Nasir Khan killed

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Nasir Khan killed
Harris Khalique

Nasir Khan hailed from Mardan. He was four when he moved to Karachi with his family. He grew up there, chewing paan and spitting the red saliva out with a vengeance like his mates, drinking strong tea, sharing jokes in a loud voice, playing cricket with an old bat with nails hammered into it and a tennis ball with plastic tape wrapped around, selling hairpins and waistbands in either the Nazimabad Chowrangi market or Saddar, speaking the city’s colloquial working-class Urdu. In short, a typical Karachi-style upbringing.

He attended a local municipality-run school with yellow walls and dingy rooms for a good five years. That made him literate and numerate. He also went to the local mosque for some years for an hour daily to learn to read the Quran. His father was a little irregular in these matters but his mother would always ask her son to go to the mosque whenever he was home.

At the age of 19, Khan was married to a 17-year-old cousin from Swat. They started reproducing right away as per tradition in both their family and the neighbourhood where they lived. Khan had six siblings, his wife eight. His father, after working for several years as a labourer at the Kemari Port, settled as a small vegetable vendor who would pull his cart for hours unending in the relatively middle-class neighbourhoods of Firdous Colony and Rizvia Society in the Nazimabad area, which were also not very far away from Khan’s neighbourhood of Pak Colony.

As he grew older, Nasir Khan helped his father sell vegetables in addition to his own work. But soon he graduated from selling hairpins to driving a rickshaw. He was first trained and then hired by a local rickshaw owner, who happened to be his elder sister’s father-in-law, to drive for 12 to 14 hours a day. This increased his income considerably; and from a gross income of Rs5,000 a month he started earning Rs10,000-12,000. Swiftly, the family married off Khan’s younger sister.

Nasir Khan’s father had a road accident soon after, and stayed bedridden for more than six months. The family spent everything they had on his treatment – from selling his vegetable cart to some heavy utensils they owned. He finally passed away in misery. This happened two years after Khan had started his rickshaw job and not only did his increased income deplete fast, he also came under a debt of Rs300,000 due to his father’s illness, medicines, food and other hospital charges.

Although they used to go to a government health facility, just hiring a cab to take them there and bring them back would cost them Rs400 per trip. Khan worked day in and day out without a break – unless he was ill – increased his driving hours to a minimum of 16 a day, asked every passenger who rode his rickshaw for some extra money, started eating at a shrine where free food was served, restricted his tea habit to two cups a day, did not even buy a low-cost shalwar kameez for two years and cleared all his debt.

Nasir Khan had five children when he died in a government hospital at the age of 29. He had a wife, a mother and four younger siblings to take care of as well. While in hospital, a house doctor asked him why he had such a large family at such a young age. He told her that there was a family planning clinic – run by the government – in the area he lived in but the paramedic who ran it also had five daughters and two sons of her own. At the time of his death he was surrounded by all his siblings, his mother and his wife. That was the only solace for him.

You must be thinking that this is just another story of a Pakhtun rickshaw driver killed in Karachi. It is perhaps just another story but the reasons for it are those that do not make news. Nasir Khan was not killed because of his ethnicity. Neither the MQM nor the ANP could be blamed for his death. He was not shot down on the orders of a local cleric. He was not murdered by a militant group or sectarian outfit like the TTP or the LeJ. He died of an illness – a very easily treatable stomach ailment – in the evening of a sad day that saw some other Karachi-ites killed for sectarian and political reasons.

Khan, because of the terribly hard work he had subjected himself to in order to feed and support more than ten members of his family, send two of his children to school, clear the debt the family was burdened with due to his father’s injury and long illness and also due to starving himself to save money and drinking polluted water from any source he could find, developed a disease in his stomach and intestines. He did not go to the hospital for months and suffered in silence. Neither did he have the money required for his treatment nor the time or luxury to stay away from work.

One night, when he was taken to the hospital by his wife and a neighbour after Khan spat red saliva, he looked pale and scared. This time the red was not there because of his habit of chewing betel leaves – he was now spitting blood. He was kept there for two days but could not survive. Rest in peace, Nasir Khan. You will never make news. You were an ordinary working-class Pakistani with no citizenship rights, no economic opportunities, no decent living conditions, no social safety net, no possibility to get modern education and the awareness it brings, and no access to respectable health facilities.

In these columns, we speak about failures of governance, inaccurate policy-making, terrorism, law and order, passing progressive and appropriate legislation, creating inclusive institutional frameworks and the balance between the institutions of the state. We speak about decentralisation, the macro-economic situation, sustainable businesses, IMF loans, World Bank assistance, defence expenditure, peace with India, the Nato-Isaf pull out from Afghanistan, local government elections, theocracy and secularism, and so on and so forth.

I would be the last person to undermine the importance of these issues but our discourse and narrative largely revolves around issues that concern the elite and affluent urban middle-class. There is little mention of Nasir Khan and millions like him who live in subhuman conditions across the cities and villages of Pakistan.

What the oppressed common people of Pakistan face on a daily basis is not newsworthy any more. The most our private electronic media does is pick up a case and ask for charity. There is no debate in today’s Pakistan on ending the elite capture of the state and affluent middle-class capture of our society and thinking.

Tailpiece: Speaking of the death of Nasir Khan in Karachi, I am reminded of three other deaths in recent days that must be remembered. Three gentlemen I had the honour of knowing passed away. Dr Farman Fatehpuri, an arch critic, a meticulous lexicographer, writer and intellectual died at a ripe old age. But his loss is irreparable, especially for our literary world.

Quresh Pur – TV host, narrator of documentary films, television producer and a man of letters – promoted pursuit of knowledge among young people through his graceful TV programmes. Munir Hussain, the cricket enthusiast and editor of a sports magazine, made us enjoy the action on the playing field for decades. One solace is that at least they were privileged in their deaths – neither did they die of bullet nor of poverty.
Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com

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