Elegy for Karachi

SEPTEMBER 2003 - Such is the indifference that rules our hearts that when stories appear in the media which would otherwise make painful reading, we simply move on, the news item remotely affecting our well-protected sensibilities. It is as if the misery of one area belongs to another planet or another time. As Karachi struggles on to keep its head from sinking further down, battered by one disaster after another, there is little pain and concern from all of us who don’t live there. We are too involved keeping our head from going under our personal cesspool.

But those of us who have had the privilege to have lived and enjoyed the wonderful atmosphere of culture, gracious living and the buzz of a dynamic, cosmopolitan city that was the quintessence of Karachi, feel otherwise and shed tears in our hearts for the city that has been so brutally vandalized. It was not that the times were different then – they indeed were, but what is sadder is we were different people then. Karachi was still commercially driven in its inner most core because that was what it essentially was. It was a port city and to its shores came people from everywhere doing business. It was a city that buzzed with business – it still does except that the years of neglect and battering have left its environs, rusty, weather beaten and frayed at the edges. It is still the country’s only port city but it is a hovel, not the commercial capital of this 149 million strong people – at least that was the number till last night. The Karachi that was home to many different people, all drawn magnetically towards its luminous glow, is still home to those and many more but the cocktail of nationalities and ethnic backgrounds is now a lethal bomb that continues to detonate with what is sickeningly monotonous regularity. While we all have continued to feed on whatever the city could offer us, we have given nothing back other than disorder, breakdown, chaos and all else that characterises the kind of people we have become.

Violence is now the creed of a city where the sight of a gun was just as rare as a UFO in the skies. The jet set of Karachi in the trendy and swinging 60s was a notch or two higher than the jaded, drug-driven PYTs of today are. There was real class to Karachi’s social scene. It was not made up of people with no background or culture. It was in fact quite quite the opposite and what was remarkable was that clashes, differences, fights, misunderstandings – all were settled without resorting to guns and killing. The city’s undisputed hot spot in those days – nights would be more appropriate, was the discotheque in Hotel Metropole and reflecting on what Karachi is now, reminded me that the story of violent social behaviour that rocked Karachi’s society was when a girl who was asked for a dance and refused to, was spoken to rudely and aggressively by one of the Mazari or Bugti boys and received a resounding slap finally to get the message. There was no gunning down of half the discotheque or a blood feud that eliminated most of the girl’s family. It was not that sort of time and it was not that sort of thing. Now, a violence-infected Karachi thinks nothing of killing, bombing or murdering, guilty and innocents alike. That thin line that keeps us above beasts has evaporated in Karachi as if it was never there. Polite behaviour is seen as weakness and courtesy seen as a flaw. The number of Pakistanis and foreigners who have perished in Karachi’s fires is not known to most of us except that it drives you to the depths of despair should you be burdened with a conscience. These may be numbers to many but these are lives, snuffed out in a gruesome manner. Gentle men and women, professionals and politicians, poor and downtrodden folk, innocent bystanders – in the wrong place at the right time, doctors of a particular sect who have been killed with systematic brutality – the list goes on and on. Each horror leaves you shaken and there seems no end to it. Of course it would be too simplistic to place Karachi alone in that list – other cities don’t exactly conjure a picture of tranquility and harmony, but because Karachi has been more than just another city, because it represented the best of what we were going to offer to the world, its end breaks the heart.

For if Karachi is not ending, what else is it doing? Victim of callous and greedy administrators who have lined their pockets and built their empires, large and small, the city’s fragile infrastructure with thousands and thousands of people pouring in for work, a life, a chance to get somewhere, has cracked and collapsed. The country’s largest city has no water supply system worth the name. There is hardly a road that is complete or not pock marked as if bombs have been raining on it. There is no credible sewerage system – well calling it a system would be raping the English language. 40% of the city’s sewerage has collapsed. The bewildering jumble of wires that criss cross the city providing intermittent power and telecommunications remains one of the country’s abiding mysteries a living testimony to the approach that city planners and administrators have lived by in providing what are basic necessities. When the rains came down this summer, it caught Karachi off guard completely. For the first time in its history, if I am not wrong, the airport was cut off from the city and even 4-wheel drives couldn’t cross the seas that swept across the roads. If there was ever proof required that the city had no system whatsoever to deal with anything, this was a sign from the good lord above. Yet Karachi survived, spluttering and choking to live another day.

As if it has not suffered enough, there is the latest endurance test the city is being put through. It is not possible to tell the difference between which is more tragic – the spilling of hundreds of tons of oil into our harbour or the oily and sickening wave of lies that all the officials have fed to the public. Tasman Spirit may have cracked up and emptied its poison on our shores, but not a single person in the stage drama who should have been held responsible, have been named and caught. Instead, a disgusting game of ping-pong has carried on, with lies piled on more lies with deliberate and malafide intent. A retired brigadier rules KPT. A colonel runs its administration. The navy is asleep as it has for most of its 56 years. There are many suspects but no one is going to be caught. The people will pay the price for years, the poor fishermen for even longer times.

There is now nothing left that works in Karachi. Of course life goes on. It always does, but the problems are no longer on a scale where lies and false promises will see things through. It takes an un-elected army ruler to approve a Rs 29 billion package for Karachi’s revival and it is welcome. It could have so easily gone to buy more toys for the boys who have played war games since we floundered into existence, but while it will do much to restore the basic lifelines of Karachi, all concerned have deftly avoided providing the one thing above all, a mass transit system without which Karachi’s problems will never be solved. Will a great biblical disaster wake the rulers up to this reality? Floods and oil have given the city 29 billion for 4 years. Will a tidal wave and an earthquake together do the job? Karachi will revive a bit but it will only be the city it used to be in that place where special memories live without fear of oil slicks and flooded streets.