On the Corridor's Last October Night, Lanterns for the Ones Still Walking

The autumn lantern nights began, a decade ago, as a way to grieve the coasts that went under. This year, along the Makran corridor, the festival has bent toward the living. On the last night of October, families floated paper lanterns not only for the dead but for relatives still walking the migration routes — a shift that says much about a year in which registered migrants climbed past 120 million, said Mateo Solis. In a corridor town, schoolteacher Amina Farouk helped her students letter lanterns with the names of cousins and grandparents somewhere between here and a safer elsewhere. "We used to write the names of places," she said. "Now we write the names of people, and we hope they are still walking to read them." The festival draws no ministers and makes no policy. It marks, in candlelight, the difference between a statistic and a family. The lanterns went up at dusk and burned toward the water.