The Offence of Defence

In which we peel back the façade of the orderly suburb of Defence and reflect on how it is out of synch with the rest of Karachi and Pakistan.*

When I first came to live in Karachi as a young ‘fahrin’ (foreign) bride a long, long time ago, my husband thought fit to rent us as our first home an enormous house on a large high-walled plot in the Defence Housing Authority two streets away from the DHA Club in Phase Two. After Phase One, Phase Two was the oldest area of this district efficiently administered under military authority. Originally intend for army officers and their families, the DHA population had long since been opened up to wealthier civilians and as such was deemed an up-market, or in local parlance, a 'posh' locality. 

After the initial shock of discovering that the kitchen was in fact the size of a small ballroom (in which the previous tenants had in fact cooked their food on a woodburning grate set on the floor in the middle, charring the mosaic flooring), I soon settled to the task of filling this bare mini-mansion with locally produced furnishings - in the spirit of 'be Pakistani, buy Pakistani' and 'power to the people'! From Queens Road there was cane furniture, handwoven Galleria Gultex dhurries and handloomed cotton upholstery, chattai (reed floor-matting and ‘chicks’ (split cane blinds); and from a local carpenter an ill-conceived teak dining table a la japonais – 18 inches off the ground with matching stools that became (eventually) a pain to sit down on and get up from. Not for me the clunky rococo bourgeois style that seemed so popular at the time.

Abbas had in fact opted for size over convenience in the expectation of my own family’s needs and not to impress his dulhan (bride). Fed up with damp and grey British weather, among other shortcomings of the British Isles, my father had decided that he too would move to live in Pakistan. Being a Muslim of Middle Eastern origin, this wasn’t as far-fetched a notion as you might expect. Particularly for one in a self-imposed exile with a yen for the sun and the ‘simple’ life. Before petro-dollars many Arabs would come to Pakistan for their tertiary education (some still do) and trade links were always strong. The port town of Gwadar further to the east of Karachi had at one time been owned by Oman.  My father had also been the moving force behind various philanthropic projects in the Punjab and so had already formed an affection for Pakistan that still to this day flourishes. It was to prepare for this eventuality that Abbas had rented this cavernous home, so as to provide transitional accommodation to my own, rather populous, family.

While I was excited to be moving to live in an Islamic country (as I then conceived of Pakistan), the prospect of residing in Defence had never really appealed to my father. It was merely to be a stepping stone to an idyllic compound he hoped to build in an orchard in Malir, then on the north eastern outskirts of Karachi. On each and every visit to Karachi he would comment, only half jokingly, on what an offence Defence was – the play on words deliberate of course. Behind all these high walls plush homes had been built to cocoon their pampered residents while all around us existed pockets of slums, filth, squalor and poverty. And still do! The incongruity between the luxury of Defence and much of the rest of Karachi was, quite frankly, jarring to our sensibilities. The gap between the haves and have-nots was disconcerting. Surely it was morally repugnant that the well-to-do should live so complacently alongside the ghettos of such poverty and deprivation of basic civic amenities? And so it became a habit of mine too to refer - somewhat ungratefully – to Defence as ‘Offence’.

That was well over 20 years ago and notwithstanding some development and expansion, not much has changed. The incongruity is still there. I am back in Karachi once again after a long stint  in the UK, and, let’s be honest about the ironical truth, grateful to be able to live in orderly Defence. This is mostly because we found a home that lay but ten minutes away from our children’s school, a convenience, nay, a luxury that cannot be over-estimated. There are more parks, metalled roads, pavements, road markings and working traffic lights (I won’t go into the subject of storm drains right now as this painful episode of engineering deserves a whole essay in itself) than any other city district. And garbage is regularly collected from the piles we make on empty plots after it has been sifted through by resourceful and needy young men for recyclables, making it the cleanest neighbourhood in Karachi.

What hasn’t changed is the general lack of forward planning. Great to have commercial areas giving lifeblood to each neighbourhood, but once all the plots and shops are filled, where will we all park? Look at Zamzama Boulevard for instance. Hardly a boulevard inviting gentry to promenade, it is just an ordinary thoroughfare in a dense commercial section of Defence. I often hear it being called the ‘Bond Street’ of Karachi. To me that’s a misnomer: more like ‘Bombed Street’. Thatches of wires, forests of signs, narrow lanes bristling with boutiques (the aspiring 'Bond' bit) and uncivic-minded double-parked drivers all conspire to make entering this zone a stressful experience rather than an outing into luxury.  Further up the road Khadda Market is trying to solve the parking issue by reconfiguring the stadium with two vertical parking lots. The project seems to have stalled, however. It will be interesting to see how the denizens of Defence will manage to park at a distance and actually walk to the shops. I fear businesses will fold. We could have built a massive geodesic dome over the entire market and air-con the placed so it becomes a mall in its own right. But this is Karachi, not Dubai.

Or is it?

I’ve only actually been into Dubai proper thrice over the last 12 years. Apart from litter and the absence of chrome and glass, I feel Defence has more in common with Dubai than it does with the rest of Karachi, or Pakistan. Just as Dubai is a fantasyland entirely divorced from its natural environment and history, living in Defence we are insulated from what life is really like for the majority of Karachiites and Pakistanis.

Every day we unblinkingly drive past the slum colonies that apparently lie outside DHA's jurisdiction. It seems short term needs have caught us in webs of contradictions and lulled us into tolerating institutionalised hypocrisy. Our collective greed for convenience and comfort has blunted the imperative of responsible city planning,  community management and accountability. We let mega projects like Emaar's $2.4 billion Crescent Bay start a massive 108 acre (actually it was supposed to be 75 acres) reclamation and luxury building project of 4,000 apartments that makes no provision for lower incomed folk and their civic needs - it stalled spectacularly. And the $115 million Cogen desalination and power generation plant also had an epic fail. We let public amenities like the cricket stadium be turned into exclusive private clubs like Southend Club. Did you know that for the whole peninsula of Defence there is only one measly football pitch available to the public - Rahat? Or that access to this pitch was franchised to an independent club to share as they wish? Just where are the increasingly overfed boys of the thousands of households in Defence supposed to exercise and get healthy? 

There are many good things going on within the DHA, not least of which are its schools and colleges struggling to meet the needs of the middling to lower socio-economic classes, and a few clinics. Most efforts, however, are private charitable enterprises, like the CEDF 70-seater mobile bus school. They are too few to be sure, but it is

Nina Ijaz of CEDF talking to volunteer Amarah Makhdumi aboard their Bus school

conscientious actions of caring individals and groups that is the secret of how Pakistani society maintains its momentum and keeps itself from imploding. This is a regularly overlooked key factor in preventing the 'failed state' label fear-mongerers keep yammering on about.

Its hard to feel satisfied about the delights of Defence when so much remains offensive to our sense of logic and citizenship. And its even harder when we start to look at the social and cultural behaviour that living in such exclusive neighbourhoods induces. Without a sense of community, residents of DHA feel it their right to hold noisy parties into the wee hours, oblivious of their neighbours’ rights. Without a sense of accountability people illegally install suction pumps to suck out as much water from the fresh water supply pipes, without considering that they are depriving their neighbours of their right to water.  Add to that the intolerable power-outage situation, and we have whole neighbourhoods with generators literally roaring away, day and night, causing stressful noise as well as environmental pollution, contributing generously to the evil of global warming. There is a vast cultural chasm between what goes on inside and outside these homes. Often it takes death to bring neighbours together. The contradictory extremes boggle the mind.

I am chastened to acknowledge that offence is a way of life in Defence.

*This has been modified from the original essay written (but unpublished) several years ago.