without ones. In Mandi, you can find a lot of Cattle Farms. Each farm had its unique name like Afridi Boom Boom Farm, Memon Farm, Sindhi Farm, Dilpasand etc., those farms were beautified with unique types of lamps, generators were always ready to help those lamps glow, and specially cleaning was being highly considered withinin those farms.
Mandi is predominantly visited by males with percent of 99.9%. Only 0.1% or may be lesser number of females visit Mandi. Males are found highly active during event of Eid Ul Azha, perhaps this why some people in their opinion regard Eid ul Azha as Eid of BOYS. In Mandi, your slippers are likely to get dirty because of cow’s poo. Irony, you can’t help this thing anyway. I was happy that my clothes were at least safe until cow tail touched me.
After this entire tiring walk, I got too tired just in 3 hours and became highly wishful to return my home. Luckily my mates agreed and we started to find Suzuki to leave us home, but this time it was harder task than before. It was my first time travel on Suzuki so as of my friends, though most people travel in the aforementioned way. It got too late of night hours. It was 12 o clock when we decided to leave but how to get back to home, we did not know very well. We first lost ourselves in Mandi as it is so huge, then when we found place where we entered Mandi from, we got little feelings of relief yet reaching home was still under question. We started walking again and found Suzuki to help us. It is never easy to find Suzuki going to place where we wish to but we found [it took 45 mins walk, and personally I think we walked around 3.5km atleast] and finally we reached home by 1 o clock. After reaching home, I became sicker than I was feeling in Mandi. My face specifically started to become hotter, my eyes were burning and my hair were already under thick layer of dusty sand of Mandi. I went immediately for shower, yet it didn’t help my health much, after then I started writing this article to share all my experience.