Karachi Nights
No matter how frenzied the exhaust-coated sun-saturated day is in Karachi—this city really lives at night.
Hawks come out against the dirty pink sunset, their wide ragged wings stretched against the salty wind rising from the clanging port. The yellow street lights buzz on, their harsh glow smeared in the heavy humid air. Children, barefoot and bored, poke their lazy limbs through wrought iron bars that cage apartment balconies.
And then all at once the rising night floods in with the call of a hundred muezzins layering like rounds until one last cry to God falls back to earth as a lonely prayer, settling somewhere among 14 million people, all jostling against each other for some small piece of economic opportunity in this explosive city.
If Lahore is this country’s soul, and Islamabad its mind, then Karachi—in all its scrappy glory—is Pakistan’s guts.
Karachi doesn’t make the list of destination international cities for most travelers. The few foreigners that still venture to Pakistan, despite nearly daily reports of a country on the brink, don’t spend much time here. Karachi can’t boast the cool self-important avenues of Islamabad or the Mogul romance of Lahore; it isn’t a pretty city—most that come here will remember it for its heat and tangled traffic, its cement block buildings and regular blackouts.
The Lonely Planet, final word in travel destinations, allots this city—spread over a thousand square miles just west of the mouth of The Indus River—a measly two pages worth of activities.
I had no intention of getting to know Karachi. My original plan, like that of most journalists in Pakistan, was to head immediately to the violence and tumult of the tribal areas, to the political talking heads of the capitol.
But Karachi immediately grabbed me by the collar and it wouldn’t let me go. And an ever shifting security situation in the north made it easy to delay plans to leave, as I extended my stay a few days at a time, armed with thin arguments about meetings and appointments that were keeping me here, in the city that was shaping my impressions of Pakistan.
As the Taliban crept into Buner and heads of state pouted their way through diplomatic meetings, I was spending my days wandering through the industrial suburbs of Sher Shah, home to the mechanics, small time machinists and child laborers that make up this stumbling country’s economic engine.
Here I talked to a father and son pulling apart discarded electronics from Dubai for the valuable metals and plastics that would make their way to smelters across the city.
I followed a sixteen year old laborer beginning a daily routine that lurched from 6am morning prayers to a shift at a bolt making factory to a few evening hours at a children’s learning center where he’s hoping to become literate and help his family out of the poverty that binds him and his nine year old brother to the whirring machines they bend over ten hours a day.
I visited the Pashtun neighborhood of Landhi, washing finger pinches of crunchy halva down with cardamom scented green tea and talking about the Taliban’s march into Swat with a family who left their fruit orchards to the fate of war.
And I stood in the broiling mid-day heat watching men in paint dotted tank tops apply neon highlights to the mythical scenes of half-naked warriors standing above defeated tigers and glowing portraits of assassinated political leader Benazir Bhutto that cover the cargo trucks that wail and spew their way from the port here to the four corners of Pakistan.
But as compelling and diverse as my days were in the city it was Karachi’s nights that kept me coming back for more. There are no nightclubs or bars due to prohibitions against alcohol, so it isn’t late night drinking that keeps the city churning through damp evenings punctuated by sudden swoops into darkness due to the overburdened electrical grid. Politics are what really keep Karachi awake.
It’s true that everyone in Pakistan, from cabbies to hotel staff, has a political debate at the ready, especially for a traveling American, but Karachi wins my personal award for political intensity.
Dinner isn’t even considered here much before eleven pm, and in my experience it’s almost never eaten alone. But before I could hope to dip marinated strands of fatty barbequed mutton into cool herb flecked yogurt sauce or squeeze the hot oil from bubbly puri bread between my teeth, there was the requisite daily political debriefing.
My evenings usually began with a trip to a café or sheesha bar--sometimes on a friend’s gravelly rooftop or crowded living room--where armed with piles of Dunhill cigarettes and the day’s headlines we all hunkered down to hours of conversation strung together by heavy politics.
A heady sense that the future of the country is being decided now, in the angry summer months of 2009, fuels the sweaty earnestness of many of these nightly meetings attended by students, political organizers, activists, NGO workers, journalists and lawyers.
Rumors and updates from military campaigns raging up north often lay the groundwork, but the conversation sweeps widely from the true nature of Islam to the tortured and destructive relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan.
Battle stories from this spring’s Long March, when many of these Karachiites piled onto the tops of buses trying to make their way to Islamabad in defense of a representative judiciary, are a frequent favorite, as are passionate arguments debating the role of class inequality in the country’s current unrest.
As an American, I am often included in these sessions under the guise that I offer an important perspective, but it’s clear that I am here to listen, not to talk. And for a journalist steeped in the one-dimensional political discourse surrounding Pakistan, there is much to learn.
Tentative suggestions that U.S. non-military aid to Pakistan might help repair the ever widening rift between our countries are immediately met with concerns that any money to the current government will be misspent and only create another generation of U.S. indentured politicians.
Assumptions that the extreme religious rhetoric of the Taliban is directed at America are quickly corrected by those that see terrorism as battle within Islam not between Islam and the rest of the world.
And happy pronouncements that a new U.S. administration may offer newly effective diplomacy in Pakistan usually provokes a round of pitying smiles, reserved for the naïve American inclined towards sound bite solutions.
By the time we all roll around again to the creation of the mujahedeen (and thus the Taliban) through the Afghan war--a moment in history whose reverberations are clearly continuing to be felt in Pakistan and the U.S.--throats are raw, stomachs are rumbling and it’s time to continue the debate over charred chicken or spicy chickpeas or fluffy piles of yellow biriyani.
Long past midnight, after the plates are scraped clean, the tea drained and the waiters exhausted, everyone pours out into the street, trying to say our goodbyes through a flurry of continuing arguments and jumbled plans to meet up again tomorrow night.
In the last few weeks, the city’s political insomnia has been hijacked by a new ominous form of nightly politics as it seems that the violence currently holding Pakistan hostage has finally arrived in Karachi. Ethnic tensions between Pashtuns from the country’s tribal areas and Urdu speaking Muhajirs hailing from Indian cities pre-partition have boiled over.
Political accusations that the city’s Pashtun communities—currently receiving fresh waves of refugees from the intensifying war in the north—might harbor terrorists have resulted in nightly riots in the city streets, midnight gun battles that have killed dozens of people.
As I finally left Karachi for Lahore in a smoggy dusk, scenes of firebombed trucks and reports of armed gangs of men were unfolding in the local news. It seems that the evening meetings of my friends here might be overshadowed for the moment, as the city—a microcosm of Pakistan—holds its breath, waiting for what the next night might bring.