[Reader-list] Devdas style, Karachi

[rehan ansari]

 Self destruction, Devdas style
 By: Rehan Ansari
 July 18,2002 Overheard at a party, a perfect Karachi story. And it�s got Devdas in it. 

Miss was going home, driving with a friend, to Defence where all homes have big gates. 

Over the course of the last 20 years boundary walls around houses in Defence have gone up half a foot a year, the rate of growth of the walls is so high that if you squint you can see them growing. If you close your eyes you can hear them growing. 

She either drives along Zamzama or over the Kala Pul or the fancy flyovers. Lots of ways to get to Defence. Whatever music they are listening in the car is not Bollywood, hip hop, rap, anything black, that�s not Defence. For my money it will be rock, pop, boy or girl band, or house music. 

Karachi has a lot of land, unlike Mumbai, the rich can build and build and still be by the sea: Phase IV, phase V existed in the 80s, and now there are phases VI, VII, VIII� you can build all the way to Kutch. 

If you are poor you can live among the poor, there is a lot of land for them too, it is not near the sea, it�s towards the hinterland of Baluchistan and Sind. Spread out like outstretched fingers are townships, and I really mean the apartheid metaphor, of Orangi, Lyari. They have been without roads, water, electricity, schools, hospitals since the birth of Pakistan. (There may be an argument for martial rule if the General gave everybody the living conditions of a cantonment.) 

I imagine the whole event as if I were in the car with her. Everything that has to do with violence and politics is true in the following story. 

We drive past the American Embassy, next to it is the office of a multinational bank, opposite which is Frere Hall. I remember I met a friend, a banker, at this multinational and we took sandwiches to the park and she showed me papers that she was carrying, some new product the bank was launching, a particularly easy-to-give loan, that�s what the marketing plan said. In her papers she showed me a section of standard directions, she said, about those to whom the loan will not be given. People identified by the part of town they lived in: Orangi, Lyari. That bench we sat on, under the red platic umbrella, is where bodies landed, flying through the air from the direction of the American embassy, after the bombing. 

We drive along Gizri. At a traffic light, two Afghan boys approach the car selling plastic rosebuds. I refuse to buy any but ask them where they are from and they say Gizri. There are katchi abadis, the Karachi term for slums, in Gizri but really Gizri is an upper class enclave, region really, it�s huge. Where are your people from? Gizri. Where were you born? Gizri. 

She has arrived home to her father�s house. Her father is the Karachi success story. From a muhajir family, professional, English-speaking, a businessman, clients are multinationals, married into a landed elite (land somewhere in India, but true blue really). So successful this man, so good with the English language, he was in a cabinet with one of the prime ministers of the 90s (There is always someone good with the English language in Pakistani civilian cabinets, Mushahid Hussain for Nawaz Sharif, Aitzaz Ahsan and Javed Jabbar for Benazir. The military never keeps one. They are the only babus who count and they ignore everybody else who speaks, particularly, the English language.) 

She is inside the car, the airconditioner is on, so is the music. Her own blaring horn, she can barely hear, the walls of the house so high, the gate so thick the chowkidar has a hard time telling that the headlights are being flicked that he is late to respond as usual. She turns her window down inadvertently. 

There is a gun to her head, a man had walked up from behind the car. She is silent, the horn is silent, he tells her to send the saheli sitting next to her inside the house to tell the parents they must come out immediately. 

They come out: the father, the important man, dishevelled, mother in a nightie. Unbeknownst to the couple the mother�s senile father has heard the commotion going on and comes out with an ornamental gun. Father has to wrestle his nawabsahib father-in-law to the ground. Man with gun, unfazed, has mother bring in jewellery and cash out of the house to the car. 

When he is satisfied he announces he needs a lift home, and that the miss in the car will drive him. They drive to sabzi mandi, the other part of town for her. Before he gets off he tells her he is going to kiss her. He does. She describes it as a �ganda sa kiss.� (Of course, what else, he doesn�t know how.) He left her a note with his name and a number and said kabhi koi kaam ho, kisi ko marwana ho, to. On the way back she takes much longer. She gets lost, somewhere behind sabzi mandi. 

Whether it�s the fighting arm of the MQM, or the sectarian outfits like Sipah e Sahaba, who murder Shia professionals, or the jihadi outfits with the suicide bombers, they are all part of a culture of death blooming for 20 years. All the assassins come from the same parts of town, those townships that are the fingers of Karachi. Fingers that come together as fists that beat 

The girl who was taken for a ride and kiss is a filmmaker. I wonder if she will make a Devdas film for her city.


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