The scent of crushed rose petals mixed with damp earth is supposed to smell like peace. For generations in Rawalpindi, that specific fragrance—released when heavy water droplets hit the pink petals scattered across a fresh grave—offered a quiet sanctuary. It was the scent of duty fulfilled. On Eid morning, while the rest of the city echoed with the clatter of new teacups and the rustle of stiff, starched linen, thousands of families would walk through the rusted iron gates of the local cemeteries. They came to bridge the gap between the living and the dead. They came to say, We have not forgotten you.
This year, the gates felt heavier. The silence was different.
Consider Mohammad Bilal, a thirty-four-year-old clerk at a local government office. His story is the story of thousands in Punjab’s bustling garrison city. Bilal makes forty-five thousand rupees a month. In the grand calculations of macroeconomic data, Bilal is a line item. In the reality of the open-air markets of Rawalpindi, he is a man drowning in dry land.
On the morning of Eid, Bilal stood outside the boundary wall of the historic Shah Chan Chiragh graveyard. In his right hand, he held the small, calloused fist of his seven-year-old son. In his left, he held his wallet. He needed to buy flowers. He needed to hire a grave digger to clear the wild, thorny brush that had choked his mother’s final resting place over the winter. He needed a small bucket of water to pour over the stone.
He left with an empty wallet and a hollow chest.
Inflation is often discussed in the abstract language of percentages, consumer price indexes, and central bank policies. We read about it in the morning papers, squinting at charts that trace the downward trajectory of a currency’s purchasing power. But those numbers do not capture the actual weight of the crisis. To understand what is happening to the social fabric of Pakistan, you have to look at the shifting price of a single basket of red roses. You have to look at the economy of mourning.
The Microeconomics of Grief
The tradition is simple but deeply rooted. Visiting the graves of ancestors during Islamic festivals is a cultural anchor. It is an act of devotion that requires very little: a handful of flowers, some incense, a small tip for the caretaker who maintains the site, and perhaps a few coins for the beggars lining the dusty perimeter. It was always the one ritual that resisted class divides. The rich and the poor stood side by side in the dirt, throwing the same petals onto the same earth.
Not anymore.
The hyperinflation that has gripped Pakistan over the last few years has finally breached the cemetery walls. What used to be a nominal expense, an afterthought funded by loose change, has transformed into a calculated financial decision.
Step onto the pavement outside the city’s major burial grounds—from the sprawling premises of the Dhoke Khabba cemetery to the cramped plots near Committee Chowk—and the financial strain hits you immediately. Vendor stalls that used to overflow with vibrant pink and deep crimson now look sparse. The sellers themselves look desperate.
"We aren't making a profit," says Tariq, a third-generation flower vendor whose family has set up a wooden table outside the Shah Chan Chiragh gates for forty years. He is a hypothetical composite of the dozens of furious, exhausted merchants currently lining the streets, but his numbers are entirely real. "People think we are gouging them because it's Eid. They don't see what the wholesalers in Pattoki are charging us. They don't see the cost of the fuel to bring these flowers up north. A single leaf costs more today than an entire garland did three years ago."
The math is brutal.
A small plastic bag of rose petals, barely enough to cover the headstone of a child's grave, now commands a price that makes casual buyers flinch. Garlands that used to cost fifty rupees are being quoted at three to four hundred rupees. For a family wishing to visit three or four ancestral graves, the cost of flowers alone can easily clear two thousand rupees.
To a wealthy elite, two thousand rupees is a cup of coffee at a high-end cafe in Islamabad's F-7 sector. To Mohammad Bilal, it is two days’ worth of milk and bread for his children.
The crisis multiplies when you cross the threshold into the graveyards. The public infrastructure of these cemeteries has long been neglected, leaving the maintenance of individual plots to an informal gig economy of grave diggers, water-carriers, and local children looking to earn a few rupees. These workers, hit just as hard by the soaring prices of flour and electricity, have been forced to hike their rates to survive.
Clearing the weeds from a single grave now costs upwards of five hundred rupees. A single bucket of turbid water, carried from a distant well to wash away the city's thick layer of summer dust, costs another hundred.
Suddenly, a morning spent honoring the dead requires a budget of several thousand rupees. In a country where the minimum wage struggles to keep pace with the cost of a bag of wheat, remembrance has become a luxury item.
