Karachi in Fragments
Shahid kept his pigeons in a coop on the roof of his home, nested somewhere in the anthill labyrinth of Karachi's oldest neighbourhood, Lyari. The building was crumbling in places, but the coop was of the modern variety, replete with receding ledges and fluorescent lighting, and the birds' white feathers and painted bodies plump from a luxurious diet of wheat, black chickpeas and almonds. ‘Salman,’ ‘Govinda,’ ‘Katrina,’- thirty or forty Bollywood-named birds resided here, cajoled and trained for competition, groomed to be ‘flyers’ or ‘leaders’. A young, speckled Afghan pigeon can cost tens of thousands of rupees, sometimes payable in instalments. Upon arrival it is completely plucked. Helpless and flightless, the newly born bird is carefully fed and cared for. Forty days later its loyalty is measured in its consistent return from heights and distances difficult to discern with the naked eye.
Shahid often spent his evenings lying on his back, watching these birds, listening to their barely audible evening coo. Twenty five nearby pigeon racers had organized a tournament for later that month. Shahid and the others had spent 4,000 rupees to enter; the owner of the bird that stayed in the air the longest would be declared the winner. First prize was a motorcycle, but Shahid hoped to win the third prize, a television. His friends and neighbours were all lovingly grooming their birds on nearby rooftops, tenderly feeding them ‘motor-on’ pills, his name for the amphetamine that would ensure the birds' high flights. The pigeons were his most prized possession; every evening he initiated his eight year old son into the craft, as Mir Nihal did for Asghar, in Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi. But the pigeon racers of today aren't the crumbling oligarchy of old. In fact they are new subjects, with unprecedented desires and novel political affiliations. On the cusp of an amorphous and ill-defined middle class, these are the new actors in the story of modern Karachi.
The deceptively capacious rooftop sat three stories above the capillary lanes below. Drying laundry hung over the chest-high boundary wall; a baby goat tethered to the leg of a sagging charpoy nipped at a pile of hay. Under the adulterated purple night sky, an accretion of uneven city spread in all directions. It seemed possible to skip along the top of Lyari, roof to roof, all the way to the sea.
From the ports and beaches on the Arabian Sea to the south, Karachi crawls haphazardly north over green mangrove swamps and along the Lyari and Malir rivers, west to the lunar mountains of Baluchistan, and northeast into the flat scrubland of Sindh. Each year, the city colonizes a little more of the desert to make space for thousands upon thousands of new residents.
Here, there is room for everyone; Karachi is now a Pakistan in miniature, with all of its ethnic and linguistic DNA in competition and combination. The broad strokes are familiar: Muhajir and Pashtun, Sindhi and Punjabi and Baloch. But these labels fail to contain multitudes of sub-groups who defy the taxonomy. What of the Kashmiris, Seraikis, Swatis, Biharis, Bengalis, Goans, Parsis, Hindu banyas?
The cacophonous roadside bus depots near Cantt Station or out in Sohrab Goth are in perpetual motion. Long modern coaches inhale and exhale passengers 24-hours a day, the bus's front windows displaying the names of their far-flung destinations in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (formerly North West Frontier), Punjab, Sindh and beyond. The air-conditioned conveyors drop passengers at countless near-anonymous villages and towns along the way, a service the atrophying train network can't deliver.
The state, in fact, doesn’t do much in Karachi. In its absence ethnic bonds were the grids along which neighbourhoods developed and the voice in which demands were articulated. The narrow potentialities of patronage politics pushed out other possible configurations. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) party dominates Karachi and pioneered the city's brand of ethnic politics. The MQM claims to represent the interests of the Partition refugees from northern India, Muhajirs, who make up the largest single 'ethnic' group in the city but whose proportionate size is shrinking. Without a demographic reservoir in the provinces, many Muhajirs perceive 'their' city to be besieged by the legions of Pashtun newcomers who have imitated the MQM's politics to, among other things, organize against the MQM.
Neighbourhoods contract their ethnic political party to provide every imaginable service, from supplying water to accessing affordable housing to securing jobs and education. And sometimes, in the battle for the dwindling resources, things get ugly. It is from this conflict that modern Karachi been born. But the city is one that runs on commerce, and everyone needs everyone else. Memon developers rely on the Lyari gangsters, the Muhajir businesses rely on Pashtun labour.
It's difficult for me not to find sympathy for the MQM's story, for it is partly my family's own. More importantly, it has produced modern Karachi. Separated from their homes, without the vertebrae of kinship in a country where such biological connections are crucial, Muhajirs were excluded from jobs and resources, from the country they paid for with their blood and sacrifice. What began as a student movement turned a culturally disparate group of immigrants of a similar class into a single, invented ‘ethnic’ group, Karachi’s largest. Under democracy, they won local elections and then enforced their will ruthlessly on its streets. Soon, the ruling party, the military establishment, many inhabitants of Karachi, had all had enough, and an operation was launched in 1992 to put the party ‘in its place’. Thousands of MQM activists were killed and tortured. The favour was returned in kind. After seven years of raids and disappearances and fresh corpses in gunny bags, the operation was declared a success.
Then in 1999, the military took over government yet again, and wanting to join the end of history, its technocrats opened Pakistan to the revolutionizing flow of global capital. A thousand new economies and new desires bloomed. The MQM found its opportunity for rehabilitation in the 2002 local elections and took it, allying with the regime and becoming the party of the future, of the expanding middle classes with globalized aspirations. Without the constraints of democratic compromise, the party dreamed of creating a smoothed-out new city of malls and corporate high rises and flyovers. If whole communities of the working poor were smashed apart in the process, so be it. But during this revolution, the ranks of the city's already large Pashtun population swelled, as war displaced millions from the northwest. Eventually, the military regime began to crack and a return to democracy looked inevitable. May 12, 2007 was the tipping point.
