Karachi Dreams

If you comprehend the magic of this beast of a city, you must be one of us.

Karachi thrums like the strings of an electric guitar, a bittersweet symphony deconstructed by a master. It presents vistas of uncompromising beauty minutes before one of the elements it is slave to sweeps down and takes it away. A boy goes to Clifton beach with his family and dives into its warm currents. He does not know that just hours ago a reti bajri truck had excavated the ground beneath his feet. The mini-whirlpool reaches out to touch his ankles, caresses upwards, and seconds later his head is underwater, his arms growing weak to hang limp by his sides, and his breath stilled. Fish food for the creatures of the deep, niblets for the beasts wading in the shallows.

Some people call Karachi a dressed up fishing village, a metropolis vast in size and tiny in the scope of its productivity. Industry and its effluents tinge natural hues sickly green or cow patty brown. Ships carrying strange cargo and stranger life forms dock beside it and pour their bottled energy into it. Always subtle, and sometimes smuggled. People and their waste litter alleys and street corners, argue in cars parked side by side at traffic lights and then rush forward to establish real superiority with the engines of industry’s chariots, cars. Or trucks, or buses actually. Cousin Anne, who is here from Nashville Tennessee to explore the culture behind the psyche of her Indian/Pakistani father, says Karachi is much cleaner than the cities she has visited in India. She says it is more ‘comprehensible’ to her. We welcome her with open arms. If you comprehend the magic of this beast of a city, you must be one of us.

After a break of a little over a year, we decide to have a reading. Our guest list is small, obviously, who writes when you can sing, dance or appear on television? Television IS the future, where will all the writers go when the sun sets on the printed word?

The first night she spends with us Anne has what she now calls ‘the Karachi panic attack’. She cannot breathe and has to get up and stand under a steaming shower to release the invisible pressure on her chest. We hear her as we lie arguing, at 4 in the morning, in the next room. We coax her out, and then sit up with her until she falls asleep again. Anne says she has had strange dreams from the moment she landed here. She will share one of them with us at the reading. For some reason, the sound of five different voices calling the faithful to prayer that converge at the nexus of our highly agnostic household seems to soothe her. Don’t you like it? she asks. How do we explain to her the way sounds drowns in the city, how it loses meaning so fast we go to other places and get edgy at the relative silence. The tiptoe existence. We must have sound to cover our own movements.

The first to read is an ex-theatre director who is now in television. He reads from a story he wrote some years ago. It is the story of a boy abused by the guard at the mosque where he is a ward. The ex-director reads the opening chapter.

“It is 5:00 am and it is time for the muezzin to get up and give the azan for Fajr. In the dark he steps over the sleeping forms of the little, lithe, bodies sprawled in the room.

The muezzin is a nice man. Except for the fact that he has a fancy for little boys. Too bad for them. How he reconciles his job as the caller to prayer with his molestation urge is a deep dark secret. Maybe if he had psychoanalysis we would be able to know more. But who can psychoanalyze these Maulvis?

Tonight he has been asleep, too sleepy to bother to acquiesce his appetite. He has been praying with the faithful for it is the 27th of Ramazan, and the faithful have kept the lights of the mosque on till early morning. He couldn’t sin today. No.”

The muezzin finds Rehmat frozen in a fetal position, paralysed into still frame. He prods him with his foot, then bends down and tries to rouse him, but Rehmat wont respond.

“The code of excrement, you didn’t squeal. Rehmat had learned that fast. The Maulvi couldn’t help him. The muezzin wouldn’t…The muezzin walked away. God knows what came into his mind. He turned back. He squatted on the floor next to Rehmat and tried to dry his tears.”

When he feels that, Rehmat screams. The muezzin puts his hand over his mouth, and Rehmat rises and bites, attacks the touch itself. In his effort to break free the man smacks him and Rehmat faints.

“The next memory Rehmat has is that of feeling sunlight on his face. He is lying on a charpoi under the neem tree. The pain in his anus is still unbearable and so he immediately turns over on his side…he cries out, but no sound…he is deaf.

The boys all stand around him. Talking chattering. He can’t hear anything. He faints again.

When his eyes open, it is dark. Some sounds make their way through the dense fog surrounding his audio impulses. He jumps up and starts running. On reaching the door of the mosque, he is stopped by a large hand on his shoulder- the guard.

Rehmat can’t hear much now. Rehmat can’t learn anything in the Madressah. Rehmat is useless for the Masjid Imam. Except for one thing. And Rehmat faints when anyone touches him. Convenient for them all.”

That’s really why that Judge wanted Javed Iqbal pulverized you know. It wasn’t just a punishment for his sins; it was about how he dared bring them to light. Darkness is an essential part of our grand plan to make a replica of the dark ages.

Chowk.com founder and editor Umair Khan stops his pacing up and down and speaks. The baby in the sling on his chest punctuates his sentences with suitably erratic arm waving. He wants to know why this hasn’t been published, and why doesn’t the writer publish it on chowk? But the writer in this case wrote for catharsis. Mission accomplished, he sees no need to inflict that random suffering on others. So much for my personal mission statement then.

