{"id":8989,"date":"2019-09-14T17:00:56","date_gmt":"2019-09-14T08:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2019\/sep\/14\/nameless-village-chak-24l-punjab-pakistan"},"modified":"2019-09-14T17:00:56","modified_gmt":"2019-09-14T08:00:56","slug":"my-nameless-village-now-lost-in-time-mohammed-hanif","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=8989","title":{"rendered":"My nameless village, now lost in time | Mohammed Hanif"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Farmland was swapped for concrete houses, a private school has thrived \u2013 but the village still doesn\u2019t even have a name<\/p>\n<p>I went to a school in Pakistan\u2019s Punjab province called government primary school, Chak 2\/4-L. Chak means village; 2\/4-L is the name of my village, 2\/4 the number of the canal feed that irrigates it, and L because it\u2019s on the left side of the canal. Most villages along the canal had named themselves after a local legend or a landmark. We never bothered. I always assumed that our people were so hardworking they forgot to name where we lived.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t mean to romanticise hard labour, but my people were always busy cultivating their land. The land was fertile, but fertile land requires even harder work: you must irrigate it at midnight and pick your vegetables before dawn. And there were rewards. If you owned two acres of land you could send your sons to university and give water buffaloes to your daughter in their dowry; if you had no acres but owned a buffalo you could still send your son to school and your daughter to a Qur\u2019an class.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2019\/sep\/14\/nameless-village-chak-24l-punjab-pakistan\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Farmland was swapped for concrete houses, a private school has thrived \u2013 but the village still doesn\u2019t even have a nameI went to a school in Pakistan\u2019s Punjab province called government primary school, Chak 2\/4-L. Chak means village; 2\/4-L is the name &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":507,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[60,61,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pakistan","category-south-and-central-asia","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/507"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8991,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8989\/revisions\/8991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}