The chief justice of Pakistan, the nemesis of former dictator Pervaiz Musharraf, scheduled a rally of his supporters in Karachi. MQM leaders said they would not allow him to leave the airport, and its armed cadres fanned out through the city in a show of force. But the unexpected happened. The parties that supported the restoration of democracy, the previously minor Awami National Party (ANP), a party of Pashtuns, and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), fought the MQM in pitched battles throughout the city. More MQM men died than anyone else. Over 60 of their sector offices were burned to the ground. The chief justice never made it out of the airport, but the ANP accomplished something far more momentous: they showed that the MQM's hegemony could be successfully challenged.
Karachi is a city of the poor. Under the new economy, with its ‘flexible labour’ and privatization of state-run corporations and all the rest of the structural adjustments of capitalist modernity, the great majority of its citizens are suffering from economic insecurity and ruthless competition. They were also in danger of being physically dispossessed by the developmental plastic surgery reshaping the city's physiognomy. The ANP's (and to a lesser extent the PPP's) street power made credible its claim that it represented a new political force in the city, and many in the working classes threw their support behind the parties, Pashtuns with the ANP and Baloch, Punjabis and others with the PPP. Whether the party elites have the interests of the poor in mind is less and less certain.
In response to its inevitable loss of electoral dominance, the MQM has catered to the varying strata of the Muhajir middle classes in Karachi, and more recently the elites, who are diverse and live more or less outside of the city's ethnic and political logic, ensconced in luxurious high-walled villas in exclusive neighbourhoods by the sea. For the middle classes they have continued to construct 'luxury' apartment blocks and gated communities, modern shopping malls, for-pay parks and public spaces. And for the elite, the flyovers and signal-free thoroughfares that can take them with ease from the upmarket area of Defence to their factories in Korangi or the airport. But this is not their story.
Saddar
A column of brown hawks circled slowly overhead. I had come to consider the local raptors, ever-present in Karachi, as the unbiased guardians of the city: the only residents with the wisdom to see all, coldly and without prejudice. In a city hissing and steaming with the inexorable change, to pause and look up at the birds provided some sense of certainty and comfort, and I had projected on to them this role of guardian observer. If you look around, wherever you might be in the city, the ragged predators are ceaselessly turning against the sky or tussling with crows or swooping down to snatch food from the ground in front of you.
On that late January day as the birds gathered like flies over carrion, I was standing on the footpath in front of the Karachi Press Club with a reporter for ‘Metro One’, a local Urdu-language news channel and another young man from ‘Khyber News’, a Pashto-language channel based in Peshawar. We were waiting for the latest episode in a long-running drama pitting the unionized workers of the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) against the latest private company to try its hand at running the city's beleaguered power utility. Seven years ago the public power company was privatized as part of Pakistan's push to sell off what were called inefficient public companies. In 2009 when KESC attempted to fire around 4,000 employees whose jobs it said had become superfluous, the workers struck back. Substations were burned, non-union employees were attacked, and KESC’s headquarters besieged.
The company responded by offering a golden handshake, which most of the striking workers accepted. A handful were rehired on low wage contract salaries with no benefits. The remaining workers have done their best to ‘disrupt business and poison the minds of our workers’, as a KESC spokesman put it. Two weeks after the rally, I attended another of these disruptions in front of the gleaming new KESC offices. There, I saw a striking worker set himself on fire. Nearly every day for a week after this I received calls from the leader of the union, Ikhlaq Khan, who asked me to attend the next decisive, all-important protest. But public sympathies dwindled, the press gave less column inches and airtime. The 80-plus-year-old KESC union was limping towards the grave.
With or without the union, you can still set your watch to the daily blackouts in most parts of Karachi. Electricity prices have nearly tripled since 2004, even with continuing subsidies, while the new corporate managers are paid indecently generous salaries. In upmarket neighbourhoods like Clifton, where theft is supposedly less frequent, residents suffer fewer blackouts and there are even call centre hot-lines to report disruptions. But in middle-class areas, blackouts can last half the day. The same is true for industrial zones, compounding the misery of increasingly insecure labourers who can't work when factories go limp during load-shedding. In the poorest neighbourhoods, where the parasitic kunda power theft system of wires, metal hooks and bamboo poles is necessary and bills go unpaid, power is simply shut off.
A couple of dozen of the striking workers arrived to commandeer the street. Middle-aged, strong, the KESC workers were a multi-ethnic lot, no small feat for a political organization in Karachi. Some carried black flags, some red, some wore shalwar kamiz, some sweat-stained shirts and pants. The leaders of the workers union climbed on to the bed of the truck, flanked by a young boy who looked about ten standing with them. ‘We will be victorious, even if it means waging war on these sister fuckers!’ one screamed into the microphone. ‘Your voice will even reach the ears of the Zardari!’ In between speakers a random member of the crowd broke through the hum of chatter with a chant that was then taken up by everyone: ‘Mazdoor, Mazdoor - Bhai, Bhai!’ (labourers, labourers, brothers, brothers). Another speaker took the microphone, ‘In Musharraf's time we ate lathis and dandas (sticks) and now in Zardari's time we're eating bullets. But nothing can stop us!’ The boy punched his fist into the air.
While the workers posed for the line of cameramen standing between themselves and the speakers, I noticed a group of men, four or five, standing to my right near the press club gate. They were religious men, wearing fist-length beards, prayer caps and shalvar kamiz, and they all appeared to be in their twenties. Crisp clothes, clean appearances and cool countenances. Youths with wispy beards arrived holding the black and white striped flags of the right-wing religious party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazlur (JUI-F). They wore shalvar kamiz but with a modern flair: designer glasses and expensive looking leather loafers. I immediately understood in some phenomenological way the charismatic appeal of these Islamists, their seductive pheromone of purpose and power. The religious men watched amusedly as a dark, grey-haired worker at the rally recited an Urdu poem over the truck's PA system. The crumpled Baloch and Pathan and Bihari workers looked tired on their feet, attention waning, shoulders drooping.
