ISLAMABAD: On a recent Ramadan night, Mamoon Sabri, 27, slipped into a tracksuit an hour after the iftar meal and headed to his new favorite getaway: a padel court.

Racket in hand, he walked onto the artificial turf at The Pad, Islamabad’s first padel club, as a group of his friends also arrived. Soon they began hitting forehands and backhands across the net, slamming the ball off the back wall, scooping it over the net and teasing each other with shots close to the wall — and so went on an hour-and-a-half long game of padel.

The racket sport, a mix of tennis and squash that is the fastest-growing sport in the world, is also gaining traction in Pakistan, especially in Ramadan, with its culture of sports and physical activities in parks, streets, and sports grounds after iftar and until the pre-dawn suhoor meal, fostering a sense of community and promoting health at the same time. 

At The Pad and other padel courts in the Pakistani capital, padel games are offering people both a fun-filled pastime and an opportunity to socialize and exercise in the hours between iftar and suhoor. A Ramadan tournament is taking place at The Pad currently, with more than 50 teams participating in all-girls, mixed doubles and advanced team categories. 

As of 2024, there are approximately 30 million amateur padel players worldwide, with the sport, founded in Mexico in the 1960s, now played in over 130 countries, according to the International Padel Federation.

“Padel is a great time and Ramadan is always a great time for sports in Islamabad anyway because everyone wants to play, everyone wants to stay awake till sehri [suhoor] one way or the other,” Sabri, a sports broadcaster and consultant, told Arab News shortly after winning a men’s doubles game.

Mustafa Mirza, a co-founder of The Pad, said the club was fostering an atmosphere of camaraderie in Ramadan.

“Padel is a social hub and it is linked more with the lifestyle,” Mirza said. “We have an excellent response in Ramadan. We feel that the people who were not familiar with padel, because they ventured out in Ramadan and they found this sport to be so challenging and rigorous, and then they have taken part in it.”

Indeed, from dedicated sports clubs to pop-up facilities in upscale neighborhoods, there is a surge in courts and players this Ramadan, with families, friends, and even corporate groups gathering late into the night and enjoying the sport’s social nature. Many players said they would cap off their matches with post-game hangouts at nearby cafés and restaurants where they could enjoy suhoor in groups. 

Mahnoor Khan, a 27-year-old employee at a telecom company, said she had come to the courts for the first time with her husband and a group of friends, describing padel as a “very good sport for family and friends.”

“In Islamabad you don’t have a lot of options other than dining out, so this is the very first time that they have introduced something that is other than dining out for socializing,” she told Arab News. “You have a good game, and you go out after iftar or whenever … I think the concept is now spreading really fast.”

Zainab Ameen, who manages The Pad club with her husband, another co-founder Ameen-ud-Din Hafeez, said though the club had only launched a few months ago, the response was “tremendous.”

“We never thought that we will get this kind of response. We just started with two courts and when we got a very good response, we opened two more. And now, we are going to open a futsol [arena],” she told Arab News.

What makes padel particularly appealing during Ramadan is that as a low-impact sport, padel lets one enjoy exercising without any hard strain on the muscles, thus serving as an effective means of staying fit without feeling exceedingly overwhelmed in Ramadan.

“It’s a very low skill floor for the game to play. So, anyone who is starting off will have a good time because they are going to feel like, ‘Wow, what a shot, I am a machine’,” Sabri said. 

“But then there is also a very good skill ceiling … It’s a very interesting mixture in a way most racket sports are.”

ISLAMABADL: Wearing his signature pink Foodpanda uniform, Hajji Khan stood waiting outside the white gate of a house in the Pakistani capital an hour before sunset would usher in the iftar meal in the holy month of Ramadan earlier this week. 

Minutes later, the gate opened, and a customer received his order and paid Khan, who hurriedly hopped back onto his bike and sped off to complete the next delivery for Foodpanda, a prominent online food and grocery delivery platform in Pakistan. 

The going gets a bit tough for Khan and other Foodpanda riders during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk and often order food through restaurants or home chefs for the iftar and pre-dawn suhoor meals. Because the timing of the fasting meals are set, there is no room to be late, and riders like Khan, 25, often have to break their fast on the go with water and a fried snack bought from a nearby food stall, or by sitting down for a quick, free meal at a roadside charity ‘dastarkhwan.’

“We do our best to ensure timely deliveries before iftar so that customers can break their fast peacefully,” Khan said this week as Arab News accompanied him on pre-sunset delivery runs. 

“We usually break our fast at free iftar dastarkhwans set up along the roadside. However, if I have many orders, then I break my fast while on the way to a delivery.”

The youngest of five brothers who left his home in the eastern Pakistani city of Sargodha four years ago to find work in Islamabad, Khan says he works in Ramadan from 2pm till the end of the suhoor meal at around 5am, making around Rs50,000 [$178.61] during the holy month, a modest income that barely covers basic expenses. 

GoNSave, a data company that serves leading gig platforms, said in a survey this month riders who worked during Ramadan and Eid cited personal financial needs, higher earnings from increased demand and incentives, and more job flexibility. At least 26.66 percent choose only to work during Ramadan.

’SMALL ACTS OF KINDNESS’

While there are few orders during the morning and afternoon, Ramadan rush hour begins at around 4pm, around two hours before iftar. Then, it is no doubt a challenge to navigate the city’s busy and traffic-snarled roads on an empty stomach, the aroma of food wafting from the delivery box.

“Normally the day passes smoothly while fasting, but it becomes very challenging in the afternoon, when we start delivering food orders and the smell of food intensifies our hunger,” Khan said. 

“This is our peak time, and fasting feels particularly difficult but we push ourselves to take as many orders as possible and deliver them before iftar.”

Khan, who delivers around 25 orders per day, says generous customers sometimes invite him in to break his fast if it is close to iftar time. 

These “small acts of kindness,” as Khan described them, made “all the difference” and pushed him to keep performing his duties despite the challenges. 

“Sometimes, a kind customer invites me to break my fast with them or they hand me an iftar parcel,” he said, as he stopped at a mosque for Asr, the third of five obligatory prayers in Islam.

“But if there’s nothing, I stop at a roadside dastarkhwan and share a meal with strangers who for a moment feel like family.”