Resilient city

This elegant and compelling biography of Karachi after Partition may have overdone the violent face of a vibrant city.

Steve Inskeep’s Instant City is not quite Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, the racy, voyeuristic biography of Mumbai replete with sensuous bar girls, brazen gangsters and hard-bitten cops. Instead, Inskeep’s book on Karachi is an elegant, meditative journey through one of the great but troubled cities in South Asia.

Not many cities are born. They just happen. Or rather, they are living organisms, expanding their contours with each new busload of migrants that arrives. Karachi, though, was re-born in 1947, mid-wifed by Partition and accompanied by an orgy of violence that took place on both sides of the border. Before 1947, the city was 51 per cent Hindu. After Partition, most Hindus fled to India, while droves of Muslims from Uttar Pradesh migrated to the city and were dubbed “Mohajir”, forever settlers amongst natives.

 

Inskeep deftly traces the new beginnings of this city which was, in essence, part of an overarching project of building a nation— an “imagined community”, in the words of Benedict Anderson. Jinnah, a Shia, may have been a Scotch-drinking secularist but “Pakistan was also a laboratory for competing notions of religion and its relation to the state,” says Inskeep. This meant that in the absence of a guiding hand (Jinnah died soon after independence), Karachi’s communities turned on each other, and the past decades have been marked more by Shia-Sunni bloodbaths and Mohajir-PPP-Pakhtun urban wars than Taliban-style terror campaigns.

So lethal has this onslaught of violence been that Inskeep mentions a Karachi psychiatrist’s analysis that “massive numbers of people in Karachi were suffering from post-traumatic stress — it usually went untreated. Many people responded to Karachi’s trouble by living in a lower gear, limiting their ambitions and moving about like the ‘living dead’. They’d lost hope, he said.” Inskeep is clearly obsessed by the narratives of violence in Karachi, so much so that an infamous bombing of a Shia Ashura procession on December 28, 2009 forms the spine of the book.

Its strengths are Inskeep’s vivid portraits: the curmudgeonly Ardeshir Cowasjee, the Parsi heir to a shipping fortune that was seized and nationalised by Bhutto, forcing Cowasjee’s metamorphosis into Karachi’s most caustic columnist; Nawaz Khan, an enterprising migrant turned cloth smuggler turned real-estate developer; K Punniah, editor of Sind Observer, who was so distraught about Karachi’s transformation that he eventually returned to Bangalore and then was found dead on a Bombay road due to a broken heart.

The most striking one is that of Abdul Sattar Edhi, the founder of the Edhi Foundation, the leading charity in Pakistan, famous for its ambulances. Despite running a multimillion-dollar empire with offices all over the world, Edhi, now 86, continues to drive his ambulances himself. “I feel happy to drive an ambulance with a dead body behind,” says Edhi who arrived in his new home in 1947, a restless teenager desperate to “find himself”. After working as a street peddler and a paan seller, he started a pharmacy for the poor and helped by a donation, bought his first battered British van. An idea was born.

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By most civic measures, the Karachi that Edhi lives in today is a disaster. Its wealthy are on life support, thanks to their massive generators and outsourced tankers of water. For the rest, it means 14 hours of no electricity daily, once-a-week water supply and a constant challenge to get to work through curfews, gun battles and the occasional exploding bomb.

Yet Karachi, post-Partition, revealed the promise of a different city. Inskeep says that it had “poolrooms and restaurants for every class of people…bars where the taxi driver went…and bars which were more expensive.” “In the ‘50s, our mothers and aunts would go to watch movies with their chaperones. They would wear saris showing their bare midriffs,” a Pakistani-American anthropologist tells him. One fascinating section is devoted to city planning when Ayub Khan, post his army coup, launched a high-minded pet project to mould Karachi into a modern city by hiring Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis to shape it. The Greek had the right idea—building a sprawling, organised suburb called Korangi for the poor and integrating both poor and well-off areas with the idea of avoiding low-income ghettoes like in the West. None of that happened. When Doxiadis took a driving tour of the suburbs later he saw that “people were building squatter homes all over Korangi’s street grid…In North Karachi, the other big new suburb people turned markets into homes. They turned homes into shops.” Disillusioned, the Greek architect eventually left to plan the city of Islamabad

Still, for the well-to-do, Karachi was “swinging”. Balmy nights could be spent drinking a cold lager and jiving away at a beachfront nightclub (which would on occasion break out a striptease or a belly dance). Tony Tufail, nightclub impresario, born in Delhi and newly-minted Karachi citizen at the age of nine in 1947, was an embodiment of these times, a dreamer who hoped to bring the magic of Paris and Old Beirut to his city in the form of a casino. Right after all the tables and roulette wheels were shipped in, tragedy struck — a coup that ushered in the deeply conservative Zia. It was curtains for Tufail. Men like Zia ultimately laid waste to the dreams of many in Pakistan, primarily by giving a platform to the likes of Maulana Mawdudi who many consider the architect of an alien, deeply conservative brand of Islam that was starkly different from the pervasive Sufi strain. From then on, Karachi would never be the same.

Inskeep, a journalist for National Public Radio in the US, has a novelist’s flair and eye for exquisite detail. When describing a bomb that was defused, he observes that “hundreds of steel nuts were stuck to the glue. Someone had neatly distributed the nuts all the way around the cylinder, and lovingly pressed them into place one by one.”

Yet, even while realising that chronicling the career of a city can be a maddeningly complex task, at times I felt stifled by Inskeep’s sole fixation on violence. Instead, a vibrant city such as this deserved other snapshots — football-mad kids in Lyari, a profile of one of Karchi’s up-and-coming rock musicians, the dignified fishermen at the port of Ibrahim Hydari. Whatever. Something to give you not just death, but also a bit of life, as his book cover promises. What better way to encapsulate a city that keeps taking a beating, but gets up every time, shakes off the dust and moves on.

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INSTANT CITY
Life & Death in Karachi
Authour: Steve Inskeep
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 284
Price: Rs 599