Jinnah Road: Lighthouse (Part II)

The position as caretaker included a variety of odd jobs. It was Zaidi who tended the tightly trimmed lawn outside the imambargah.
And on December 28, 2009, Zaidi took on a duty that made him miss the start of the procession. He helped to provide security for a smaller neighbourhood procession that morning, waving a metal-detecting wand at the marchers who entered the route.
By the time he finished, the major procession was already moving through the central city. Zaidi would have been forgiven if he missed it – other members of his family did, finding the neighbourhood procession to be enough devotion for one day.
But as the trustee of a prominent place of worship, he was of no mind to stay home. Nor was he content to start the procession late and trail along at the end.
He wanted to walk near the front. Racing across town, he caught up to the marchers, angling to reach the head of the procession just before the banyan tree at the Lighthouse Centre.
There was no authorised entrance there – policemen barred his way – but Zaidi managed to talk his way past them.
By the time he emerged on the broad expanse of Jinnah Road, Zaidi was wearing a coffin sheet draped over his shoulders – the same kind of white cloth in which Muslims were commonly buried.
The coffin sheet was painted with a slogan – “Mourning or Martyrdom”. Later, I asked Zaidi’s family what he meant by that slogan.
They explained that many marchers carried sheets with the same words. Zaidi was saying to the world, “You would have to kill me to keep me from walking in this procession.” March or die.
The Shias’ bloody rituals contributed to prejudice against them. Some Sunni Muslims spoke of the rituals with revulsion, and their distaste added to the tensions built into the holiday itself.
The Ashura ritual recalled the start of the schism between the sects – Shias supported the claim of the martyred Hussein to rule the Muslim world, while Sunnis did not.
Over the centuries since then, religious scholars and political leaders sometimes narrowed the sectarian divide, and sometimes widened it.
In Pakistan, several minority Shias had actually governed the country since its independence in 1947, starting with the national founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
The trouble was that fundamentalist movements had gained strength in recent decades, calling more attention to religious distinctions and leaving less room for tolerance.
Pakistan became a battleground for influence between Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and Shia-dominated Iran.
By the 1980s, anti-Shia extremists were drawing on some of the most intolerant traditions of Sunni thought.
They found recruits and sympathisers in a country that contained its share of casual bigotry; years ago I went on a long drive with a colleague in northern Pakistan, utterly decent and kind in every other respect, who started on the subject of Shias and seemed unable to stop, complaining of their rituals, their bathing habits, their dishonesty, their lack of intelligence, and other supposed Shia traits I failed to notice.
But these views never became universal. On the day of the Ashura procession in 2009, many Karachi residents of other sects and faiths volunteered their time to ensure the safety and comfort of the Shias as they marched.
And chief among these were scores of young men who turned up now and again in the city’s security videos, often wearing distinctive khaki uniforms.
They were Pakistan Boy Scouts, including Sunni Muslims, Hindus, even Christians. The Scouts were a familiar presence in Karachi.
They had been for generations. A British general had begun the worldwide Scouting movement in 1908, and it spread across much of the British Empire at the same time it was spreading to America.
In the 1920s, a Hindu businessman paid for the Karachi Boy Scouts’ handsome stone headquarters. In 1947, the founder of the nation, Jinnah himself, accepted the designation of Pakistan’s chief Scout, a title that passed to his successors.
The current chief Scout was President Asif Ali Zardari, whose moustached image graced the inside of the Karachi headquarters right next to Jinnah’s portrait, and who would, early in the following year, issue a statement urging young Scouts to help battle terrorism.
While American Scouts are associated in the public mind with suburban kids and thin mint cookies, Pakistani Scouts live closer to the edge.
“America is a developed country, and we are a backward country,” said Najeeb Ilyas, a Scout leader who met me once at the old Scout headquarters. “In Pakistan, mostly poor boys become Scouts.”
Ilyas spoke in a high, scratchy, expressive voice. He had close-cropped hair, a short gray beard, and a calm expression.
There was no shortage of poor boys (as well as poor girls, though the Girl Scouts were not assigned duties in the Ashura procession).
The organisation claimed 70,000 members in Karachi, including Ilyas’s three sons, who put on uniforms accented by multicoloured neckerchiefs and by little green-and-white Pakistani flags stitched on the right breast.
The family lived in Lyari, an old and crowded section of the city that was equally famous for its progressive politics and the gun battles of its criminal gangs.
Ilyas believed that Scouting kept his kids away from trouble. Sometimes the city boys travelled to Pakistan’s northern reaches for the classic Scouting experience, a camping trip in the mountains around the Swat Valley; although in recent years the trips had to be cancelled.
Too many mountains were filled with Pakistani troops chasing the Taliban. But the Scouts still performed community service in Karachi on days like Ashura.
Shia Scouts marched at the front of the procession or helped with security. Scouts of other sects or faiths were at first-aid stations along the route, where Najeeb Ilyas was in charge.
His sons joined him at the station across from the Lighthouse Centre, on the patch of land by the banyan tree, within range of the camera on the corner of the old city hall.
His youngest son, Ghulam, was 12, a tiny boy with a strong and steady gaze. For the Scouts at the Lighthouse, the first sign of the approaching marchers was the arrival of the little white vans of the Edhi ambulance service.
Any mourners who were overcome by exhaustion or injured themselves on the route were helped into Edhi ambulances for a ride ahead to the first-aid station.
There, some would get basic treatment, while those who needed more would be carried on to a hospital. The first-aid station was filling with bleeding men by the time the procession came into view.
Shia Scouts, dozens in a row as wide as Jinnah Road itself, held a rope to keep the rank straight and the marchers behind them.