Next up is Mahim Maher, TFT’s very own new talent. She reads three of her own poems, and then one by an obscure poetess on the nature of PMS or PMT that has us all in stitches. Shock value? Certainly. Hysterically funny? Yes. Mahim does it the proper way, telling us when, where and why she wrote what she wrote. There is one called ‘toilet boy’ about a person who tiles bathrooms. Ever wonder how we just stop noticing the people who do such work for us she asks? Before he leaves, the toilet boy leaves a subtle reminder of his existence. If the man on the throne stops perusing his newspaper and surveys the kingdom beneath his throne, he will notice two distinct patterns. The uniform perfection of the tiles in plain view, and the variation worked in beneath his feet.

Anne is next. She elects to read us passages from the journal she has been furiously scribbling in every 40 minutes from the moment she landed. Between that and her camcorder (can’t say anything interesting to her without a ‘wait. let me get this on tape’. The Karachi horror show, we call it), she’s managed to capture, contemplate on and preserve for later regurgitation every nit that ruffled her hair on this trip. She reads us one of those ‘strange’ dreams.

Her father is dead, and Anne and her sister are sorting through the things he indicated he wished to be buried with him. Her sister keeps squabbling over which dresses to keep, and Anne cannot seem to get over the container with his ashes in it. It is chipped, or cracked, and she obsesses over whether to have it mended or not. This is set to the accompaniment of her fathers voice in her head, adding a sense of frantic urgency to the need to mend the broken container in which his ashes lie. He falls silent, and the dream ends. “All the other kids had clear plastic Tupperware containers for their parents ashes”, she reads.

Anne once said to me (actually she said it a couple of days ago but I’d like to preserve the grandiose tone of the piece, shoot me why donctha) that one of the answers she was looking to find was to what extent her family history and the culture that intruded every now and then into her middle class American home had contributed to the formation of her behavior patterns. In other words, was everybody in the world messed up or just her?

Everybody in the world obviously, we chimed, though not necessarily in harmony.

Next there is the poetry of a banker. He used to write regularly, then his life slipped into a groove so comfortable it has the tenacity of a beanbag and seldom lets you rise. He says he isn’t miserable enough to want to burn paper with the acidity of vitriol. ‘The Last Cigarette’ has been published on chowk.com and is printed here with their permission.

silent footfalls echo on the road

trains splash in an aqua blue sky,

my mind is the colour of lead

And i have smoked the last cigarette.

dreamland, dreamscape, dream thrum.

“hold me tight” she cried,

so I turned a quizzical eye to the screen

sulphur burns illuminate our bodies

i like the smell, i like the smell.

is that an oil slick in the corner, brother?

my arm trembles as I touch your hair

knots wrap around my fingers

we shoot beer bottles in the afternoon sun

practicing for when the budweiser blimp arrives

but traffic comes before that.

i duck and twist and weave and turn,

rest the ladder against the mountain,

but this narrow opening cannot squeeze me through.

i need a helping hand

to belly flop into this shimmering pool

to slip into this snakeskin tailcoat.

copper runs down my sleeves,

but my mind is the colour of lead

and I have smoked the last cigarette.

The Budweiser blimp reference is understandable if you take a right from the Shaheen and Shamsheer roundabout in defense and drive towards the sea. The road is wide, and on each of the electric and telephone poles dissecting the road is one of the 99 names of Allah. They whiz by in side view mirrors, and as you race down that particular beaten path the most visible construct on the coastline is the golden arches of Karachi first McDonalds drive-through.

We will be assimilated.

Baber is also a director. He does music videos and magazine shows, the ‘link while you blink’ genre of contemporary magazine programming. He has nothing to read but elects instead to play us two tracks from an album he released last year in collaboration with talented guitarist Faraz Anwar. It is inspired by influences as varied as death metal and Beethoven, lush and raw by turns, reverential and cheeky otherwise. But what unites us tonight is not the quality or intensity of the bile on display, it’s the recognition that the energy poured into these forms of expression might well have been converted to violence, defeatism and a ticket out.

The band is called ‘Dusk’ and a label in Portugal has released this album. Radio stations in Europe play tracks from it, and here you turn on the telly and see the same moronic faces churning out the same superficial songs about how everything is secretly all right became some girl looked at you in a parking lot.

After Baber it is Asma’s turn. Asma is here on holiday from university in New York, where she is doing a PhD in Political Philosophy. Karachi bred, Karachi baby, she reads from Stephen Dunne. No one has ever heard of him before but after she’s done we all plot to get the book. We are all so involved we lose track of time. When we realize it’s a working day the next morning most people leave, a few stay behind. There is a vague plan of getting up early the next morning and driving to Somiani and Gwadar to show Anne the shipyards and the clean beaches, the terrain on Mars visible to the naked eye in our very own backyard.

U and I stay behind too. I is a director in an ad agency, and U teaches literature at a girls school in the city. She says the biggest problem she has is getting her girls to think. She reads one of her own poems, composed hours after they were driving home late one night and saw a dead body in the road. They kept moving. “See the sublime meet its mockery,” she reads. Karachi. Now that the floodgates have opened the stories pour forth. How someone once hit a dog and kept going because it is now ‘save the dog or save yourself’, how another once saw a house destroyed by rocket launchers and AK 47’s and a body twitching in the drive, how the police scare us, how other people scare us, how no one is safe yet everyone is inspired.

That is the choice a big city gives you.

U tries to read us Fehmida Riaz’s ‘Chaddar and Chardiwari’ but can’t because it’s too long and now all of us are involved to the point that we are yelling each other down in our effort to be heard. If they did more of this in school we wouldn’t have so much to let out you know.