We travelled there twice, my father and I, first in 2019 and then again in 2022. I doubt we’ll go together again. He has since had an accident and is now in a wheelchair.
Karachi doesn’t do wheelchair accessible. Over there, everyone travels the same road – the equal-opportunity highway of ramshackle rickshaws and motorcycles weaving like manic ants; buses crammed, limbs and faces jutting out of every window; emaciated horses and donkeys dragging heavy carts, steered by desperate men. Behind the smog, the sun’s bleached eye cooks the highway, bathing everything in silvery tones.
On Karachi’s main roads, ‘ramshackle rickshaws and motorcycles weave like manic ants’
When I landed in Karachi for my first visit, I was accompanying my father, the novelist Hanif, who had been invited to be a keynote speaker at the Karachi Literature Festival. My extended family lives there, and I was meeting them for the first time at the age of 24. My Pakistani heritage, a quarter of my DNA, had always felt abstract. But being there finally – at last bridging the gap in my identity – I felt both drawn and repelled, unsure if I really wanted to embrace this piece of my puzzle.
Mohammed Hanif, a highly regarded novelist and journalist, once said, ‘In Karachi, you find everything except what you’re looking for.’ As I began reading his intoxicating novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes, I started to know what he meant. Having visited India a few years before, I had expected the same kaleidoscopic streets and technicolour saris.
Sachin with his aunties Nasreen and Maheen
But there was little colour in Karachi. I’d have to travel north to the festive city of Lahore for that. Karachi is different: it’s a scarred colossus of concrete and steel, a cinderblock city of half-finished and abandoned sky-rises, military compounds and ruined beaches. At a red light, a beggar with stumps for legs rolled up to our cab on a skateboard. Our cabbie tossed him some coins and he disappeared back into the throng.
Maybe I was looking at it the wrong way. What Karachi lacked in postcard prettiness, it made up for in grit. The people are survivors, and there is great charm to their resilience and spirit. Somehow, they always manage to find a way.
Kalashnikovs are one such way. The guards outside our hotel brandished theirs casually. One eyeballed my passport, sneering at my stamps from India – Pakistan’s uneasy neighbour. ‘I got lost on my way here,’ I offered weakly. A nod. A clank. And we breached the fortress that is the Sind Club.
Beyond the gates lay a different world. A truly anachronistic gem, this members’ club/hotel, established in 1871, is an imperial oasis of stately architecture and manicured lawns. While the city outside reinvents itself hourly, time stands still inside those cool, marbled halls. There, the sun has not yet set on the British Empire.
Horses and carts are a feature of city streets
Arriving at breakfast, we were treated to a grand affair, a sumptuous spread of curries and dals. For the uninitiated, there is sublime logic to a spicy curry breakfast, the South Asian way of fortifying your gut for what the day has to throw at you. Just don’t drink the tapwater: it’s the gastrointestinal equivalent of Karachi traffic at rush hour.
A cousin, Zafar, came to pick us up and take us to the family house, just a few miles away. As he was the first person I was to meet from the Pakistani side of my family, I found myself rehearsing a more conservative version of myself, one with an air of piety. I needn’t have. Climbing into his pick-up truck, finding a seat among the piles of liquor bottles and cigarette packets, it was clear that this portly guy with a wicked smirk in the driver’s seat was more interested in sin than salvation.
As he rammed his pick-up through Karachi traffic, I found myself drawn in by his mordant charisma. In his late 30s, he’s a cunning, mischievous, swashbuckling raconteur, fuelled by a brew of Marlboro Reds, vodka and Xanax (which he ‘popped’ periodically from his stash in the sun visor). He’s the real Karachi, I thought, the city’s soul made flesh. For him, this grim, desolate town was still a treasure trove of possibilities. You just needed to know where to dig.
The Sind Club is an ‘imperial oasis’
My family lives in an old military district called Defence. It’s where Karachi’s ‘elite’ play-act middle America behind tall blast walls, flanked by wide, tree-canopied streets. It’s post-apocalyptic Los Angeles; Mad Max meets Desperate Housewives.
A servant opened the gate for us and we drove in. I didn’t know my family had servants, and the sight of their living quarters made me uneasy. Just hammocks under a concrete overhang in the garden. Still, a hammock is better than the gutter, I suppose. I learned servants are common there, even for families with moderate means like ours.
The welcome party descended: a flurry of aunties – one, two, three, four. Finally, some technicolour. They swooped me up and took me indoors. Suddenly I was deep into a conversation about relatives I didn’t know, various ailments, and how hungry I must have been. An uncle appeared, then another cousin. All in all, there were ten of us – and just like that, I was family. It was a profound, world-expanding moment, finding myself belonging, finally, to this long, shared history.
The house was old and told stories. Dad said it was beautiful years ago, before the family money began to dwindle, after my grandfather left Karachi to start a life for himself in England. A mammoth bookcase dominated one wall: novels, history books and family journals spanning 100 years. Over such a long time, the books had coalesced into a homogenised grey mass. If one were to try and pry one out the whole thing would disintegrate in an avalanche. My family’s legacy: ash.
The following morning the Literature Festival began. As we arrived at the gates, the place was a circus of soldiers and students, assault rifles and paperbacks. The auditorium was packed for my dad’s keynote. Somehow, I’d also found myself on the ‘rising stars’ panel with other young writers and poets. I was billed as a screenwriting expert, which was the first I’d heard of it. Some 200 eager students filed into the hall to listen to me speak. I should have told them that if they moved to London and endured a decade of strife, they could be unemployed just like me.
The people at the festival were Pakistan’s stubborn flames. It’s not easy to put on a festival there, to celebrate art and artists. These were people who saw that as worth fighting for.
On camelback at Clifton Beach
Over the next three days, with Zafar collecting us in the afternoons and chauffeuring us around, Karachi began to make more sense. For someone who’d grown up in Shepherd’s Bush, the multicultural and socially diverse kernel of West London, the people felt oddly familiar: the way they managed life’s disorder, often with cleverness and humour. The Empress Market that Zafar took us to wasn’t so different from Shepherd’s Bush Market. I can’t attest to the quality of the produce there, but judging by the smell, the meat seemed to have been marinating since Victoria’s reign.
On our last day, Zafar took me to visit a friend of his, a man living in the fringes of legality. From what I gathered, he was a mercenary of some kind. His home was a blend of the luxury and the lethal: velvet chesterfields and Persian rugs shared space with a vast cache of cutting-edge killing machines. Everywhere there were assault rifles, sniper rifles, semi-automatic handguns and shotguns. Sitting down, you’d have to probe the cushions to check if there was a live grenade nestled there. Over the course of the afternoon, our host showcased his collection in what felt like a Hollywoodised pre-mission briefing, the moment where the protagonist gets acquainted with their tools before the big showdown.
As twilight fell, Zafar took my father and me to Clifton Beach for a camel ride. Bobbing along on that grunting beast as the sun dipped into the Arabian Sea, Zafar and Dad riding beside me in a neon-lit dune buggy, I felt my heritage settling on my shoulders. It seemed appropriate that this far-flung, untamed metropolis be my second home. I was proud it was part of me: the wild, wild East.
