Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2022

“Once you’re in their books, you’re done for. … they’ll ask you what you do, how much tax you pay, where you’re registered, how much you make, and are you left wing or right wing.”— Mustafa Efendi, a character in A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk

WHEN you think of informal labour in Türkiye, the image that comes to your mind, if you read this, is the life of a street vendor in Istanbul, unfolding amidst diverse layers of changes: personal, social, political, environmental, ecological in the wake of urbanisation and the melding of tradition with modernity. The saga of change, chronicled by Pamuk in the novel, spans four decades from the 1980s to 2000s.