It is 11 PM in Karachi. In New York, it is 2 PM. The deadline exists in EDT. I exist in PKT, in a room where the AC is running because anything below a certain threshold of heat makes thinking impossible — but set carefully, deliberately, at a temperature the household has collectively agreed upon, because K-Electric charges by slab, and crossing 200 units in a month does something to a bill that takes weeks to recover from.
The electricity might cut out in the next hour anyway. It might cut in ten minutes. There is no way to know.
Unscheduled outages are a different category from loadshedding, which is itself a schedule that changes without notice, and neither category cares about what I am in the middle of. I have attended meetings this way. Mid-sentence, screen frozen, connection dropped. A colleague in another timezone is waiting while I figure out whether I can continue on the backup or need to reschedule.
This is not a complaint. It is a data point.
Pakistan has always been hot. This is the first thing someone will say, and they are not wrong. But there is a difference between heat that is survived and heat that has become a system — one that reorganises every hour of every day around its own requirements and charges you accordingly.
We have a word for poverty. We have a word for class. We do not yet have the right word for what happens when the climate becomes infrastructure — when staying alive requires an access pass that not everyone can afford to buy, and when the price of that pass keeps rising.
Call it thermal inequality. Call it the heatwave economy. Call it what it is: a tithe collected from the people least responsible for the temperature and least equipped to dispute it.
Here is what survival actually costs, in concrete terms.
The KE bill is a monthly negotiation with physics. Residential units cross slabs, and at each crossing, the rate climbs. There are peak hours — 6:30 to 10:30 PM in summer — when the rate is higher still. The AC that makes sleeping possible, the UPS that keeps the fan running when the power cuts, the inverter that protects the router so the work can continue: none of these is a luxury. They are the infrastructure of functioning, available in full to some households and assembled in pieces, with sacrifice, in others.
Some households — in DHA, in Clifton, in the exempt zones — experience no scheduled loadshedding at all. In high-loss areas of the same city, it runs six to eight hours a day. The heat is the same heat. The access is not.
And here is the irony that does not make the news: this calculation is no longer exclusive to the poor. The white-collar household — salaried, educated, and, by most measures, stable — now runs the same arithmetic. Which room gets the AC? What temperature is acceptable before the slab tips? Whether the UPS battery will last through the night or needs replacing, which costs money that is not spare.
Inflation has compressed the distance between managing and not managing to a number on a bill, and that number has been climbing. The middle class is not in crisis the way the daily wage worker is in crisis. But it is no longer insulated either. It is doing the same mental accounting, just with a slightly larger margin for error.
A generator would solve this, in theory. Petrol, for the better part of the last three years, has not been a solvable problem. The price peaked at over Rs. 330 per litre in 2023 and has swung violently since. The people who run generators on petrol are the people who can afford to treat petrol as a recurring household expense. This is not most people — and increasingly, it is not even all of the people who once assumed it would always be.
Gas, meanwhile, has a crisis of its own. Sui Southern routinely cuts supply during mealtimes — sometimes announced, often not. Residents across Karachi have described coming home to no gas at lunch, at dinner, or during Sehri.
The alternative is LPG, which is expensive, or food from outside, which is also expensive, in an economy where inflation has meant that even a basic meal from outside is a calculation, not a convenience. There are families in this city who cannot reliably cook a fresh meal during summer because they have no electricity for the induction, no gas for the stove, and no budget for the restaurant. The inflation that has compounded every crisis since 2021 does not pause for heatwaves.
I have ordered food on bad nights and watched the tracker stall. The rider, stuck somewhere in traffic that a city this size generates even at midnight, or waiting at a kitchen where the gas only just came back. I have eaten late, or reheated something that was not meant to be reheated, and moved on. This is the minor version. The version with options. I am aware, in a specific and continuous way, that most people managing this equation have fewer of those.
What the heatwave economy has quietly produced — and what nobody is calling by its name — is a new pressure to earn more than one income because one income is no longer enough to survive a Pakistani summer.
The salaried worker takes on freelance projects after hours — at night, when the heat has fractionally eased, hunched over a laptop on UPS power, racing a battery percentage. The schoolteacher gives tuition on weekends to cover the electricity bill the school salary cannot absorb. The shopkeeper’s eldest son drives for a ride-hailing app in the evenings. The woman who used to manage on a single household income now sells food from home, stitches, or tutors, or does all three simultaneously, because the numbers stopped adding up somewhere around 2022 and have not recovered since.
This is not hustle. This is not entrepreneurship. This is thermal arithmetic — the extra income required not to get ahead but to stay in the same place when the summer bill arrives. The heatwave economy has expanded the working day not as an opportunity but as an obligation, and it has done so most severely for the people who were already working the longest hours for the least return.
The school calendar is where the inequality becomes almost elegant in its cruelty.
Last summer, Punjab moved school holidays earlier and earlier — first June 1, then May 28, then May 22 — as each heatwave arrived ahead of the forecast. Twenty-six million children out of classrooms in Punjab alone. On paper, the decision is the same for everyone. On paper, the heat does not know the difference between a government school in Sheikhupura and a private school in Gulberg.
