Mangho Pir

I was seven years old the first time I visited a Sheedi neighbourhood in Karachi. I had accompanied my grandmother on a campaign tour, visiting homes and receiving applications from men who needed legal aid to fight cases in the perpetually clogged city courts, from others who had lost their jobs and had no way of feeding their families, and from widows seeking stipends from the state. I felt nervous at the sight of crowds, preferred my car rides free of screaming men chanting slogans and wanted desperately to sit at home and talk without the noise of loudspeakers, megaphones and microphones. My grandmother, Joonam – ‘my life’, as I called her in her native Farsi – had been thrust into party politics after the assassination of her husband, my grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and had been jailed, beaten and elected to congress before I lost my first tooth. I adored Joonam and relished time spent with her, even if it meant engaging in campaigning.

Karachi was, in my imagination at least, a bustling metropolis. Palm trees lined the city’s wide avenues, children thronged Clifton Beach, buying roasted corn smeared with lime and chilli from street vendors and sidling up to the men who sold camel rides for a couple of rupees. But there were millions who would never benefit from its occasional munificence, even though there should have been plenty to spare. There were no Sheedi on Clifton Beach, smack in the middle of the affluent old Clifton neighbourhood where my family lived. There were no Sheedi in the new electronics stores, buying CD players or shiny fabric from the city’s up-and-coming designers. And yet, although they lived in the shadows, they refused to go unnoticed. The poverty and political dispossession could not hem them in. That first visit with Joonam was a jolt to my mental shaping of a city that I had, until then, only seen on its best and most welcoming behaviour.