As the man transitioned from poem into song, another flatbed truck slowly turned the corner at the far end of the street and inched towards us. Young men hung off of its sides waving the black and white stripped flag of the JUI-F. Hundreds of young acolytes followed on motorcycles, many with three or four men and boys riding sandwiched together. They were at the head of a procession that had been winding through the city, with a stop at the press club, to drum up support for a rally the party was holding later that week. The cleric’s proclamations and the growl of the engines combined to drown out the union leader, his poem ground to bits. As the truck rolled closer at a snail's pace, the first phalanx of motorcycles began to pass the KESC truck, JUI-F flags fluttering passed the red ones, barely touching.
De Silva Town
The JUI-F rally a few days later drew hundreds of thousands of Karachi's Pashtuns. It was at least as big as cricket star turned politician Imran Khan's heralded rally a month earlier and seemed to indicate that whatever monopoly the ANP had enjoyed over Karachi's Pashtun communities was now in question. Abdullah, a Pashtun man from Karachi, chuckled when I asked him if the ANP would be replaced by the JUI-F or Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI). ‘Those were all jobless madrassa students with nothing better to do,’ he said. ‘But many Pashtuns are very tired of the ANP.’ He said they were corrupt, and moreover, had failed to protect average Pashtuns from political violence.
I had met Abdullah in 2010 while reporting on the endless scourge of drive-by assassinations between Muhajir and Pashtun political activists. At that time, the ANP had Abdullah's support, though he said he would rather focus on making money than become a card-holding party worker. Now, less than eighteen months later, Abdullah said he would vote for the PTI. We were chatting in front of the car rental shop his cousin owned in Liaqatabad. Abdullah, 28, was born and raised in a Karachi neighbourhood called De Silva Town. He was a bit self conscious of his relatively dark complexion, and once explained that he wasn't as ‘beautiful’ as the members of his extended family in Manshera, in Pakistan's northwest, because of Karachi. ‘They put chemicals in the milk here. And if you go to a hotel run by Muhajirs they don't even put buffalo milk in the tea, they use powder,’ he had said. ‘In my village the milk is fresh and the weather is cold, unlike Karachi. So I have black skin.’
Abdullah has a wife and two young sons, one three and one six. They live with his parents and one of his brothers and his family in a two-story house that he proudly tells me the family owns. Abdullah began working as a driver when he was twelve, and it seems like he knows every lane and gully in Karachi. Along with driving, he also makes money as an ace cricket batsman, a ringer in neighbourhood leagues. Abdullah exists at the upwardly mobile end of the Pashtun working class. He saved enough to put himself through English language courses and he hopes to invest in a transport company with his brothers one day. But he still lives hand to mouth, earning around Rs20,000 every month.
Although household expenses are split between him and his brother, Abdullah manages to save very little after paying private school fees for both of his sons and as well as the rising electricity bills. If there is a strike, increasingly common, or another round of violent political skirmishing, of which ordinary Pashtuns are the most common victims, he loses his wages for the day. During the Ramadan violence in the summer of 2011, he didn't work for a week straight as one of the worst bouts of political violence in a decade bloodied the streets around his house. With his Gold Leaf cigarette smoking between his fingers he points to the charred wisps above the doorway behind us, the result of Molotov cocktails.
Abdullah offered to introduce me to his friends, and that night we drove towards De Silva Town to meet them. We cut through North Nazimabad on a main street, past the big gated houses and the dozens of checkpoint style gates that close off the inner streets from the thoroughfares. De Silva Town shares with Katti Pahari, an ANP stronghold, the rocky ridge that separates Muhajir North Nazimabad from Pashtun Qasba Colony and multi-ethnic Orangi Town. This small triangle has been a violent flashpoint in the recent political violence.
As we turned on to the road at the base of the ridge, the tricolour stripes of MQM flags gave way to the red flags of the ANP. In the midst were the crescented green and white of the PTI, as well as the black and white flags of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a banned extremist anti-Shia party. The clouds had dissipated to reveal a large jaundiced moon, which hung over the ridge as we drove. Lights from the rows of shops and stalls illuminated bullet holes pockmarking a school. Further along, walls daubed with graffiti lionizing ‘Bollu’, an infamous local ANP gunman.
We parked the car in front of a ‘Quetta hotel’ tea shop. Quetta hotels run by Pashtuns from Balochistan, are all over Karachi and serve the city's best tea, kept on the boil and made with fresh buffalo's milk. Anyone, of any ethnicity, will concede to its superiority. As we walked toward one of the gulleys leading into the heart of the neighbourhood I asked Abdullah if we needed to take the necessary precaution of having someone watch the car. He wrinkled his brow and smiled, as if it should have been clear: ‘I don't even need to lock it here. This is my area.’
Nearby was a pool hall with no door, its gulley-facing side open, but we had to squeeze by the big carom board, set atop precarious stacks of cinderblock and scrapwood, to get inside. ‘What's going on, you motherless pimp?,’ Abdullah said to Ronny, the proprietor, as he feinted a jab at his stomach. The locals looked up from their games and chuckled. Ronny was tall with a gaunt face, hair parted on the side. He cut a comical figure, in a zip up Notre Dame hooded sweatshirt with a winter scarf wrapped several times around his neck and white woolen gloves. He circled from station to station, collecting money, chiding the players, asking for cigarettes. After each round, he would kneel beneath the pool table hammering at a creaky leg. The hall was about 25 by 10 feet, its walls originally painted a pleasing eggshell blue. But in that oft-described Sub-Continental aesthetic, the black grime and paan spit had crept a good four feet up the walls, decorated with a gold 'Allah' in Arabic as well as a silver cross, and a poster of Bollywood star John Abraham. One could play foosball here, or PacMan, as well as carom and billiards, but the real drama was in politics.
The pool hall was full of local Christian teenagers. They looked a lot like the young middle and upper middle class Muhajir kids you might see in the Allahwali Chowrangi McDonald's or the Millennium mall in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, except a bit more frayed around the edges. Globally hip, with hyper-stylized asymmetrical haircuts, tight jeans, Che Guevara t-shirts. They all seemed to know Abdullah and his friends and would come over to us at the carom table and sledge us before we took our turns.