The Invisible Stapes
What happens when a society can no longer afford its rituals?
The danger does not lie in the immediate economic contraction. The flower market of Rawalpindi will not collapse the national GDP. The real problem lies elsewhere, in the slow, agonizing erosion of psychological well-being.
Human beings require ritual to process pain. We need physical markers to anchor our memories, especially in times of chronic collective stress. When you strip away the ability to perform these small, ancestral acts of devotion, you leave a vacuum. You replace a sense of continuity with a sharp, immediate sense of failure.
Imagine the quiet humiliation of a father who has to tell his son that they cannot wash grandmother's grave this year because the water seller wants too much money. Imagine the grandmother who sits in her courtyard on Eid afternoon, watching her neighbors return from the cemetery, knowing she had to choose between buying jasmine garlands for her late husband or buying the medicine required to keep her own heart beating.
These are not dramatic, cinematic tragedies. They are quiet, domestic defeats. They happen behind closed doors, in the narrow alleys of Raja Bazar and the crowded settlements of Saddar. They are the invisible casualties of an economy out of control.
The cultural landscape of Rawalpindi has always been defined by resilience. The people of this city have lived through political upheavals, structural adjustments, conflicts, and blackouts. They are experts at stretching a rupee until it snaps. But this specific crisis feels different to the locals because it attacks their dignity.
In the past, poverty meant skipping a new set of clothes for the holiday. It meant substituting beef for chicken in the Eid feast. It was a sacrifice of the material for the spiritual. Today’s inflation forces a sacrifice of the spiritual itself. It asks the living to bargain with the dead.
Shifting Patterns of Devotion
The data shows that consumer behavior changes radically during inflationary spikes, but seeing those patterns play out in a graveyard is surreal.
This year, the traditional Eid rush at the cemeteries peak early and vanished quickly. The long, lingering crowds that used to stay until dusk, reciting prayers and distributing sweetmeats to the needy, were conspicuously absent. People moved with a hurried, transactional efficiency.
Many skipped the flower stalls altogether. They walked past the vendors with averted eyes, their hands dug deep into their pockets, pretending not to hear the calls of the young boys selling rosewater spray. Some brought small bottles of water from home, filled from their own taps, carrying them in faded plastic grocery bags to avoid paying the cemetery water-carriers.
Others have stopped coming entirely.
A walk through the older sections of the city's burial grounds reveals a stark visual divide. The graves of the wealthy, marked by polished white marble and fresh green shade nets, are pristine. The graves of the working class are disappearing under a sea of wild cannabis plants and jagged thorns. The dust settles thick on the unwashed concrete slabs.
This visual stratification of the dead is perhaps the most heartbreaking outcome of the current crisis. It is a physical manifestation of inequality that outlasts life itself. It says that in modern Rawalpindi, your ability to be remembered is directly tied to your disposable income.
The Long Shadow
The sun sets early over the hills surrounding the city, casting long, blue shadows across the uneven rows of graves. By late afternoon on Eid day, the Shah Chan Chiragh cemetery was nearly empty.
A few discarded plastic bags drifted across the dirt paths, caught in the hot breeze. The smell of roses was there, but it was faint, overwhelmed by the dry smell of sun-baked clay and exhaust fumes drifting over the wall from the nearby highway.
Mohammad Bilal did not buy the flowers. He could not justify the cost. Instead, he and his son spent an hour clearing the thorns from his mother's grave with their bare hands, their fingers stained green and scratched by the dry brush. When they were finished, Bilal knelt in the dust, closed his eyes, and recited the Fatiha.
His son watched him, copying his movements, his small palms cupped toward the sky.
There was no water to wash the stone. The dust remained. As they stood up to leave, the boy looked down at the grey, unadorned concrete slab and then up at his father.
"Are we coming back next year, Abba?" the child asked.
Bilal did not answer immediately. He looked at the crowded horizon of Rawalpindi, where the minarets of the mosques rose above a chaotic jumble of concrete roofs, satellite dishes, and power lines. He thought about his rent, which was due in two weeks. He thought about the electricity bill waiting on his kitchen table. He thought about the price of flour.
He took his son’s hand, squeezed it tight, and walked toward the gate without looking back.
