The Lighthouse Bazaar takes its name from a building across the street from the banyan tree. It’s five stories high – ground plus four, as locals phrase it, stores and law offices and apartments.
Its flat white façade has an air conditioner here and there on a windowsill. The ground-floor storekeepers improvise awnings to keep the intense sunlight out of their shops, red and gray squares of cloth that give the building the look of a man dressed in rags.
But when Karachi residents pass this property, they remember its colourful history. Many years ago, film billboards obscured the façade, and the building was the Lighthouse Cinema.
By chance, I met the man who had grown up as the prince of that cinema. His name was Sharfuddin Memon, and he was a Karachi businessman.
When he was young, his father owned the theatre, which offered films from England, Hollywood and Bombay.
Memon especially remembered a 1969 American western he’d seen as a boy. It was called Mackenna’s Gold – Omar Sharif and Gregory Peck in a tale of men corrupted by their lust for wealth.
Memon grew up to become an engineer and the owner of a construction company. He moved to America for a time and encouraged Americans to call him “Bobby” when they couldn’t get their tongues around his first name.
Then Bobby Memon returned home, where he controlled several pieces of Karachi real estate, including a KFC restaurant by the beach.
He also owned the Lighthouse Cinema, though it was not a theatre anymore. Pakistan’s domestic film industry had collapsed, and though Hollywood and Bollywood films drew interest, people often watched at home.
Young couples had trouble going on dates to a theatre, where they might be harassed by religious conservatives. (“You need someplace to sit with a boy, and don’t imagine we didn’t think about that,” a young woman who’d grown up in Karachi once told me.)
Memon reconstructed the building as retail and office space that he called the Lighthouse Centre. It was still, he said, “a landmark of the city.”
Tenants could watch the swirl of life around the banyan tree below. The Lighthouse offered a perfect view of the processions that moved down the street on holidays.
One of the largest was the Shia procession on Ashura – or the 10th day of the month of Muharram on the Islamic calendar.
“I am not a Shia,” Bobby Memon told me when we met for tea in early 2010, “but as kids, I remember we used to go on the rooftop. My friends and family used to stand up there and watch the procession. It’s a day of mourning, but…”
He trailed off, not wanting to sound disrespectful, but speaking of Ashura the way Americans might speak of Memorial Day – as a day off.
Memon had glasses and a well-tended beard. He wore a dark suit, and exposed a cuff link when he reached for his cup.
He was a civic leader now, and when the Ashura procession came on December 28, 2009, he had no need to climb the stairs of the Lighthouse.
He took a more sophisticated vantage point. He drove to the Civic Centre, a gray slab of an office building miles away.
This was the new city hall, the headquarters of metropolitan Karachi’s mayor. Memon gained admittance to a wood-panelled, glass-partitioned room.
Fifteen video screens covered a wall. Police flipped from channel to channel, monitoring scores of security cameras that overlooked streets and intersections across the city.
Memon rated a place in the room because he held a special position, as head of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee.
Organised in response to the kidnappings of businessmen – an alarmingly common crime that police rarely solved on their own – this business group was now a permanent part of the local law enforcement structure, with offices on the grounds of the provincial Governor’s House, the ability to trace phone calls, and even the power to make arrests.
So Memon came to the Civic Centre with other officials and watched the wall of video screens. “It’s like a small country,” he marvelled later, as he considered the diverse and expanding city visible in camera after camera.
As Memon knew, the video room was sponsored by the mayor, Mustafa Kamal, who had built his reputation on such improvements.
Just 34 when he was elected in 2005, the mayor, or nazim of the City District Government Karachi, as he was called in the local government system of the moment, was a hyperkinetic man who swept through the city overseeing the construction of highway overpasses and water lines.
He had the security cameras installed despite the scepticism of the police, who did not operate under his authority.
Kamal considered it a matter of ceaseless irritation that the police answered to the provincial government, which was in the hands of a rival political party – and it was a blood rival, the Pakistan People’s Party of the famous Bhutto family.
