[Reader-list] Taimur Khan: Night falls on Karachi

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

Taimur Khan was briefly part of Visible Collective in the last year of
the Disappeared In America project (disappearedinamerica.org).

He has been pursuing print journalism while keeping his film work on
hold, and just wrote this fairly pessimistic take on Karachi.

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081205/REVIEW/266186311/1008
Night falls on Karachi

    * Last Updated: December 04. 2008 9:46PM UAE / December 4. 2008 5:46PM GMT

Visiting Pakistan for the first time in three years, Taimur Khan finds
its largest city's resilience drowned out by gunshots, fear and
uncertainty.


Fifteen years ago, late on a cool winter night in Karachi, the acrid
air was thick and still from the smoke of countless rubbish-fed fires,
burning in the city's bleary slums and makeshift encampments, keeping
people warm through the chilled hours before dawn. A car carrying four
men turned off of an empty road and parked in front of my uncle's
house in a subdivision of an affluent suburb, within sight of the
Arabian Sea. The men emerged from their vehicle carrying Kalashnikovs,
and, without knocking, were led through the front gate by my family's
cook, who lived in a small servant's quarter at the rear of the house
next to the kennel of two guard dogs.

The men entered through a side door into the kitchen, went directly to
the bedrooms where my three young female cousins slept, woke them,
ordered them not to make a sound, and took them at gunpoint into their
parents' room until they all stood a few feet from the king-size bed.
My uncle, startled out of his sleep, lunged for the pistol he kept
stowed in the bedside table. Fortunately, he was knocked unconscious
by the butt of an intruder's gun before he could reach his own. After
plundering the house, the thieves (and the cook) took off, laden with
more cash and jewellery than they had presumably hoped for. Like many
upper middle class Pakistani families, they kept large amounts of
their wealth at home, fearing that in an emergency their savings might
disappear from local banks.

This was the 1990s. Home invasions were not uncommon in Karachi during
this period. The city had become one of the world's murder capitals
and was fraying under the weight of a fierce turf war between the
city's two largest politico-ethnic groups. The Muttahida Quami
Movement represented the demographic majority, Urdu-speaking
immigrants from partitioned India. Its militia battled the Pakistan
People's Party of then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, supported
largely by the native Sindhi population. Karachi was also awash in
weapons, heroin and desperate refugees, and was reeling from the
violence these terrible economies required.

Even though Karachi smouldered for most of the decade, the perennial
narratives of Pakistan as a chaos-ridden failed state permanently on
the brink of becoming Talibanistan were flawed; local resilience and
toughness proved them only half true. During my visits, I saw the
shrines of Sufi saints, unique to South Asian Islam and especially to
Sindhi culture, teeming with worshippers; the Urdu bazaar in the old
city was packed with people buying books; and when the Indian cricket
team finally came to play, the city revelled for days. After September
11, the economy grew at a pace that rivalled India's, and, as in
India, there was for the first time the formation of a broad middle
class. Last year, an outburst of bourgeois consciousness helped force
out Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler, and demanded
elections that many hoped signalled a meaningful shift towards
democracy and away from military-feudal rule. The West was outwardly
enthralled because it seemed that Pakistan was finally on the
teleological road to liberal democracy, the only modernity it cares
about.

Two weeks ago I visited family in Karachi for the first time in three
years. The fragile optimism I encountered in 2005 has evaporated. In
the Nineties the upper middle class was comforted by the fact that no
matter how bad things became in the short term, the status quo would
always reassert itself: the military would always intervene to protect
its interests, which overlapped with theirs. The army and intelligence
agencies may have been fighting proxy wars in Afghanistan and on the
border with India, but internally, the state maintained a surface
equilibrium. But now the military is fighting a full-scale war on its
home turf with the Pakistani Taliban. The idea that the army can
maintain internal control has been revealed as fiction.

Pakistan still isn't "the most dangerous place in the world", that
sensationalist mantle thrust upon it last year by the American news
media. On my first night in town, my favourite barbecue restaurant was
still packed. But the city's mantra – "life goes on" – was muttered,
rather than spoken with its usual easy confidence. For the first time
I heard relatives talk of abandoning the country for the Gulf or North
America.

One day I went to a nearby barbershop to get a shave and have my hair
oiled. I would have walked, but my uncle insisted I go by car with a
driver – something he had never done, even after being robbed at
gunpoint in his home. As we drove past neighbours' houses, where newly
installed private security guards sat out front on charpais sipping
tea, shotguns resting across their knees, I asked the driver, a young
Sindhi from a village near the Bhutto clan's ancestral home, about the
new PPP-led government and its leader, President Asif Ali Zardari.
"Zardari's a thief," he said, echoing a sentiment I had heard from
many Pakistanis. We rounded a corner and passed a lane congested by a
maze of Baghdad-esque staggered blast walls and a cluster of
paramilitaries. It led to the house of a PPP minister. "They're
supposed to be protecting us," noted my driver. "But look, they are
too scared to even come out of their houses in their own city." Poor,
rural Sindhis have been the PPP's only reliable electoral base; things
are not as predictable now as they once were.

Pashtun refugees displaced by the fighting in the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas and the Swat valley have been arriving in
Karachi by the thousands, and kidnapping is now a lucrative business.
A few days into my stay, a family friend was abducted as he left work.
That night, when the ransom request came, the caller made no attempt
to conceal his number. It had originated in Wana, a town in the south
of FATA. The gang, while most likely based in one of Karachi's
off-limit mohallas, knew that no investigating agency would ever send
police into a district where the army was enduring heavy casualties
and American drones bombed daily.

On my last night in Karachi, as I packed for an early morning flight
back to Abu Dhabi, scattered gunfire sounded in the near distance.
"Maybe it's just kids setting off patakas,"one of my uncles reasoned.
But the staccato shots didn't stop, and were soon joined by deeper
ones. Calls were made to friends around the city: did anyone know
anything? Was the road to the airport safe? Everyone had a theory. The
MQM and the Sunni Tehreek, a religious party, had been fighting each
other almost every night for the past few weeks. Maybe their tit for
tat drive-bys had finally escalated into pitched battles. Perhaps the
Pashtuns' rivalry with the MQM over the control of working class
neighbourhoods was spilling into other sections of the city. There was
also word that Zardari was arriving from Islamabad that night; party
loyalists could be to firing into the air when he came home, reminding
everyone whose city it was. No one knew. Two weeks later, they still
don't; the independent news channels, so lauded for their fearless
coverage of last year's anti-Musharraf movement, are silent.

A couple of hours later the shooting subsided but the normal sounds of
the night – the watchman's shrill whistle, the Punjabi music from a
wedding on our street, the obnoxious horns of Karachi's famous buses –
never returned.


tkhan at thenational.ae