I lined up what looked to be an easy shot, and flicked the donut shaped striker, which knocked my piece away from the hole. One of the kids, named Yousaf, with bleached blonde hair, asked me in a whispered deadpan, ‘Oh ho, are you feeling cold?’ They had assumed I was a local Pashtun but when I told them I was an American journalist they crowded around, eager that I take their pictures. All of them were in secondary school, and some could speak English. Most of their parents were ‘sweepers’ but none of the kids were willing to do to the same work. The older ones all said they hoped to become nurses.
A 20 year old named Johnson said that the neighbourhood used to be controlled by the MQM. But even then, De Silva Town had become dominated, demographically, by Pashtuns. After the irruptions of 12 May, ANP fighters threw out the MQM leader in charge of the sector, effectively bringing De Silva Town under ANP sovereignty. The ANP gave the Christian community a choice: drop its support for the MQM and live in peace, or else. Johnson thought that by and large the Christians still notionally supported the MQM but in practice go to the local ANP functionaries when they need something taken care of. This kind of double (and triple) bind was in some way emblematic of the complexity of Karachi’s politics.
I asked Abdullah and his friends about what life was like for them, as Pashtuns, in Karachi as they navigated political violence and ethnic suspicion. Abdullah said that he has been trapped in his house for days during the bouts of violence, his children frightened, every time a loved one's phone rings and rings with no answer the specter of death appears. He has Muhajir friends, from cricket, from his English classes, even from the neighbourhood. But after the ultra-violent summer of 2011, they have all moved away, to safer, homogenous spaces. The same is true of his relatives who lived in mixed areas. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the prevailing state of nature has put into motion a self-cleansing. It's not about hatred or being scared of one's neighbors, it is the result of fear of being caught in the crossfire, on the wrong bus, when the parties decide it's time to play the game.
Abdullah himself was almost killed in that summer of 2011, on the night the former home minister Zulfikar Mirza gave an incendiary speech in which he said Muhajirs had come to Sindh ‘naked and starving’. Abdullah was taking a Muhajir man from Malir to a family wedding. The rental Corola was decorated with flowers; it was meant to be the couple's honeymoon car. But the speech aired and the backlash began on the streets immediately. The man asked Abdullah to turn around; the wedding was canceled. He took the man back to his house, expecting to be invited in until the city stabilized. But the man closed his front gate, and that was that. ‘I didn't know what I was going to do,’ Abdullah said. He thought the decorated car would save him. It's a Muhajir thing, not a Pashtun custom. But he was wrong. When he drove out of the man's lane onto a main road, four motorbikes, each with a gunman riding pillion holding a pistol or AK-47, cut him off, men pointing guns at him from three sides. One of them reached through the rolled down window and punched him. ‘Aap kaun?’ the man asked. Who are you? More to the point: what are you?
Abdullah thought that they would shoot him. But he had an idea. He told them that he was Hazarawal, from a region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa agitating for autonomy. They asked him to speak Hindko to prove it. He couldn't. He told them a partial lie and said he couldn't speak it because he was born and raised in Karachi. They threatened to kill him. They would surely kill him. But he told them to call his friend, a Hazarawal, who was in the MQM. They did and the friend vouched. The men let him go. Abdullah sped home on deserted streets, faster than he'd ever driven in the city, doubling back when he saw men with guns burning tires at intersections.
In some ways, the narrow escape routes of Abdullah and many of his friends explain the anxious rise of the ANP. The story of Jehangir, who was walking in just in time to witness my demise on the carom board, was a case in point. Jehangir was tall and muscular, handsome in his long hair and pakul. An activist for the party hoping to draw recruits, and something of a playboy interested in luring other kinds of admirers, it was an ‘authentic’ Pashtun look that he cultivated. When I took his photo later, he looked at the image on the camera's screen and said with a wink, ‘Wow, John Abraham of the Pakhtun.’ But Jehangir also carried a pistol, which he kept sheathed in a neoprene holster and, on this night, wrapped in his brown shawl. He came inside and put the shawl-wrapped pistol on the blue metal stool next to me, and stood around waiting for us to finish.
Abdullah and another friend, Rehmat, were arguing with each other in Pashto after the former cleaned up the board with a series of laser-precise shots. ‘You should have let Taimur bhai win!’ Abdullah was scolding him. Everyone was hungry. I had been looking forward to trying a local Pashtun roadside restaurant as part of my mission to conquer and know Karachi's culinary universe. I had eaten at the most famous nihari (spicy meat curry cooked slowly) joints in Malir, had kebab fry and gola kebab on Burnes Road, cutacut (offal curry) at Noorani in Mehmoodabad. But I still had not eaten at an authentic Pushtun spot. They tried to sway my hand towards a nearby Pizza Hut. But I persisted and they settled on a place in Patel Para, a busy commercial area lined with repair shops and small restaurants catering to the drivers and mechanics and working people nearby.
Jehangir asked if I wanted to ride with him, on the motorcycle, and I climbed on unsteadily, unsure about riding pillion with an armed ANP activist, along a road through an MQM stronghold. I didn't ask him what would happen if his enemies saw us, but I did ask him about the police. Yelling over the whooshing air and traffic, Jehangir casually allayed my fears: ‘Don't worry, boss. The police are too scared to arrest party men.’
He told me with great pride that he was shot at from the overpasses on Sharah-e-Faisal as they tried to greet the chief justice at Karachi airport on 12 May. He didn't do much fighting that day, but it prepared him for what was to come. ‘We are forced to fight by the MQM; we don't want to fight,’ he said. ‘They want to kill as many Pashtuns as they can, so that we get scared and leave. But this city is ours too, we have the right to be here, just as much as they do. They are immigrants just as much as we are!’