When Kamal showed visitors his roomful of screens, he cheerfully instructed a camera operator to play a video recorded sometime earlier, showing police officers collecting money from the driver of a stopped car.
Despite such embarrassments, or because of them, the police sent men to sit in the black swivel chairs and monitor conditions around the city.
On the day of the Ashura procession, the city police chief and other officials came to the room, the best place to watch a procession that would travel for miles.
The many video feeds available included those from the cameras attached to the old city hall, locally known as the KMC Building.
The initials stood for the Karachi Municipal Corporation, the city government’s discontinued name that still showed up in occasional news headlines, whenever some former KMC official was charged in a long-ago case of corruption.
I met another man who remembered watching video screens on December 28 – Abbas Kumeli, former Pakistani senator and a spokesman for the Shia Muslim community.
Kumeli lived in a corner house. It pushed up to the edge of the sidewalk, leaving little room for his armed guards.
After confirming that I had an appointment, the guards sent me through the gate and upstairs, where Kumeli welcomed me into a comfortably cluttered living room.
Every flat space was covered by papers or framed photos. Kumeli dominated the room, an imposing and bespectacled man of 64.
He’d been watching television when I arrived, but a moment later, the set snapped off as the neighbourhood plunged into the latest of Karachi’s daily blackouts.
We settled on couches and talked by the light from a half-open balcony door. He spoke in the slow and precise English he had refined at St Patrick’s Catholic high school, which had educated Karachi’s elites since 1861. (The boys’ school claimed Pakistani presidents, prime ministers, and a military coup leader among its graduates.)
Kumeli spoke for a community that had become insular and suspicious, and with reason. One of the first stories I covered as a reporter in Karachi involved the Shia community.
In 2002, men on motorcycles were following Shia professionals and community leaders – doctors, lawyers, engineers – and shooting them in the head.
The killings had become normal. They happened all the time. Presumably the culprits were Sunni extremist groups who considered Shias to be apostates.
The Shias had their own militants. In 2006, a gathering of Sunnis was bombed in Nishtar Park, around the corner from Abbas Kumeli’s home.
As accustomed as he was to sectarian violence, Kumeli sensed something different in December 2009.
“There’s a lot of terrorism in this country,” he told me, “but not on the days of mourning.” The annual Ashura procession had normally been left alone, but this year, “the government itself was receiving threats, and was expressing its suspicions.”
Shortly before the procession, Pakistan’s interior minister visited Karachi. “He met with me in this room where we are sitting,” Kumeli said.
The interior minister brought along the governor of Sindh, the province of which Karachi is the capital; each man represented a leading political party – one came from the mayor’s party, known as the MQM, and the other from the rival People’s Party.
Both parties had joined an uneasy coalition that was attempting to share power in the province as well as the national government.
And today, these two officials were delivering a carefully calibrated message to Shia leaders around the city.
They were saying that they had made foolproof security arrangements, and also expressing the satisfaction they were hopeful that no such thing would take place.
But they were expressing their fears as well. The visitors didn’t say exactly why they were afraid, but the list of plausible suspects was well known, starting with Sunni extremist groups that targeted Shias.
Then there were Taliban insurgents, who were bombing Pakistani cities that year in response to an army offensive against their mountain sanctuaries.
Karachi politicians who showed up for the parade could become targets for enemies or rivals. And as Kumeli mulled the possibility of attack, he learned of the explosions at two smaller Shia processions on the two days before the climactic march.
The blasts increased the tension, even though police blamed one of the explosions on gas from an open sewer line.
On the morning of Ashura, December 28, Kumeli woke and went to Nishtar Park around the corner from his house.
Today, it was the Shias’ turn to fill this broad expanse of earth. Security guards had set up a network of closed-circuit cameras to oversee the checkpoints leading into the heavily guarded area, and in a room near the park, Kumeli studied the TV monitors, one angle and then another.
