A few years ago, on a solo trekking mission in northern Pakistan, adventurer Absar Khan realised his life’s calling. Setting up his own tent, collecting natural spring water, cooking food out alone in the wilderness had given him a sense of freedom. All he wanted was to have an intimate connection with nature and environment.
“I don’t want to ever do anything else,” he says. Now, Khan is a scuba diver and mountaineer who works in Pakistan with the Olive Ridley Project, an international programme started in 2013 by two biologists concerned by the many Olive Ridley turtles getting caught in ghost nets in the Maldives.
Local villagers near the port city of Karachi use nets as their prime method for fishing. Their fishing nets get stuck at sites where there are rocks or reefs.
“We go and try and help them retrieve those nets,” says Khan.
It’s not just turtles that can get entangled but all sort of marine life such as eels, crabs, whales, dolphins and even seagulls can fall prey. “It doesn’t decompose, it just stays in the ocean,” he says.
Sadly, many die before they can be rescued.
“We were diving and we came across a large piece of net and in it there was an entangled juvenile baby shark. It was already dead unfortunately and we couldn’t save it. But we removed the net so the net would no longer pose a threat to other living marine life.”
Ghost nets also can get washed up on the shore, and his team once rescued a wild dog which had got entangled on the beach.
Ever since his childhood, Khan has had a close relationship with the environment and nature. When he was three-years-old, he was diagnosed with a rare type of leukemia. “I was treated at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. But they could not cure it. They didn’t have a cure at the time.”
He was given between two and six months to live.
“The reports had gone all over the world. We tried everything possible but there was no actual cure,” he says. “As a small child, I had no idea how serious it was. I just remember being very sick and going to different hospitals. I was very sick but I had no idea how sick I was. I didn’t know I could die within months or days. I was just a child.”
He was put under Ayurvedic treatment. The family moved to Saudi Arabia where his father got a job.
“We couldn’t live here in Pakistan because it wasn’t a clean enough environment. It was definitely clean enough by normal standards, it just was not clean enough by the requirements of Ayurvedic medicine. Ayurvedic medicine and how it works is very unconventional. It is not just about taking pills, or giving tablets to somebody. The quality of air is important. Your lifestyle is important. Whether you are by the mountains or the coast is important. There was a time we were prescribed by the doctor to go live in the mountain because of high altitude, because of the different kind of air quality over there. That would supplement the medicine that I was on. It gets very complicated.”
He recalls living with the illness at a young age
“At the age of three I have very vivid memories of course but my entire childhood was governed by my disease and my recovery. Because I wasn’t allowed to go to school, I wasn’t allowed to go outside and play, I had a very strict diet. I went through a very rigorous childhood in that regard.”
Thankfully, the cancer was in remission after about 18 months but Khan remained under treatment for about 11 years. He had to continue treatment just to make sure his immune system and body was capable of living without any medication or supplements. After the age of 14, he never used supplements, medicine or Ayurvedic medicine.
“Very few people go for Ayurvedic treatment in comparison. It is not common at all. It is pretty rare and it is pretty unbelievable Ayurvedic treatment worked for the kind of cancer that I had. It shocked and surprised a lot of other mainstream doctors.”
His mother was a teacher and professor at university. She kept a diary on everything he went through.
“I basically learnt a lot from that diary,” he says. “I learnt a lot from her because she would tell me all the stories when I grew up.”
After growing up in Saudi Arabia, he went to the UK for higher education. He set up his own legal practice working on areas such as human rights, criminal defence services, family law, corporate law, litigation and extradition.
But one morning he decided he had enough.
“I just wanted to get away from myself because everything I was doing was making me unhappy. I just couldn’t understand why I was doing it.” He felt he had changed a lot as a person and started to live a materialistic life. Khan left the UK for Pakistan, and it took him a year and a half to find some direction.
He spends roughly seven months by the sea in Karachi and five months in the north up in the mountains.
Working in the Arabian Sea, Khan has come across angle fish, parrot fish, tuna, barracudas and other species. “We have all kinds of whales, coming in and out. They have become less, sadly, but you know killer whales have been spotted around the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean. Blue whales as well, and humpbacks.”
It is a whole different world to the everyday life of living in a metropolis like Karachi. “Being underwater is very therapeutic and it is extremely relaxing and kind of offers an escape from the reality of the city life.”
He doesn’t feel danger from whales and shark when underwater. “My biggest danger is pollution frankly. All the plastic pollution, and the industrial waste and everything else that gets dumped into the sea and oceans, it all affects visibility, it affects the cleanliness of the water. And when we are going in for the work, visibility is a key aspect that has to be good otherwise if you can’t see anything then you are stuck.”
For Khan being in the water doesn’t feel like work. “I love every aspect of this,” he says. From the boat ride and ocean to interacting with marine life — it is a “holistic” experience. “I don’t really see it as work. It is just something that I love to do,” he says.
There are two full-time members of the Oliver Ridley Project in Pakistan. They also have part-time volunteers such as divers and assistants who add up to around a dozen people working closely with a number of Balochi villages along the coast within 50 kilometres of Karachi.
Once his team retrieve the ghost nets they return them to the local fishermen. “If they are able to repair and use them, then they do. If they are not, then they try and sell them to the reuse market. Then they get shipped to China. But that is happening at a very small scale. It is not that lucrative.”
Besides Khan’s work with the Olive Ridley Project he keeps busy with his adventure organisation TacTack, offering activities such as snorkelling, swimming, skin diving, trekking, climbing and culture tours. “We host a lot of foreigners, we take a lot of locals,” he says.
Does Khan miss his life in London? “Yes I do. I miss a lot of things about my life there.” His legal cases? “I don’t necessarily miss my legal cases. I miss the order and I miss the cleanliness. There is a system for everything over there, like the simplest of things. Over here it is the complete opposite. So that gets a little annoying.”
Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.