This noble self-conception is true in a sense, but as with all ethnic politics in the city, it's been hollowed out, the empty shell of rhetoric eclipses what is a closer approximation of the truth: all political actors in Karachi use violence, or the threat of it, against their rivals. That members of their own group will be targeted is an afterthought. The mantra: get rich, get rich; kill, kill, kill. But even working-class Pashtuns are starting to see through the lie. Illusions die in Karachi. Bodies fall, blood flows, deals cut, money counted. The party leaders are growing rich, as are many Pashtuns. But most still toil, more worried about making it through the day with their lives.
Federal B: Haji Club
Not far away, in the Federal B neighbourhood, is Haji Club, the biggest gym in Karachi. Its slogan, written on its website in English, is, ‘Come as you are… leave as you want to be!’ The club is symptomatic of the desires -- and unsettling frustrations -- produced by the new economies of consumption that have accompanied Pakistan's incorporation into the global economy. The mushrooming of private media, the liberalization of finance and banking, the boom in local and multinational telecom companies have created over the past decade an important, growing middle class in the city. It has also created the potential for upward mobility, for everyone, no matter how unlikely, adding to the confusions and contradictions of urban Pakistani life.
Haji Club started as a one-story house in 1968 and has grown since then into a massive three stories sitting on two large plots. Its Muhajir neighbourhood is solidly upper middle class, well maintained, and green. The main intersections have big hoardings with photo shopped pictures of Altaf Hussain, the leader of MQM, smiling benevolently through aviator glasses or raising an index finger, mouth bent in righteous anger. Underneath there are slogans in Urdu or English and the area's ‘sector number’. ‘G.A. Altaf!’ (Brought to you by) Sector 187’. Outside of its red brick gate and pretty bougainvillea hedge there was a long line of at least three dozen motorbikes. One had the phrase, ‘Silent Lover’ painted in green on its side.
The young men who make up the majority of the club's members can only be described as a breed of hipster, native to certain sections of Muhajir Karachi. Much like the poorer Christian kids in the pool hall, they had unorthodox haircuts, pomade-assisted spikes and slicks. They wore tight jeans and tighter t-shirts from which protruded the muscles of film stars. The second floor is a full gym for the 600 plus female members, and by the early evening the post-work rush had already begun. Young and middle-aged women streamed up the staircase at the front of the club that led directly to the women's portion.
Inside, Zaid, the owner, and Muhammad Akhtar, the director, took me on a tour. Zaid, who wore a track suit and slippers, had a large belly that didn't distract from the fact of his powerful arms. Akhtar was older and exceedingly kind, with dark circles under his eyes and a melancholy air. Zaid was directly related, on his mother's side, to Bolu Pehlwan, the famous wrestler who migrated from India during Partition. Zaid's father founded the gym as a place where the local youth could ‘stop smoking cigarettes and chewing pan on the side of the road and do something productive’. They proudly showed me a picture of Mohammad Ali, the boxer, when they say he visited the gym during a trip to Pakistan in 1989.
The machines all looked familiar, but there was something rough and odd about them. They were all made from scrap metal, replicas of machines that Zaid had seen in stores or looked up online. The contraptions ingeniously bypassed the need for electricity. The stair climbers and treadmills ran on a system of gears. There was an indoor children's pool and another full size pool on a second plot, next to a workshop area filled with rusting bits of beds and furniture that Zaid would transform into workout equipment. ‘Each machine costs me about Rs25,000 to make,’ he said. ‘At the store they would be at least Rs60,000 new.’ The pool was empty through the winter but Akhtar assured me that the club's swim lessons would be packed in the summer, though, ‘it's a much more selective membership,’ he told me. ‘Before, people were always spitting paan in the water, disgusting.’
Fixing the self seems to be the new trick to getting ahead. A new focus on the body, articulating masculinity designed for a new world: self-improvement, individual effort, meritocratic gain. All over the gym, the teenagers and 20-somethings finished their sets and then unselfconsciously posed and flexed in front of one of the mirrors that lined the walls, dressed in their most stylish clothes. A young boy in white RayBan frames with no lenses and an immaculately tended hairstyle stood before a mirror, flexing his arms, turning from side to side.
Kamran, 26, was one of the happier young men I talk to in the gym. He had an enviable job as a engineer for the Sindh department of finance. He graduated from Karachi University and his father's friend who worked in the department gave him the job. Kamran had very big muscles. ‘Everyone is inspired by me. 'Kamran bhai, I want to look like you'. And a lot of them started coming to Haji Club. A lot of guys. This is why they come: every hero in Indian movies has a build now. Before none of them did, but now, you have to have a big build,’ he told me. I ask him about life in Karachi. ‘Life is very good in Karachi. You can enjoy it here to the fullest, to the point where you don't even feel like you're in Karachi,’ he said. ‘Every Saturday night we have fun. We organize parties at the beach, we go to Hawkes Bay. Sometimes it's just boys, sometimes boys and girls.’ Without lowering his voice he asked, ‘Do you like beer? I love Millennium,’ referring to the Pakistani beer sold at ‘wine’ shops all over the city.
Zahid Zaki, who was tuning-up his calf muscles when I approached him, told me that he was an engineering student at a local university and had been working out for nearly half a year. ‘I am going to be Mr Pakistan,’ was the first thing he said to me, referring to the national body building competition. He had only been in one competition, a local one, but did take fifth place. He looked fit but wasn't exactly of Arnold Schwarzenegger proportions. ‘I will take steroids. Without them it will be impossible,’ he said, without hesitation. Akhtar had told me that steroid use is rampant in Pakistan's body building world and that suppliers routinely come by the gym and ask if they can set up a booth to give out free samples. I tell him that the drugs are not safe, at least that's what they say in America. ‘No, no, there are no side effects,’ he assured me. ‘If you're under professional guidance they'll tell you how to use them correctly.’
