A city in anguish

Taj M Khattak


As Karachi matured over decades after Partition, one hoped that the mix of explosive social forces would mellow, which regrettably has not happened. There can be many reasons for this failure, but lack of good political leadership is certainly one.
If people make the city, the city also makes the people, so goes the saying. Karachi attracts poor people from all over Pakistan in search of livelihood, and a trait commonly associated with this workforce is hard work, and not much else. The most significant factor why people choose to come and live here is that the city meets their needs.
Karachi, the “City of Lights,” is a place where everyone is in a hurry to get to nowhere in particular. It is a city gasping for breath. It would not be Karachi if it didn’t have its awful traffic, perennial power cuts, water shortages, spates of violence, manmade disasters, heat, dust, filth and squalor.
Karachi is bursting at its seams and its people’s nerves are taut with stresses of every kind. The city has nasty traffic jams, but its people have got used to the inconvenience and learnt to sit through them. Because of the long hours of load-shedding, its inhabitants have generators and UPS units factored into their monthly expenses. This is a city of scarce public transport and the buses which ply are torched every now and then, on pretexts such as the recent high-profile murder in far off London, the mystery of which the much touted Metropolitan Police there has yet to solve.
Karachi is where the country’s poor flock to earn a living. On the contrary, the whole country feels the affects if the Karachi Stock Exchange goes bullish or bearish. The land mafia is in brisk business and extortion is the order of the day. It is the provincial capital of the land of the ajrak and the topi and the rulers order “cultural” road shows in the city as soon as there is the slightest rise in political temperatures in the north. Corruption is cultivated here and commotion is deliberately created. Predictions about tomorrow are as unpredictable as London’s weather.
Karachi’s children are advised not to trust people outside their homes and not eat anything offered by strangers. Watch your pockets in public transport and on streets. Keep your shoes within your sight when you go to pray in a mosque. Karachi’s public transport drivers are perpetually high on hash and its taxi drivers always out to swindle passengers. Its police appear to be meant to promote the longevity of any regime in power, many of its doctors are unregistered, engineers can cause disasters and its lawyers’ fees are beyond the reach of the common man. The flyovers and signal-free corridors are deceptive, just as the inhabitants are disillusioned.
Karachi is where political workers squat on the roads for hours and listen to telephone addresses from some leader in some far away place, with the rapt attention prayer leaders in the mosques would envy. Its politics is hilarious.
As the northbound trains chug out of Karachi Cantonment railway station, one gets glimpses of the crammed houses, blind alleys, crowded streets, clogged drains, and overflowing garbage which constitute Karachi’s “ecology.” It is a city which lives in constant fear of where the next targeted killing will take place, where the warring political factions will square it out next. It is jittery and paranoid by day, dreading the prospect of the next shutters-down call tomorrow, and panicky at night because of carjacking and cell phones being snatched at gunpoint on crossings; or worse still, women being physically assaulted by criminals prowling the streets.
It is not quite like New York, but this city hardly sleeps. It is perpetually in conflict with its inhabitants. Expensive cars, vulgar lifestyles, the compulsive greed of the rich and powerful stand out in sharp contrast to the despair and seething poverty of the slums. Despite Karachi’s glitzy veneer, alas, there are no slumdog millionaires here. It is a city of offending bureaucracy, gutka addicts, sullen shopkeepers and daredevil stunt drivers. They diminish the beauty of the city of the Quaid.
It is a city where elderly clerics climb the tallest building in the country and scan the horizon for hours looking for a moon which an able seaman through his nautical almanacs can find in ten minutes flat. It is a city where the bazaars bustle with Eid shoppers during the night as soon as the moon of the holy month of Ramadan is sighted.
It is a city of grand contradictions, where religious piety and social deviations could go in lockstep. The city is expanding, but people’s tolerance is shrinking. So many people here appear to be more shadowy than their own shadows. Yet this is where poor Pakistanis come in pursuit of their dreams and get trapped in nightmarish lives. After every cycle of targeted killings, the city rulers bury their dead in specially designated martyrs’ graveyards at the expense of the parties to which the deceased belonged, and the national airline carries the other coffins upcountry free of cost for burial. This final act rubs in the ultimate contradiction of Karachi, a city where living is expensive but dying is for free. Karachi is in anguish, a city in pain.