This basti, known as Afghan Basti, is situated in Taiser Town, Scheme 45, Malir District, and features a bustling mini-city within its confines. Nothing but happy thoughts from the migration; a rare optimism in a story often marked by hardship. The migration phenomenon affects not only the physical and economic condition of migrants but also their subjective perceptions.

The first time Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan was in 1978, after a communist government seized power in Kabul. In 2006, Proof of Registration (PoR) cards were issued by the Pakistani government with the support of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). In South Asia and especially Pakistan, the “rights of migrants and pathways to citizenship have always been precarious”². Citizenship was not a legal status granted by the state to these migrants but was rather claimed as a right by new sets of displaced persons along lines of religious identity.

He says in a low-pitched voice that once we arrived, there was no need to look back. For M (70), Pakistan was not just a place to stay; it was a chance to begin again. When asked if he would ever return to Afghanistan, M shakes his head. and says, “Home is where my work is.” His son often asks what Afghanistan is like, but M has only one answer: “How can I answer him that? As far as I recall, Pakistan comes to my mind when talking about home.”

For him, home is not a birthplace marked on a map, but the place where his life is built, where work supports his family, where his children attend school, and where memories have taken root over decades of exile. He unknowingly borrows this concept from refugee studies, home as a place of livelihood, and not being tied to a particular location. Who is a migrant is a debatable question with public and political concerns shaping its core. Migrants are considered ‘out of place’, triggering international policy concerns about migration management, describing ‘who belongs where’ and ‘who can belong where’.

Pakistan is home to 247.5 million people, and Karachi, estimated to have a population of twenty million, is also home to M and his thirteen children. With three breadwinners, M and his two sons, in a shop rented for PKR 4000, run their house. “Sometimes we make ends meet and sometimes we don’t, but I am happy with what little we have,” M remarks.

For him, Karachi is not just a city; it is survival itself. Like thousands of others, he calls it a “land of opportunity”, one that allows him to live on his own terms. Migration, he says, would strip him of that fragile autonomy. “Who will buy second-hand goods there?” he asks, gesturing toward the worn tools and faded merchandise behind him. He points to Afghanistan as a foreign land, explaining that after three decades, age has made him less able to endure such upheaval. He says, nodding toward the shop that sustains him, “Sometimes we eat, sometimes we don’t, but this is our life.”

His words expose a deeper urban reality: for Karachi’s informal traders, belonging is tied not to legal status but to embedded networks of commerce and kinship. Is the longing for a lost homeland felt by Afghan refugees in Pakistan the same as that experienced by Muhajirs in Karachi or Muslims in Bombay? This question arises from the observation of Mumbai-based social anthropologist Sarover Zaidi, who, at the Second Karachi International Conference on Citizenship and the Emerging Socio-Political Realities, noted that “there is nostalgia for an impossible homeland in the Muslims of Bombay, a sort of exile that is not physical but lies within the heart.” She added that the sentiment is mirrored among Karachi’s Muhajirs. A question arises whether Afghan refugees in Pakistan carry a similar internal exile, a sense of belonging suspended between memory and present reality. A space they build, though its permanence is never guaranteed.

Markets – which are cultural anchors – provide not just income but also identity. In a city where displacement is both a political threat and an economic weapon, his refusal to migrate is an act of quiet resistance, rooted in the belief that survival is possible only here, within the rhythms of a bazaar that knows his name.

M’s eldest son owns a shop in Kabara Market, Saddar, and lives at a distance of a hundred rupee-bus ride. He speaks openly about his marriage, his children, and how they are the first in their generation to attend school in the city. Yet, whenever the conversation drifts toward the future, he gently pulls it back to the present reality of his life here.

Even thinking about it suffocates me, he says, revealing more than nostalgia. His words echo the suffocating uncertainty Afghan refugee families continue to face, caught between a homeland they don’t want to return to and a host country that grows increasingly hostile. His personal story is not an isolated memory of longing. It is part of a broader crisis of displacement, where entire generations are learning to survive in a limbo that feels permanent. For him, memories hold him in place, and so does the simple freedom to breathe without constraint.

His story challenges the common perception that displacement breeds only misery. For him, home is not a structure of brick and mortar but a state of mind, a place he can return to within himself, even when physically uprooted. Nonetheless, migration requires immediate global management following the guidelines of the Global Compact for Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees³. However, this is neither enough to sustain the lives of the migrants nor the residents. It is a recipe for chaos if legalized frameworks are not established to facilitate everyone.

“Houses are made, homes are born,” he says, with a calm that defies the uncertainty of his surroundings. Yet he admits that society often dictates what people want. When people move during a crisis, it is not even a matter of choice but a matter of life and death. In this particular case, it’s different. Due to the sensitivity of conflict-induced migration, displacement caused by humans, which often leaves them with no choice, even when it seems like they have one. “You learn to live with less,” he says, “and you learn what really matters.”

The small collection of belongings that mark his space continues to shine. It’s a quiet insistence on being seen as more than just a statistic. People are not commodities, regardless of their birthplaces. “They are more than just a census to be quantified,” said a bun kabab vendor, who is not Afghan but lives in the same neighbourhood.

The right to shelter and housing is understood as a universal human right, but the question lingers: can a country like Pakistan, barely making ends meet, help neighbors in need? When – God forbid – the resources run dry, who will be the saviour to light the torch? Or perhaps people will help themselves, as they have in any other crisis? The debate is no longer moral or political; it’s existential.

Pakistan may not be able to host Afghan refugees forever; political and economic realities are hard to ignore. However, M’s story, like that of thousands of others, will not fade with repatriation orders or policy shifts. These voices will remain etched in memory, carried by those who listen, in the hearts of neighbors, in the soil of this land, and in the words of those who bear witness.