Welcome to Yarghamalistan

Absurdistan, Londonistan… its my turn now to coin a new term with the fashionable 'istan' suffix. I have come up with a new name for Pakistan, one which captures the leitmotif of where we are at right now:  Yarghamalistan. Prounounced thus: yar-ghamaaal-istaan.

It struck me in a lightning flash of insight during a conversation  with my husband and Shahid Khan, architect and visionary behind Indus Earth Trust, an NGO dedicated to improving the life of the coastal and rural ultra-poor. We had been on our way our to Gharo near Thatta (known in ancient times as Bhambore) to check out the model mud and straw houses Shahid was training masons to build. They had been brought down from the flood-afflicted areas to the north to skill them up as a prelude to building 500 homes in Sajawal for their fellow flood victims.

Village girl helping to make a giant flag for Pakistan Day with IET

During our guftegoo  (chitchat) I aired my profound puzzlement at the missing links in the topography of Pakistani society’s current woes. For some time now I have been trying to connect the dots between what I know of Pakistanis on a personal, interactive basis with the ‘government’ and its manifold weaknesses, like rife corruption, shambolic lack of foresight and planning, ethical shallowness, sloganeering politics, endemic nepotism etc. Where individuals seem to be so capable and proactive, dedicated to serving their fellow countrymen, the institutions that are supposed to represent the interests of the citizens are quite simply failing to meet the needs of the people. In my personal experience I am always awestruck by  the numerous stellar qualities I find in Pakistanis: qualities of perseverance, considerable ability, ingenuity, generosity, selflessness, warmth and hospitality. For some time now  I’ve been working at figuring out this disconnect without much success.

Mid-conversation and mid-way to Gharo, what struck me was that on every level, and for every sector of society, we are  - to a man, woman and child -  being held hostage. In Urdu yarghamal is being held hostage. It’s such a deliciously wild sounding word - slightly out of control and lightly crazed. Maybe it’s the guttural ‘gh’ sound that invokes a sense of being ferile and lawless – or is it the atavistic sounding  ‘yar’?  And without the ‘Pa’ sound of 'Pakistan' it cannot be spat out with the contempt that ‘Pakistan’ is often vocalized with abroad (viz the British insult: ‘Paki’). There’s something of a usurping air about ‘Yarghamalistan’.

Life in Pakistan is, for now, a multi-layered exercise in being held hostage  (for most) or taking hostage (for the lawless few). At every stage and level we can pinpoint a hostage situation of how  Pakistan has become  a ‘yarghamal’-infused society. Even while it has a free press, no matter how sharp the criticism is, nothing much seems to change. A paralytic inertia has seeped through the life-blood of the body politic.  Even while its conscientious citizens know how badly we are suffering the shortfall in civil institutions that work effectively, whatever they do to support them is like a minnow swimming against the tsunami of looming disaster. 90% of the population is held hostage to poverty, illiteracy, poor health care, inadequate housing, apartheid in education and the hideously unjust distribution of wealth and access to means to improve their state.

Take your average urban domestic servant. He or she is held hostage by many things:  ignorance,  debt, the serf mentality. Without you acting in loco parentis and the nanny state, where would he be? Who would service the debt he took to marry off one of his five daughters and feed the village for a week but which he would have to live for several hundred years at his current salary (and loan-shark interest)  in order to repay?  Held hostage to his lack of foresight and to suffocating social customs, he is then held further hostage to the outrageously inadequate salary rates he is paid, to the crippling inflation imposed on him by an alien economic system, to excessive working hours by abusive employers and scanty benefits.

Every wife/daughter/sister is held hostage by a society that narrowly defines what a woman can and cannot do.  Nowadays she can by all means go for a career, but marriage will take its toll as a single, childless woman is barely visible, if not deemed a threat or prey. It’s a social truism that among the middle classes a medical degree makes you more marriageable yet if she doesn’t practice, she is a waste of resources. Women are held hostage to the lack of free and unharassed movement  - have you ever seen a woman on a bike or scooter here? With the exception of the Sunday rides of the funtastic Critical Mass Karachi bicycling group that include privileged women in the toney area of Defence, custom and taboo dictate that the only forms of transport women can drive are their own cars. She can have a career but she still has to look like a Stepford wife a la Pakistanienne: long straightened black hair, lacquered talons, dizzyingly frothy fashions and all the accoutrements  and accessories aped from the coffers of European or American fashion. We are fully able to auto-clone without the help of science here, but  woe betide her if she ever gets too tanned or too ruggedly rustic, for that is to betray the ‘Fair and Lovely’ ideal of whiteness women are held hostage to.

If your project is to build a school in a suburb of Karachi you will be held hostage to a dizzying cascade of chai-pani (literally 'tea-water', i.e. palm-greasing) dole-outs,  ‘fines’, or straight up rishwat (bribery). If you own a manufacturing company you may be held hostage to a certain political party’s extortionate protection racket controlling the locality. And being taken hostage for ransom is an occupational hazard for most industrialist families. Some have left either because this happened to them or out of fear that it might.