Guru Mandir
Somewhere near Guru Mandir, one evening, I found myself sitting on the red floral print carpet of a bookie's safe house. The naked edge of the boarded-over window allowed an orange blade of sunset to cut through a widening waft of smoke. Its source was a man sitting cross-legged and smoking a large joint. His beard and the dark prayer indentation on his forehead seemed at ease with his blood-shot eyes. The apartment was one of a handful the bookie maintained for his small operation, rotating between them every few days. He and his crew worked in shifts of varying length, depending on the how busy a sports day it happened to be. The bookie handled bets on many sports, but mostly cricket, as well as wagers on a range of mundane events. T20 matches were the busiest time, and the crew had to work quickly and precisely, like a production line, to keep track of all the sets of numbers.
A burly Pashtun man in a blue shalvar kamiz, with a kalashnikov dangling upside down from his shoulder, had let me and my guide into the small fourth-floor apartment in a nondescript residential building. We squeezed down a narrow corridor into the sitting room, which had been converted into the ‘office’, and sat against the far wall. The bookie was listening intently, the phone next to him on speaker. The man on the other end updated the odds on the Bangladesh Premier League T20 match after what seemed like every ball. The bookie wore a brown leather motorcycle jacket and sweat poured down his forehead. A crescent of balled-up damp tissues in front of him grew as he he dabbed his brow every minute.
The mechanics of betting in Karachi are well-established. The man on the phone was based in Ghaas Mandi in Lyari, the neighbourhood that is a world unto itself within the city. He set the odds for a number of bookmakers in Karachi. Bigger operations were affiliated with the big-time betting rings based in Bombay or Lahore, and their odds came from across the border. The bookie was a Gujarati-speaking Memon, and he said that the bookies he has dealt with in Bombay were Gujarati as well, so they got along. One of his workers manned the row of ten land-line telephones and also a computer. He logged the bets into a spreadsheet program. What happened if they botched a number? I asked. ‘This never happens because we record every single call,’ he replied.
The bookie said he was always looking to get out of this line of work; the tension, the paranoia, was exhausting. The intensity of human relations, of having to deal like a psychologist with bettors who couldn't pay, cajoling them to give their cars or wife's jewellery. In the last instance there's the violence, which the bookie said he very much disdained but, when it becomes inevitable, he hires the right people for the job, usually thugs from Lyari. I ask if he has to pay bhatta - the slang for extortion money - to these same gangsters. He says he doesn't. But of the Rs7- to 10,00000 he makes every month, he pays two to the police.
Earlier in the day I was sitting on a sofa across from Arshad, the man who would later take me to the betting operation. We were in the offices of a wealthy Memon property developer named Yusuf. Yusuf, a large rotund man with hands big enough to hold three cricket balls, holds court on his couch as business partners and Memon friends circulate through to talk money or swap the day's news and stories. Yusuf speaks his Memoni Gujarati very loudly, in comical up and down tones. I had an hour to kill before Arshad and I were scheduled to visit the bookie. He was showing me the wallet-size fold-out sports schedule that his bookie distributes to clients and an SMS that the bookie sent to him that morning: ‘BPL second match. Main kaam hoga (the main work will be done) 5pm’. Arshad went back to watching the BPL match on the flat-screen TV hanging on the wall. He had a small amount, Rs3,000 he said, riding on the first inning's score and he kept a dialogue with the TV as the run rate accelerated. Talk in the developers' salon moved on to a discussion more generally about the underworld; the land developers worked in a particularly dirty and violent sector.
Pakistan's IMF-administered economic liberalization integrated Karachi into the global property boom at around the same time that some classes grew tumescent with cash. The richer oligarchy, the new rich, the growing middle classes, the army flush with post 9/11 ‘aid’ money - they all used real estate to sop up their anxious surpluses. Demands for new kinds of spaces of leisure and consumption also made land very profitable. The poor began to be dispossessed, and with a martial law regime and one political party holding all the cards, there was little they could do.
Someone described what happened next as a process of primitive accumulation by the elites, transmuting public goods into private wealth. If one had the muscle, connections, and wherewithal, one could fence off the commons or throw out the inhabitants of the goths, the original villages that Karachi, ever expanding, has since absorbed. On that public park or village, one could build a mall, an apartment complex, a bank. Others would claim it, as was their right in this Hobbesian state, and armed minions would fight it out.
The democratic government of the PPP has slowed down the rate of this accumulation to a degree by passing laws that regularized some unofficial settlements, and protected the goths. But with the scale of the profits, and natural demand, it inevitably persists; officials can be bought off, or brought in as partners in land deals. Zoning laws are ubiquitously ignored. Under democratic rule, poor Karachiites, the majority, with the help of urban land use groups, have successfully fought back in some cases to land grabbing that would otherwise dispossess them.
One of the Memon developers told me a story, as we sat drinking tea and eating fried snacks of the Gujarati variety. ‘In this business, you have to be ready to show your strength, at any time,’ Tariq began. He said that when he starts a project, depending on which part of the city it is in, the local political or criminal power will approach him and ask for bhatta, protection money, ‘Rs50 to 100,000 per month’ during construction. Sometimes a representative will ask him directly, sometimes they leave a parchi, a note, and sometimes they send a letter to his home. These letters usually give personal details of daily routines and children's names and urge the recipient to pay up. He received one recently that listed details about his son. He said he always has.
But he also described how he formed a productive relationship with Rehman Dakait, one of the biggest gangsters of Lyari, after he began paying bhatta. Whenever he needed to show his strength, Tariq called on Rehman to flex. In the story he told, he said that he had arranged to buy an old apartment building in 2006 and planned to put up a more up-scale building in its place. Tariq first had to buy the flats from their individual owners, but one tenant wouldn't budge and kept asking for more and more money in exchange for selling the property. Tariq decided it was time to be strong. Rehman and his thugs kidnapped the holdout and took him to one of Tariq's unfinished buildings. A band saw stood in the middle of the room, over it the man was held as the saw's blade spun to life. The man was given a simple choice: sell the flat or else. Today, the upscale apartment building is full of happy residents.