Flag-bearers held up banners in red, black and green, decorated with religious inscriptions and images of minarets.
Behind the flags a mass of humanity moved forward in good order, many singing or chanting traditional slogans bemoaning the long-ago loss of the martyred Hussein.
That mass included Mohammad Raza Zaidi, the caretaker of the imambargah, walking with his coffin sheet over his shoulders and at last in the position where he wanted to be.
Sometime after four o’clock in the afternoon he telephoned his family with his good news. I am near the front, he announced over the phone, I am walking just behind the banners.
Just up ahead of him and a little to the right rose the white façade of the Lighthouse Centre. To the left was a small opening in the wall of buildings along Jinnah Road – the little triangle of earth with the first-aid station and the tree.
Some of the Scouts were relieved when they saw the marchers approaching safely, since they had forebodings about the day.
They moved up to the side of the road to watch the mourners pass. Scout leader Najeeb Ilyas turned to his sons and the other boys by the roadside. “Start passing out the sweet water,” he called out.
A few metres away from Najeeb, a metal box stood next to a light pole. It was a box of considerable size, more than six feet high on metal legs, with a sloping metal roof.
If anyone should come across a damaged Koran, or discarded paper with a Koranic inscription, people were supposed to drop it through a slot in the box so that no one would throw the holy words in the garbage or trample them underfoot.
The box stood near the banyan tree, and it was inside that box of wayward scripture that someone had planted a bomb.
The city surveillance video includes no sound. The camera looks silently down on Jinnah Road from the old city hall.
The banyan tree is visible in its little triangular park, across the street and maybe a hundred yards away. The video recording shows the mourners coming into sight, walking toward the camera.
The lead ranks, including the Shia scouts, have just passed the tree, which is visible behind them. They calmly pass in front of the blue-and-white sign for the Subhanallah Bakery.
Then the explosion rips into the body of the crowd. Within two seconds, thick gray smoke has risen as high as a five-storey building.
The flags and banners at the front of the parade sag as their bearers stagger or fall. People in front of the flags, those with room to run, scurry forward in search of cover.
Behind the flags the rest of the marchers, those who survived, are stuck in the shrapnel and smoke. Survivors affirmed later that there were two explosions.
The first was sharp and small, like a firecracker, coming from near a water barrel. It may have been designed to startle people, fix them in place.
Then the main explosion knocked Najeeb Ilyas to the ground. He speculated later that he was shielded from the blast by the people around him.
“I am an unlucky man,” he told me. “If I got martyrdom on Ashura, I would be in heaven now.” (I told him I was glad for his bad luck.)
He rose to see the corpses of three men to his left, and the bodies of five women on the ground behind him.
He saw his 15-year-old son Waqas, wounded and lying on the ground, and shouted for help. Another of his three sons approached.
Though at first, Najeeb recalled, “I didn’t recognise him because of the dust and smoke.” All of his sons had survived.
Behind Ilyas, at the first-aid station, a 14-year-old Scout named Mohammad Kumail was knocked senseless.
The Scout was tall for his age, brown-skinned and studious-looking behind the rectangular frames of his glasses.
He couldn’t see anything after the explosion except smoke. He couldn’t hear anything either. Eventually, his head cleared, the cacophony of shouts and howls around him jolted his brain, and he began to look around.
What stayed in the boy’s memory were the body parts strewn about the first-aid station. The explosion destroyed the Edhi ambulance that was parked beside the box, but within a few minutes more ambulances arrived.
Faisal Edhi, the son of the founder of the ambulance service, arrived with them. Even though as a younger man he’d moved to America for a time, Faisal liked his work here.
He seemed energised by facing the horror of it. If he didn’t do it, who would? He worked with ambulance drivers to clear away the wounded and the dead.
He crossed Jinnah Road to the building next to the Lighthouse Centre, climbed the stairs, and emerged on a balcony overlooking the scene.
“One of the bodies I shifted, from about the third floor, was a half body,” he remembered later. Somewhere in the chaos of the next few hours, Faisal would find a moment to inspect Edhi ambulances that had been near the bomb, including the one that crumpled.
He found the ambulances’ metal skin peppered with little dents and holes. They had been sprayed with steel nuts, the kind typically screwed on the end of a bolt.
More of these nuts would be found strewn about the park and on the pavement of Jinnah Road, later to be swept up as evidence by the police.
Many of the nuts had also plunged into the bodies of the marchers in the procession. More than 30 people had been killed, and hundreds wounded.
By now, photographers and video crews were moving up and down Jinnah Road. The many newspapers, news agencies, and television stations with offices in range of the banyan tree soon spread the news across the city and around the world.
In recent years, Pakistani cable television news channels had multiplied even more rapidly than the population.
Live coverage in Karachi prompted people across the city to begin frantic searches to learn if their loved ones were safe.
They called the marchers’ mobile phones, dialling again and again; sometimes an ambulance driver would answer, saying, “This phone’s owner is dead.”
The family of Mohammad Raza Zaidi, the caretaker of the Shia religious hall, received no such confirmation.
They dialled and dialled the phone from which he had called them near the head of the procession. Nobody answered.
As the afternoon became evening, members of the family travelled into the central city from their house in Sau Quarter.
They began searching the hospitals, and kept searching until they found his body. In accordance with tradition he was buried that night, along with the torn remains of the coffin sheet he carried to his death.
He was buried on the grounds of the Shia meeting hall where he was trustee and caretaker, at the edge of the green lawn he tended.

Extracted from the book ‘Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi’ authored by Steve Inskeep.