The most insidious form of Yarghamali practice is the political deployment of religion. Certain sectors of society have draped the flag of Islam over the politics of this country and are holding it hostage to their claim to the moral high ground, leaving those who espouse ideals of tolerant but equitable democratic governance grasping for paradigms of virtue that can translate into the minds of our illiterate and disenfranchised, but religiously sensitive masses. After all, who wants to displease God, when our Fate is really in His hands? Confusion about the very identity of Pakistan as a country for Muslims or an Islamic state still occupies the popular mind. Added to that is the way the icons of progress and advanced (i.e. 'western') civilization and their vassals have infringed the sovereignty of this nation, how is the simple citizen to make any sense of how a secular state can ensure the rights of all its citizens to practise their religion with tolerance and brotherhood. Islamists persuasively tout the argument that abandonment of religion has brought us to this mess, and all that is needed is to reinstate their version of Islam for the milk and honey to flow once more. Meanwhile the secularists are held hostage to the burden of separating the taint of  neo-colonial enterprises from models of progress and social justice that are themselves, after all, spawned evolutionarily out of the industrialization of Europe and the ‘West’, and therefore suspect as foreign and ‘un-Islamic’.

Who will negotiate our release from Yarghamalistan? No one but us. There is no saviour out there. Candidates in the upcoming elections are each pandering to the collective need for a Messiah, but not one of them will be able to deliver what Yarghamalistan needs to become Pakistan. Not in one term of office, nor two. It going to take a few generations, for our fate is also woven into the geo-politics of the region, the insidious modern version of the Great Game. The only saviours are ourselves: we have to save ourselves from being held hostage to our own ignorance, fears and small-mindedness. The negotiations are going to be tough.

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.

Introduction

A series of stories & vignettes about our lives and experiences living in Karachi

Introduction

I’ve always liked the address of our home in Karachi: 786 Hilal[1]. It appeals to a sentimental attachment to our faith. The religious significance of the number ‘786’ seems doubled by the crepuscular name of our street. 786 is, of course, the numerical equivalent of the Arabic phrase, ‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful’, while ‘Hilal’ is the crescent, a symbol of Islam.

786 Hilal has been HQ for my family since we came to live in Pakistan in 2001. It’s a gloriously breezy, somewhat cavernous villa spread out on three floors with a capacious garden on two levels. After looking at almost 40 houses, I knew when I first walked into 786 that this would be our home: spacious within and without, light, unpretentious, surrounded by empty plots, and within walking distance of a tiny but pretty park. Not to mention a mere 10 minutes from the children’s school.

These stories are more than just about life at 786 Hilal. It’s the safe base from which we daily foray out into Karachi and experience the kaleidoscope of its colours, scents and events. It’s also where we receive all manner of life enriching guests, human and animal. Barely a day goes by without something memorable or eventful happening. Given the recent political unrest that’s an understatement of course. I mean ‘eventful’ on a small scale. Scale has never mattered to me all that much. I see meaning in the seemingly trivial and humble as well as the grand and epic. Probably more so for the seemingly insignificant speaks directly to my mind and heart. These messages may seem simpler and more immediate, but they reverberate audibly through the concerto of our lives here in Karachi.

From media coverage and press reports, Karachi is forever teetering on the brink of implosion. To those who live here, we know that in spite of everything life goes on. We live on through the turmoil. Needs does as needs must. Having grown up in Beirut during the 70’s, civil unrest does not faze me. Which is not to say I am inured to the daily reminders of life’s fragility, or to the social injustices suffered by most people, or to the perverse polarization of rich and poor. And its not just sheer momentum that keeps the wheels turning. I often joke among friends that living here one is daily given proof of the existence of God, for where would we all be without the constancy of His mercy raining down upon us when we have wrought a desert out of civil unrest, inept civic planning, and a breathtaking inability to think long term or to behave in a way that shows we understand that the common good is our good.

One word alone yields proof of a higher divine entity overseeing the torrid affairs of Karachi: traffic. The law of averages should surely dictate greater numbers of accidents than do occur. So common are the skin-of-teeth misses that my own fight or flight response has been dulled, if not switched off.

What makes living in Karachi so agreeable, however, are its people and the relationships we’ve forged with them. I have never found it hard to be moved and touched by the fortitude, patience, forbearance and generosity of its Karachiites. One could just as well write the opposite and it would be equally true, of course. Its often a matter of socio-economic class.  But this is what our experience has been.

Being congenitally positive, I am inclined to be hopeful and in love with life with a capital L. I accept human frailty – though in others it is easier to accept than in oneself, it has to be said. In spite of the myriad off-putting things one can identify about Karachi’s residents, all around me I see mirrors that reflect at times my lowly self and at others my nobler self. Its an education alright!

Karachi comes into a clearer focus when one visits Pakistan’s other major cities. Lahore always strikes me as a place with a clear identity, rooted in history, with Lahoris unapologetically enjoying their heritage and lifestyle. In short the city feels ‘bien dans sa peau’, though perhaps a little too much for its own good. Islamabad’s raison d’etre is government, so order, practicality and decorum dominate. Dull would be another word that could justifiably be applied to our lush capital. Pindi, a more natural city, is almost too far gone but I’ve hardly been there of late so will refrain from more comment. The nervy, edgy feel to Karachi is a natural consequence of its patchwork of different communities, Sindhi, Pathan, Punjabi, immigrant and emigrant, jostling alongside each other. The promise of a better living if not a daily wage has brought a mind-boggling array of peoples together in an uneasy modus vivendi.

Karachi is full of contradictions and frustrations but also it is against this backdrop that our lives here are filled by moving themes of suffering humanity and noble forbearance and by events at times sublime, at times ridiculous, but always edifying and humbling. 

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[1] In fact the real number of our home is different but equally Islamically significant. For privacy’s sake I have changed the number and street name.