Lyari
Even as they fall victim to it, land developers like Tariq need Lyari's muscle to operate in Karachi's law-of-the-concrete-jungle property market, where the potential profits dwarf the fees paid for services and extorted as ‘protection’. In fact, Lyari gets used in many ways by the powerful. It has provided a loyal vote bank to the PPP since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's populist government in the 1970s. Lyari was a stronghold of the Left opposition to Ziaul Haq's martial law rule of the 1980s, and Lyari's gangs evolved out of the militant anti-Zia movement much in the same way that Los Angeles' ‘Blood and Crips’ were the post-ideological bastard children of the Black Panthers.
Lyari is the only significant area of Karachi that votes for the PPP, and the party uses it to launch the careers of its politicians. It's likely that Bilawal Bhutto, President Asif Zardari's son, will run from Lyari when his time comes to inherit the party, even though he has barely spent time in Karachi, let alone Lyari. But while the party takes Lyari for granted in its electoral strategies, Lyari's fortunes have changed very little. After Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan in 2007, the gangster Rehman Dakait more or less extinguished the endless gang war that had torn Lyari apart. He brought the neighbourhood factions that had been fighting each other over the control of turf, drug markets, smuggling routes, extortion together under the umbrella of an organization he called the People's Amn Committee - amn meaning ‘peace’. With most of the gangs united behind him, and the fires of daily violence doused, Rehman wanted a place in the PPP power structure; one of Lyari's own was determined to control its destiny. Rehman was killed in a police encounter in 2009. Many say the PPP was responsible: it wanted Lyari back in its place. But as everywhere else in Karachi, Lyarians aren't willing to walk backwards in time and accept the old reality; it's not even possible.
A friend of mine who reports for local television had become personally familiar with Lyari over the years. He offered to introduce me to the men who had inherited Rehman's mandate. They're all heart, he said: ‘They want Lyari to stand on its own.’ And in a way this is true: they want to be the patrons of Lyari and provide leadership that responds to immediate needs. But they are also undoubtedly still neck-deep in crime and violence and while they are officially banned, Amn Committee leaders appear in television interviews and at political rallies. With the MQM on a back foot, they have now entered the fray of Karachi's patronage politics.
My friend hadn't been able to get through to the Amn Committee leaders beforehand so we had to rely on an alternative network of communication. We pulled over near Lea Market, in the heart of Lyari and he approached two grease-stained mechanics working on an old black and yellow taxi. ‘We're looking for Uzair bhai, of the Amn Committee. Do you know where he is tonight?’, my friend asked. One of the Baloch mechanics wiped off his hands on his kamiz and gave us a suspicious look: ‘I don't know who you're talking about.’ My friend explained that we were journalists and that he knew brother Uzair but that he couldn't get through on his mobile phone. The mechanic reached into his pocket and used his mobile to make a call. Then he hung us and said: ‘Drive two lanes down and take a right. They're at the old hospital’.
If you drive through Lyari, your immediate sense is that this is a world apart from the Karachi that Pakistan knows. The people look different and speak languages that, for an outsider, are difficult to place. It's dominated by the Baloch, and many of them came long ago from the Makran coast and are of black African descent. Kids in Lyari don't play cricket, they prefer football and boxing, and many will swear to you that Lyari has more football clubs than Rio. There's a bit of favela flavour to the place. You see boys wearing Ronaldinho jerseys with their shalvars. ‘FC Barcelona Messi’ was spray painted in black on a wall. Lyari has its own pop singers and rappers, unheard of outside its remit. Lyari's identity, it seems, is constructed on an anti-identity, on its difference from mainstream Karachi culture. Lyarians speak in terms of being black, sheedi, as they call it, not Pakistani or Muslim in the first instance.
My friend parked the car in front of the Amn Committee headquarters. It looked like an abandoned municipal building, but one that someone had begun to renovate before giving up halfway. There was scaffolding over the front gate and planks of wood ran through it, over unpaved dirt. The area's electricity was cut and the shadows cast by the empty-looking building obscured the faces of those hanging around in front.
The young sheedi men perched on the boundary like hawks stared us down as we walked by them into the courtyard but they didn't stop us or ask about our business there. I tossed my friend a look. He replied, ‘Don't worry, they knew we were here before we even asked those guys for directions.’ Lyari, perhaps as a result of its insularity and impenetrability, particularly during times of conflict, radiates a feeling of surveillance. You always have the sense that you are being watched by many eyes.
Uzair Baloch and his lieutenant Zafar Baloch sat at the far end of the courtyard, under a neem tree. A group of men hovered around the pair, talking with each other and smoking cigarettes. There were no guns in sight. Zafar was bearlike, with drooping, doleful eyes. He was holding an infant girl in a purple frock and pigtails who laughed and squealed. ‘Come, come, we've been waiting for you,’ he said with a big smile and a tinge of lisp, and we sat in the white plastic chairs arrayed in a circle. His unusually baggy shalvar caught awkwardly on the metal rods screwed into his right leg where shrapnel from a hand grenade had nearly killed him last year. Uzair was a smaller man, but through his economy of expression and speech exuded cold power rather than Zafar's avuncular warmth.
I asked them how the Amn Committee had tried to raise the status quo in Lyari. Uzair, the leader, stared intently into the glow of his smartphone, letting Zafar articulate the Committee’s narrative of redemption and persecution. ‘We made one voice so that no one can ignore Lyari anymore,’ Zafar began, tapping the ground with his cane for emphasis. ‘We want to break the mindset of Lyari, that is the biggest problem. If we go to Gulshan or Nazimabad (Muhajir neighbourhoods) and we see all of the schools and the businesses and the clean roads, we realize, where are we living? But just as Mutthaida [the MQM] did it for themselves, it's for us to worry about how to change ourselves. I will surely not leave things this way for my children. We cannot leave here - what, go back to Balochistan? My great-great grandfather was born in Karachi. So I am not going to let my children be destroyed by the gun culture and drug culture that has been imposed on us by those who want to take over Lyari, that has destroyed so many people here.’
