In Pakistan, official state ideology, with its insistence on sameness and unity – encapsulated in the idea of one nation, one language (Urdu) and one religion (Islam) – tries to erase difference in the name of nation-building. In everyday settings, however, relations and exchange between communities are often sustained through a maintenance rather than overcoming of difference. In this paper, I consider the centrality of the maintenance, rather than the closure of difference, in encounters between young Hindu and Muslim men and women in Karachi.

One May morning in 1935 the garrison town of Quetta, on India’s North-Western Frontier, was sleeping. At 03:03 a.m., an earthquake shook the city. Perhaps 30,000 people were killed, and as many again evacuated over the next two weeks. Central to public debate on the earthquake was the figure of time: the idea that the earthquake had arrived suddenly and destroyed the city in less than a minute. This paper asks why that idea arose and why it endured. It argues that the figure of time was central to government narratives because it presented the earthquake as a sudden ‘natural’ disaster.