I went to a school in Pakistan’s 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’s 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.

I don’t 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’an class.

Whenever my mid-range landlord father got his occasional bout of agricultural ambition, he would use it for our character building; he would drag us out of our beds before dawn and make us pick vegetables – aubergines, okra, courgettes, all things we considered vile – and then, with baskets over our heads, make us walk to the vegetable market in the city. Agriculture was fabulous but unpredictable: sometimes you were on your way to the vegetable market with your baskets, and the returning farmers would tell you the abysmal market rates and you would dump your vegetables on the roadside and go home. Produce you had worked for four months to grow would rot on the roadside.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Water buffaloes in the canal. Photograph: Faizan Ahmad

Everyone realised there was more money in real estate than growing aubergines and okra. Over the years, I have felt a yearning for the places lost to property dealers – a favourite guava orchard, a pond covered in turquoise moss – and then I have admonished myself. Do you really expect this place to stay frozen in time and wait for Hanif sahib’s annual visit?

When the first private school opened in my village, I boasted that nobody would send their child there. The city was next door and had enough private schools, and what was wrong with government primary anyway? On my next visit I saw people with four kids on a motorcycle, and a dozen on a donkey cart, all dropping them off at the private school gate.

People who sold their land bought Toyota Corollas and converted their mud houses into concrete beauties. Many put up a plaque in Arabic that read, aptly: this is my Maker’s blessing. After a few years, the money ran out, those Corollas were sold, and the ex-farmers started selling mobile phone cards and fizzy drinks and crisps from tiny shops carved out of their homes. Most of the fertile agricultural land was turned into gated communities with tiny little parks for children’s rides.

In 2/4-L’s march to progress I recall two key moments. When the first in-house toilets were built, I remember elders sneering: are we going to shit in our own house now? The second was my late mother, always non-judgmental and kind, getting furious when a neighbour started wearing the burqa: “Everybody has seen her since she was a child – what is she trying to hide now?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The village state primary school. Photograph: Faizan Ahmad

She could not have predicted what people would do in the village for a living. I asked a recently widowed young woman who had never had a job what was she going to do. A Qur’an teaching course, she said, and a beautician’s course as well. Skills that will get you work in 2/4-L. Who doesn’t want their children to learn to read the Qur’an? Who doesn’t want a facial and a trim?

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The canal that fed us is still there, but is dried up half the year. There are actually two canals: one small, one big. The big canal had a boat crossing that took us to the R villages. It was a big, rusty wooden beast, and the boatman would tow it across by tugging on a steel wire that was strung across the canal. This is the part of my childhood that hasn’t disappeared. I remember a young man running the boat, then the young man turning old and his son taking over.

The last time I took the boat, a feisty old woman was in charge. “My husband has died and my son is very ill,” she said. “Please pray for him.” Passengers asked her to take a seat, and started tugging the boat towards the right bank. She sat down and started talking about her youth, a time when 2/4-L was such a fabulous place that nobody had to buy vegetables.