In practice, the private school has a generator. It has air-conditioned classrooms and the administrative capacity to run bridge programmes to catch up and continue. The government school has fans that depend on electricity that isn’t coming. The child in Gulberg loses a few weeks and returns in August approximately where she left off. The child in Sheikhupura loses months, returns to a classroom already moving without her, and the gap between them becomes the kind of gap that does not close. Reproduced, year after year, by a calendar that looks identical and functions very differently depending on your postcode.
And then there are the bodies that were already managing something.
In June 2015, Karachi experienced what researchers would later call its first epidemic of severe heat-related illness — over 1,200 deaths in days, with temperatures near 49°C. The studies that followed documented a pattern that has only deepened since. The most frequent concurrent condition in heatstroke patients was not anything exotic. It was hypertension. It was diabetes. The chronic illnesses that already sit quietly inside a significant portion of this population – conditions that affect medication schedules, kidney function, cardiovascular response, and the body’s basic ability to regulate itself – become, in extreme heat, acutely dangerous.
A diabetic body processes heat differently. A body on antihypertensives may dehydrate faster. A person managing a chronic condition already knows what it means to negotiate their body’s limitations against a world that was not built with those limitations in mind. What the summers since 2015 have added is a new variable in that negotiation: an environment that is actively hostile, for months at a time, getting longer.
I know this register, not from research, but from the inside. The heat does not take a break because your body has other things to manage. It does not check whether the medication needs to be kept cool, whether the power has been on long enough to matter, or whether the nearest functioning pharmacy still has stock. It simply continues. You continue alongside it, or you don’t, and which one happens has more to do with your circumstances than your resilience.
Kahan tak sunogay, kahan tak sunayen.
While all of this is happening, another Pakistan is having a different summer entirely.
There is a Pakistan that lives inside an air-conditioned bubble — home, car, office, mall, repeat — where the heat outside registers as weather rather than threat. These Pakistanis travel in 4x4s and chaperoned cars, windows up, climate control set before anyone gets in, moving through the same streets as everyone else without touching the same air.
It does not think about the KE bill because the KE bill is not a crisis; it is a line item. It does not negotiate with a thermostat.
It goes on shopping expeditions to Dubai when Karachi becomes uncomfortable — not because Dubai in June is pleasant; it is also 45 degrees — but because Dubai has uninterrupted electricity, malls the size of small cities, and the particular relief of being somewhere the infrastructure simply works.
A leaked property database documented over 23,000 properties in Dubai listed under Pakistani ownership, estimated at over $12.5 billion in value. The money that built those apartments did not come from people who have ever had to choose which room gets the AC.
Then there is the other Pakistan.
The blue-collar worker who starts at 6 AM because by noon the heat has made the work physically impossible, which means he has earned half a day’s wage and has no mechanism to recover the rest.
The informal worker — and 70% of Pakistan’s workforce is informal — for whom reduced hours in a heatwave mean a reduced meal, or no meal, because the wage is daily, the inflation is real, and there is no sick leave for weather. The family sleeping in one room, not because it is cosy but because that is the only room they can afford to keep cool, and even then, with restrictions, with arguments about the thermostat, with one eye permanently on the meter.
This man is not deciding between Dubai and Karachi.
He is deciding whether he can afford to eat today.
The distance between these two Pakistans is not measured in kilometres. It is measured in units of electricity, in litres of petrol, in whether the gas came this morning, and in whether the meal on the table is hot or exists at all.
The rich do not experience the heatwave. They leave before it peaks, return after it breaks, and in the interval, the poor have absorbed everything the summer had to offer — in wages lost, in hours worked in dangerous heat, in children kept home from school, in bodies that were already managing something now managing more, in second and third jobs taken up not out of ambition but out of the bare arithmetic of survival.
Same country. Same summer. Entirely different realities.
The anticipated objection sits here: But this is just poverty. Poverty has always been unfair. Why are you calling it something new?
Because poverty used to be a condition. Now the climate is a collaborator. The heat does not expose existing inequalities and leave them where it found them. It deepens them, compounds them at speed, and makes them structurally harder to climb out of.
The labourer, the student, the chronically ill, the salaried worker now running a second shift after midnight — they are all absorbing the cost of a temperature this country did not cause. Pakistan produces less than one per cent of global emissions. The bill is being paid in bodies and bank balances and lost hours by people who did not run up the debt.
This is what makes thermal inequality different. Poverty, in theory, is correctable. Physics is not.
The heatwave economy is already running. It has its own hours, its own mathematics, its own expanding circle of who it reaches — downward, always downward.
It is also in the 4×4 moving through all of this, sealed, unbothered, on its way to the airport. It is in the construction worker’s 6 AM call time, the white-collar family’s argument over the thermostat, the freelancer’s second shift starting after midnight when the load comes back, the child who fell behind in a summer that has lasted too long, and the chronically ill body negotiating a season that has decided to stay.
We have spent years calling this weather. It is not weather. It is a system. And it already knows whose side it is on.