Last week, Rafia Zakaria won the 2026 National Magazine Award in the category of Columns and Essays. The winning piece, “Water Pressure,” was published in Issue 150 of The Believer and is available to read in full on their website. It follows Zakaria’s father on his search for clean water in Karachi, Pakistan, where the mounting climate crisis has crept into all aspects of daily life. Zakaria discussed the prize and the celebrated essay with The Believer’s managing editor, Ginger Greene.
THE BELIEVER: You won a National Magazine Award last night in New York for your essay, “Water Pressure.” What did it feel like to see this piece recognized in that way?
RAFIA ZAKARIA: It was a tremendous surprise… It is very difficult to place personal essays, but it is the personal story that can ultimately make an abstract issue—such as water scarcity in a faraway city like Karachi—seem as real as the heat wave that was happening in New York on the day of the award ceremony. I was so grateful to work on this project, and to have the freedom and latitude to explore what extreme heat can do to ordinary people in an ordinary megacity.
BLVR: Your story explores the many difficulties of procuring water and power in Karachi, in an ever-warming world. What inspired you to approach this subject? And what were some of the difficulties you faced as you developed the essay?
RZ: I feel like a lot of climate journalism focuses on the deterioration of beautiful natural environments and the loss of wild ecosystems. I wanted to focus on how extreme heat, as well as water and power scarcity, affect human relationships, how it erodes and corrodes the scheme of relations between people and the environment. Sometimes it is not possible to see how it is happening when you are in the midst of dealing with these problems every day. But as someone who is in and out of Karachi, I was able to perceive these dynamics.
One of the difficulties I faced in reporting this story was a lack of precedent for this sort of exploration. For instance, there is excellent and deep reporting on natural or man-made disasters and their aftermath. But there is less writing on persistent issues, like decades-long water shortages, where there is no single cataclysmic event on which to center a story. I wanted to show that the story of chronic scarcity can also be told in an impactful and interesting way.
BLVR: The piece opens with a vivid scene from your family’s neighborhood in Karachi, in which a man is angered when he notices your aunt receiving an overflow of water into her underground water tank, such that it’s wastefully flooding out onto the street. Their confrontation ends when your aunt begins to throw rocks at him to get him to leave her alone. I was curious: What was your first reaction when you heard this story? Was it relayed to you as a problem of “water envy,” as you call it?
RZ: I will admit that my aunt’s reaction was a bit extreme, but it crystallized how chronic scarcity can create levels of seething frustration that can bubble to the surface in absurd ways. The story was told to me in the context of: Is she OK? But actually, no one facing this sort of privation day after day is really OK. Water is a mainstay of existence, so the fact that you can now have an iPhone but not access to clean water is a bizarre juxtaposition of privilege and paucity.
I also felt that my aunt’s actions put into stark focus what people likely want to do but usually don’t. I came up with the term “water envy” because I wanted to start creating a vocabulary for phenomena that are felt, but for which there are often no words. I think the phrase encapsulates how policing resource consumption becomes just another part of living in a neighborhood. In most cases, people will not challenge each other to the extent they do in this instance, but that is why it is such an apt story: Both characters had reached the end of their rope.
BLVR: Water politics in Karachi are complicated. For one thing, there are the daily strategies middle-class Karachiites have developed to procure water, which involves pumping water from the main lines into private underground water tanks. Navigating the uncertainty of main-line waterflow has become a full-time job for your father, as you point out. At the same time, there are many more people who don’t have access to these “pump games,” because they can’t afford a private tank. They are forced to purchase water from private companies that hike up their prices. How has the situation with Karachi’s water mafia progressed since you reported this piece?
RZ: I think the situation is much more dire now, because the pressures have become more acute. The population has grown dramatically and grows further still on a daily basis. Temperatures have risen, owing to climate change phenomena like the heat domes I talk about in the piece. As a result, people increasingly have to resort to taking their chances and obtaining water without knowing its source or even if it is potable.
In the summer, there are thousands of deaths that are ultimately caused by lack of clean water, but they are not often tallied under this category. As the heat index rises in Karachi, these situations are pushed to the limit and people—particularly the very old and the very young—begin to die. The water mafias are more entrenched and merciless now; they know how to throttle competition and work with street gangs and land mafias to ensure that the consumers in a specific area have no options but to pay them.
BLVR: As we approach the summer months, Karachi is already reaching excessively high temperatures. In early May, the city recorded a peak of 111 degrees Fahrenheit, the city’s highest reading since 2018. This heat, as you describe in your piece, compounds with power outages and water shortages, which seeds the ground for long-term public health crises. How are you feeling about the upcoming summer?
RZ: I dread the summer months for Karachiites. If you fall sick during the summer, it is hard to get reliable care in a timely fashion and, most of all, to find a relatively cool environment to recover in. Any illness could threaten survival. Since there is no easily available large-scale refrigeration in poorer areas, there is also a huge risk of eating spoiled food. There is no way of telling if something in a store fridge was left out for hours the night before, or if the energy source powering the fridge is reliable. So it’s Russian roulette all summer long.
This summer will not be any different. The political rift between Karachi and the rest of the province means that the city is constantly starved of resources, and the federal government seems disinterested in the plight of the people who live there. Many Karachiites are the children of people who migrated from India in 1947 and hence distinct from Punjabis, who make up the majority ethnicity. All of these divisions make the situation one of constant chaos. People are living a bit of a Hobbesian existence there.
BLVR: How has the situation in Karachi shaped your relationship to your experience of the US? You recently moved to Salt Lake City in Utah, which is also in the midst of a climate-related disaster. Have you noticed any similarities between the two places?
RZ: Well, there is a war over water underway in Utah as well. Last week, three county commissioners in Box Elder County, Utah, passed a proposal to build a 40,000-acre data center in the area, which is twice the size of Manhattan. The residents, aghast at what their elected representatives have done, are now trying to organize a referendum that will stop the plan. If the data center is built, the project will suck up all the water left in the already drying Great Salt Lake. It is estimated that it will also increase nighttime temperatures by 8 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit.
This situation really reminds me of Karachi, and it is difficult for me not to feel a bit like a Cassandra. Utahns have little idea of what that sort of scarcity and extreme heat can do to the fabric of society. It transforms our individual and collective relationships with the natural environment, but also the relationships we humans have with each other.