He saw nothing unusual. Men were waving security wands at the masses lining up to enter Nishtar Park that morning.
They would attend a majlis, or meeting, before walking to the procession route that began nearby. Police had already performed a security sweep and cordoned off the route, leaving only two entrances near the beginning and a single exit several miles away at the end.
Thousands of police guarded the streets leading to the perimeter. They were backed up by the Rangers, paramilitary gunmen who provided muscle when the police were not enough, urban warriors in T-shirts and camouflage pants, who rolled through the streets in pickup trucks.
Each truck had a man balanced on the truck bed as it moved, holding a machine gun that was aimed forward over the cab.
The Shia ritual that Kumeli oversaw that day frequently baffled outsiders, although its emotional contours could feel familiar to Christians, who at Easter celebrate a story of both death and resurrection.
For Shias, the Ashura procession was both an occasion for sadness and an affirmation of their faith. The procession marked the long-ago death of the Prophet (PBUH)’s grandson Imam Hussein (RA) in what is now Iraq.
It was said that Hussein had only a relative handful of followers when he threw his outnumbered band into a hopeless battle against his rivals at the city of Karbala.
The story of his sacrifice, passed down through generations, steeled Shias to endure suffering and fight for lost causes.
They believed that Hussein had been deprived of his place as the rightful leader of the Muslim world, and it was entirely consistent with the traditions of their faith that after the passage of more than a millennium, they refused to accept this injustice, and even blamed themselves – how could they have failed to sustain Hussein in his time of need?
Some of the mourners scourged themselves, performing acts of ritual grief – many would say it was genuine grief – over Hussein’s death.
Some slashed their own backs with specially made blades on the ends of chains. Others cut their foreheads with knives.
Some needed stitches afterward. Most Shias did not go to such extremes, but did display their devotion by marching for miles through the city – and they were moving now, many holding banners in front of them as they streamed out of Nishtar Park and onto the secured route.
They were passing the white dome of the tomb of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Later in their procession, they would walk for miles down a street named after the founder of the nation, MA Jinnah Road, which led past the banyan tree.
The marchers soon left the view of the closed-circuit cameras that Abbas Kumeli was watching. They moved forward under the eyes of the citywide video network set up by the government of Karachi.
This was what Bobby Memon saw as he looked over policemen’s shoulders at the Civic Centre. If, by chance, someone noticed a video feed from one of the outlying streets, he might have caught a glimpse of a bearded man in a hurry.
He was racing to catch up with the procession. The hurrying man was a devoted Shia, so much so that his very devotion made him late.
His name was Syed Mohammad Raza Zaidi – the name “Syed” was an honorific, indicating that he claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH).
Zaidi woke that morning at home in a distant Shia neighbourhood, far enough away that when I stood in the clock tower of the old city hall and looked out over Karachi, his neighbourhood, called Sau Quarter, was one of those that was invisible out in the haze.
It had been built in the 1960s, when the city was exploding outward to the north and the east. Zaidi faced a long journey across town, and much to do before he could start.
He was a 40ish man with a greying beard, two children, and a lifelong interest in his religion. As a younger man, he travelled to Iran, an overwhelmingly Shia country, where he studied at the religious centre of Qom and visited the sprawling domed shrine of a saint in the city of Mashhad.
On returning to Karachi, the young man followed a more earthly pursuit. He drove a rickshaw, one of the three-wheeled Chinese-made motor taxis that were ubiquitous across the city.
He earned enough money to buy several rickshaws, but his youthful interest in Islam returned. When he was chosen as trustee and caretaker of the Shia religious meeting hall, or imambargah, down the street from the family home, he sold the rickshaws and devoted himself fulltime to this new occupation.
It was an unpaid position, but Zaidi could afford the sacrifice because he lived as part of a joint family – he was one of several sons who had brought their wives home to live in their father’s increasingly crowded house, while the daughters were married off and sent elsewhere.
Extracted from the book ‘Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi’ authored by Steve Inskeep.
