They mold the earth and make the bricks that build the nation. Before they can write or read or dream the people of the brick kilns know how to take the loose grains of that shift beneath their feet and give them form.

The earth is all that exists for them, it sits in every fold of the cloth that covers them, it seeps into the cracks in the naked soles of their feet, their eyes and their hair.

In a Pakistan grown fat with mighty mansions; theirs is the most earthly existence, attached to the land whose love is professed by all. But the earth does not belong to them, theirs is an enslavement created by the land and the men who own it and who own them. More than a million labour every day, child and sister and man and woman, shaping the bricks that build the nation.

It is a nation that doesn’t care and on Tuesday last it provided another testament to its uncaring, its indifference to those whose labour and losses are etched in the walls that shelter them.