Keti Bandar was not always a backwater. Established after 1819 when its predecessor, Shah Bandar, began sinking into the ground as the Indus River changed course, the port quickly became a commercial hub. Ships sailed from here to Bombay, Madras, the Persian Gulf, and the Makran coast. The East India Company routed goods through it, and by 1845 the town had a population of 2,542 and a functioning customs office. Commissioner Hudson's 1905 report described it as a central commercial town. The surrounding land, irrigated annually by the Indus, produced red rice, bananas, coconuts, and melons. In 1932, Keti Bandar even received the status of a Municipal Committee.

That same year, 1932, brought the instrument of decline: the Sukkur Barrage, built upstream on the Indus. As the modern canal system diverted water to irrigate Punjab and upper Sindh, the flow reaching the delta diminished. Keti Bandar's agriculture withered. The Hindu trading community that had managed the port's commerce -- 7,000 to 8,000 people according to a WWF report -- migrated to India after Partition. The remaining Hindu families left after the 1965 war. Meanwhile, the Karachi Port Trust and its railway connections siphoned trade northward. No direct route connected Keti Bandar to the new commercial networks. By 1992, underground seawater had pushed forward, contaminating drinking water and forcing another wave of migration.

Local fishermen have a name for the mangrove forests along the coast: soldiers of the sea. These dense, salt-tolerant trees break storm waves and slow the ocean's advance. But as river water stopped reaching the delta, the mangroves thinned. In 2009, the Sindh government organized a world-record planting event, placing more than 500,000 mangrove saplings in a single day near Keti Bandar. The exercise has been repeated twice since, and mangrove coverage has improved in some areas. Yet the sea continues to gain ground. The village of Kharo Chan has been entirely swallowed. A seawall built to protect the coastline failed. The remaining fishermen, who sometimes spend days at a time on their boats in the Arabian Sea, return to display their catch in the open market, where buyers collect the fish and truck it to Karachi -- the city that long ago replaced Keti Bandar as the region's port.

Every Pakistani government since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's has announced plans to revive Keti Bandar. Benazir Bhutto proposed a coal-fired power plant here in 1994 using fuel from Thar; Nawaz Sharif's government rejected it. A feasibility report for a connecting road was prepared, but priorities shifted to Gwadar port instead. In 2008, the Pakistan People's Party government proposed building an entirely new industrial city called Zulfikarabad, attracting Chinese investor interest, but Sindhi nationalist parties raised objections and the project stalled. The port of Keti Bandar remains what it has been for decades: a pier for fishing boats, a coast guard base, and a reminder of how rivers, politics, and the sea conspire to unmake what ambition once built.