There is a particular sound that every Pakistani of a certain age can summon from memory without effort: the soft hiss of a Shezan All Pure tetra pack being pierced by its slightly-too-short straw, followed by that first sip of mango juice so unnaturally orange it could be reclassified as a colour rather than a flavour. For many of us, that sound was the soundtrack to school lunch breaks, hospital waiting rooms, and the long, sweaty afternoons of summer load-shedding. And yet, in this strange and inflation-bitten year of ours, that humble paper carton has quietly transformed into something far more profound than a juice box. It has become a portal back to a Pakistan that felt simpler, kinder, and considerably less expensive.
This, then, is a love letter to Shezan, and to the modest co-conspirators in our collective recession-era nostalgia.
The Mango Juice That Built a Nation
To understand Shezan is to understand a very specific kind of Pakistani magic. The juice was never the best mango drink on the market, and anyone who has held a real Chaunsa in their hands knows it bore only a passing resemblance to the actual fruit. Nevertheless, it was ours. It appeared at every milad, every school annual day, every cousin’s mehndi, and every hospital waiting room where some uncle was being treated for something he had been warned about for years. Indeed, there was a time when no Pakistani gathering of more than four people was considered legally complete without a stack of Shezan cartons sweating gently on a tray.
What made it so beloved was not the taste, although the taste was admittedly addictive in the way that only mildly suspicious processed foods can be. Rather, it was the consistency. The straw might bend, the carton might leak from that one mysterious corner, and the juice itself might be approximately forty percent sugar by volume, but the experience was always exactly the same. In a country where almost nothing else stays the same for very long, that kind of reliability is something close to sacred.
The Supporting Cast of Snack-Time Heroes
Of course, Shezan never worked alone. Behind every great mango juice was an entire ecosystem of small, affordable joys that defined a generation of childhoods. There was the legendary Slim Jim, those impossibly thin chocolate wafers that always crumbled before reaching your mouth, and yet you never minded because the crumbs themselves were half the pleasure. There was Peek Freans Sooper, the biscuit so deeply embedded in our tea culture that it might as well have been declared a national heritage item. And let us not forget Rio, that strange sandwich biscuit with its faintly artificial pink cream, which somehow tasted like a flavour the colour pink would have if pink were edible.
Moreover, there was Pakola, that radioactive green ice cream flavoured soda that occupied a strange but beloved place in our hearts. Rooh Afza, meanwhile, did the heavy lifting all summer long, mixed with cold milk in jugs the size of small buckets and ladled out to entire mohallas during Iftar. These were not premium products by any measure. They were, however, available at every kiryana store within a two-rupee coin’s distance from our homes, and they made us feel, briefly, like the wealthiest people on earth.
Why It All Tastes Better Now
Here is the part where I must admit something uncomfortable. None of these things were that special at the time. Shezan was just juice. Slim Jim was just a wafer. Pakola was, and remains, an acquired taste at best. So why do they now feel like artefacts from a lost civilisation?
The honest answer, of course, is that nostalgia is a sneaky little thief, and it loves nothing more than a struggling economy. When the rupee is doing somersaults and the Bijli bill arrives looking like a ransom note, the mind tends to retreat to the last time it remembered feeling safe. For many Pakistanis, that retreat lands somewhere in the late nineties or early two-thousands, in a kitchen that smelled of fresh roti, in front of a PTV drama with terrible production value, holding a Shezan in one hand and a Sooper biscuit in the other. The food itself is almost incidental. What we are really tasting is the absence of worry.
What is more, these small comforts remain remarkably affordable even now, which makes them one of the few honest pleasures we have left. A tetra pack of Shezan still costs less than a single fancy coffee, and unlike that coffee, it does not require an explanation, a podcast recommendation, or a barista who spells your name wrong.
A Toast to the Small Things
In the end, perhaps this is what makes recession-era nostalgia so powerful in Pakistan today. It is not really about Shezan, or Slim Jim, or any single product on its own. Rather, it is about the quiet realisation that we used to be content with very little, and that contentment was not something we had to buy on installments.
So, the next time you find a dusty Shezan in the back of some corner shop fridge, do yourself a favour. Buy it. Pierce the carton with the comically inadequate straw. Take that first overly sweet sip. And allow yourself a few seconds of remembering a Pakistan where the load-shedding was bad, the cricket team was unpredictable, and somehow, despite everything, we still felt like the future was going to be alright.It probably still is. Just possibly with a Shezan in hand.