They said they were tired of sacrificing for the PPP and then discarded when the party has no use for Lyari. ‘That is what we wanted to change. Three times they [PPP] came in to power and didn't do anything for us. The fourth time, it is only because Uzair bhai is screaming all the time that Lyari gets any money for development. The MQM gets jobs in the police and appointments. We are PPP, its backbone in Karachi, and we don't get anything. They are better off that they think about this before we do. If Lyari is Bilawal's constituency, then develop it, prove that it's yours. We will make him prove it. ‘ Lyari and the PAC are interchangeable terms with Zafar and Uzair, a trait common to all of the political groups in Karachi, who conflate parties, peoples and neighbourhoods in a self-serving abstraction.
Zafar's mobile rang and interrupted our conversation. He spoke in a hurried Balochi, briefly, and hung up. ‘Commando!’ he yelled, and a sheedi man wearing a kaffiyeh stepped out of the building behind us. Zafar said something to him and the man walked across the courtyard into the old hospital cum headquarters. A few moments later, another man walked out carrying a holster with two pistols. He put it on underneath his jacket, got on a motorbike that was parked next to the boundary wall, and rode out into the street. There are so many anecdotes of violence that pepper the narrative of the Amn Committee. I thought of the massacre at Sher Shah during the violent summer and the extortion letter that one of the Memon businessmen had received that had been signed ‘Uzair bhai’.
I asked Zafar about the violence of the previous summer and what the PAC's role in it had been. He told the stories of two grenade attacks, within the span of a month, the second one nearly taking his life. He had been having tea at nearby Lea Market just before midnight when he walked into the street to talk to a boy who was having trouble at work. Suddenly, the electricity went out, and the night swallowed everything, he said. The would-be assassins had found their moment, and they shot at Zafar and then threw a grenade, which nearly ripped off his leg. Who did it, I asked. He claimed that they had found cells of terrorists hiding out on the outskirts of Lyari, killers he alleged worked for the MQM. ‘If you use fire against us, you will get fire in return,’ he said.
An attendant signalled a visitor, interrupting our conversation again. A group of women approached, one older, holding an infant, the others carrying plastic folders, dressed in brown niqabs. The older woman talked to Uzair in Balochi and then the girls introduced themselves to him, each shaking his hand in turn. I could make out the words ‘CV’ and ‘medical college’. They were asking for the PAC's help finding placement in a Karachi college.
My friend and I got back in our car and drove past Cheel Chowk toward the port, and then out into the city. As we sped over the new curving flyover, the yellow lights of Karachi Port illuminated the serene mechanical off loaders, their Chinese operators sitting high up in the cabins, guiding the steel dinosaurs slowly to and fro along the silent dock. I had visited the port a few weeks earlier and saw the blockaded American Humvees and shipping containers of material, sent for the NATO troops in Afghanistan, gathering a veil of brown dust.
My mobile rang. There had been another grenade attack in Lyari. Or was it a bomb? People from the Amn Committee had died. The caller, another friend, wanted to know if we were alright. We were out of harm's way, I told him. But things would only get worse for Zafar and Uzair. Their vision for Lyari wouldn't be able to survive the reality of their on-going connections to the gangs of Lyari, and their weak political position. Through the late winter and spring of 2012, demands for protection money from Muhajir traders and businessmen, the parchis delivered in Uzair's name, piled up voluminously. The MQM demanded the PPP provincial government, who controls the city police, carry out an operation in Lyari to cleanse it of the criminal menace. Eventually, the government assented, and the police moved in. Local press reported that the police were guided through Lyari's serpentine lanes by masked members of the Arshad Pappu gang, sworn enemies of the PAC dating back to the days of Rehman and, many say, proxies for the MQM. At first, aggrieved Lyarians fought back with stones and Molotov cocktails, then, day after day, police fought pitched battles with PAC members, who fired machine guns and rocket propelled grenades from windows and rooftops. Bounties of Rs1 million and Rs300,000 were placed on Uzair's and Zafar's heads, respectively. Word on the street was that Uzair was hiding out in Baluchistan.
A newspaper editorialized that, ‘While Lyari is in the throes of violence, the rest of Karachi remains relatively unaffected, indicating there is a disconnect between what goes on in that forsaken corner of the city and the rest of the metropolis’. But this, I thought, was wrong. Lyari is not some rotting limb hanging limply at Karachi's side. Lyari is like an organ vital to the health of the body, but one that has been neglected.
Next Decades
In less than fifteen years the waves of migration to Karachi are expected to subside. When they do, the city will be even more diverse than it is today. No ethnic group will have sufficient numbers to dominate, and the illusion that any party can rule alone, or that any party can be completely side-lined, will disappear. In order to maintain a competitive electoral advantage, Karachi's rulers, one hopes, will be forced to transcend their myopic communal vision and appeal to the interests of its poor inhabitants. The ethnic nationalist parties, the MQM and ANP, and the PPP, all have similar long term political goals and talk about providing basic amenities and security for the city. They all advocate greater provincial autonomy, for example, and more equal distribution of national resources. Crucially, none of them cloak their interests in the vestments of religion. Karachi’s future thus need not repeat the mistakes of its past.
Karachi is a young city. The average age of the inhabitants is about 25. It is this young generation that will shape the future of the city. In Qasba Colony, a Pashtun-majority neighbourhood that has seen more than its share of target killing, I met Imran, a high school student who lived with his family. Imran's mother was Muhajir and father Pashtun; both were Karachi natives. When the violence begins, Imran makes sure to call his friends and relatives, of many ethnicities, who live in other parts of town, and they do the same. Sitting on the cool concrete floor of his home, I asked Imran if he felt as torn as the city itself, between allegiances, even within his own family. ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘I understand both sides. But the truth is that it is not a war of languages, it is a war of the parties.’ He admitted that fear had become ingrained in the city's psyche, and said that his friends tell rickshaw drivers to take routes that avoid specific ethnic neighbourhoods. ‘But I have been all over Pakistan and even to India, and I can say this: I never want to live anywhere else but here.’