The lights have gone out once again in the city of lights, this time swallowed within the dark cloacal depths of Zulfiqar Mirza’s maw. It grows ever more curious that while Fouzia Wahab, Sherry Rehman, Aitzaz Ahsan, and Shah Mahmood Qureishi – those who crossed He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named – ended up in lesser positions (but maybe better ones, so let’s just say: changed), for some reason Zulfiqar Mirza has not yet been slain by a fatal flash of teeth.
To tell the truth, as everyone knows, lights have been out for Karachi for a very long time, and I am not speaking of KESC’s woes.
My parents and I lived near Karachi University once; Gulshan-e-Iqbal was a fledgling suburb at the time, all prickly dunes and gangly hills with University Road a long, deserted thoroughfare. By night when we returned late from dinner at someone’s place, I would sleep in the back seat of the car from the stadium to the NIPA Chowrangi, and there I would wake to the sound of bells, a soft ‘chan chan’ of the anklets on a loaded camel train as it wound its way down the road.
We took midnight walks, and my young nephew was scared by jackals howling from distant hills.
They seem like memories of another planet now. University Road today is as like to Bunder Road as anywhere. By day it resonates to the cacophonous blare of traffic wending its way through a haze of smoke and by night to the clack of automatic weaponry near and around the infamous NIPA Chowrangi…where once I asked a policeman to sit in my car to keep a carload of boys from pestering me as I drove home alone. Can you imagine this happening today?
Only in the last few days, armed men killed six persons near Disco Bakery in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. We laughed at the name when this bakery came into being, yet it became our local source for bread and eggs over the years.
Three persons were killed at Rashid Minhas Road, where a drive-in cinema used to be. It was here that ‘much of Karachi’, if you will excuse the wild claim, saw ‘Beyond the Last Mountain’, that molehill of a movie which, like the ‘Mad Mad Mad Mad World’ with upwards of nineteen well known names, cast every person who was anyone in Karachi somewhere in its scenes.
Both movies managed to leap off the screen, and Karachi today is beyond the last mountain of everyone’s worst nightmare, a mad world where the worst political manoeuvrings of a corrupt government and all its corrupt partners and opponents play out openly on an unabashed scale. Racism, bigotry, lies and twisted moves hold centre stage in this city as in no other.
Karachi is where Mohajirs, the astute and hardworking backbone of a city struggling to remain viable, are led by persons with Jabba-like appetites. It is where persons such as Mirza are able to jeer at them, calling them ‘bhookay nangay mohajir’ (hungry, unclothed refugees)…and get away with it.
For a country like Pakistan where even people who hold religion dear tire of the subject because of the way it is touted by those in power, it is ironic that this particular segment of society, the Mohajirs, is jeered at for fleeing penniless from India and seeking refuge in Pakistan. What were the Prophet Muhammad and his companions but Mohajirs, fleeing persecution in Mecca and taking refuge in the welcoming city of Medina? We take our calendar from that event for God’s sake, how can we forget…how can being a Mohajir become a taunt here?
It is because we are unable to transpose history into current scenarios that we make such dreadful mistakes.
It is the Mohajirs who bent their commercial prowess into making Karachi the commercial hub of the country, a hub that refuses to die in spite of every effort of successive persons in power; Karachi which rises like a phoenix from the ashes every time it is bludgeoned to death.
It is certain that the founding ideology of this country considers men like Mirza and those who prop them up beneath contempt, though it does not seem to support the Mohajirs either, reacting to such cheap words in ways detrimental to the county that these people have adopted, which has in spite of the words of said persons beneath contempt, adopted the Mohajirs as its own.
