The Cry of Karachi

KARACHI CRIES.

They were walking alone that day.
I knew it was over.
It spelt like that all day, rain over rain.
I knew time was indifferent.
I know now that you were not there.
But I still looked for you.
Rummaged through the loneliness of Karachi streets
I know that no one was there
But I still looked for you

Twenty-five people could change the world.
The day I say ‘sky is blue.’
It was like that all day today. Raining, reminding.
I knew torture-cells at thirteen, so did you.
We were both karachites. That city of fire.
That time when I lost you to suicide.
That time when you lost me to oblivion.
I knew the city was mine. So did you.
At that time we weren’t so rich.
At that time we weren’t so poor.
At that time you were you, and I
was I.
That time is over now.
Lost in the ‘so do you call this all night long?’
I thought I could wake the sun with all my shivering.
It was frightening cold. The night you left me.
I was twenty-three years old.
Dead as the city had been for thirteen years.
The first time I saw blood on the paper.
I stopped reading newspapers. I grew irises in my garden.
Strange choice? We are all in need of a new world.
Sometimes I can still see the news
As it beat upon the pavement with cold news
Three more died today, less than one of yesterday.
I knew I could count on you. No matter what they said
In the papers. I knew I could trust you. You were my friend.
No stranger. The city burnt at the heart of its Saddar.
The church-bells took me to the arms of Christ, as an infant.
How’s one to say all this, to ears indifferent to Christian cries.
I was walking to school that day, I saw him standing there
Up on a cross, arms like straight arrows, and eyes like fire
Piercing through my soul. Why walk like this in my school.
Are you a part of teaching, then? I said to him.
You know, Karachi in those days used to be my home.
I could walk anyway, I could try to speak even in the hot afternoons.

Somedays are lost on you. I told you it was over.
In Mahabharata there is a soulful line, the little boy with new resolve in his blue eyes, says, simply: “My youth is over.�
Rain used to come like that. Like it didn’t care, do you remember? My city used to be so child-like, so wounded.
I said to you one day:
“this is a city that can cry, look even the walls have become tears, I don’t know any other sea that is so distant.� I told you, sometimes I can’t let go.

There was a road towards a market that selled flowers. Later, I grew up to learn it was ‘sold flower.’ At the edge of town, where one step more and you would never be seen again. I sold flowers. I heard they got you if you said, “I’m no longer part of this mission� and threw you out of
A racing wagon, till your skull crashed on the stone pavement. Breaking you.
They used to break people in my city. I used to hate reading newspapers.
I once made a newspaper for school, we had columns and Arabic fonts.
It didn’t tell me the time. It wasn’t needed. The ‘unoccupied’ rooms one after the other, must belong to some hotel in Karachi, the one I never visited. But I knew, somehow, it was there. Somewhere. I told you about it then.
When we were listening to church-bells, the computers, the chalk, the classrooms.
You said, “I believe you.�

I fought my way towards sleep. Bilingual sleep, the one that has arms more than one. Then I knew the difference between street cars and school vans.



The crackle of his newspaper lost on ambiguous realisms.
I forgot the dynamite in its decorum.
It used to roll onto itself.
It held together.
In fact, till it came apart no one could tell, it could do that.
Twenty-five times it turned.
In different hands.
They read the pages like sands read water.
I didn’t take time to notice.
It had its affects.
People were dying. Really, not metaphorically. It was all over In the newspapers. It affected the brain, made it grow
grey on the inside. I happily grew irises. I didn’t want to think about who killed this. I said I would grow these flowers. Through this very rain.
I promised myself this everyday. Before going to school. Before taking perplexing streets. I never cared for directions. Just getting there.
I went everywhere, distributing flowers that were the color of snake’s poison turned in water, by careful analysis into sound. From there, I could turn the sound to real flower. No problem. I can do this. I told you all.

I lied, or I fell. I do not remember.
When the accident was over.
There was no hospital room for my wounds.
My irises too were gone.
It was the cold white stare of doctors who no longer had irises, only white behind them,
like a T.V screen that shows nothing, not even the current,
that ‘welcomed’ ? me back. I hated the town. I still hated newspapers.
I hated how their white stayed, and their dead black iris words never spoke.
There was no sound. There was nothing, except death.

Fifty people died, there was some open-air firing somewhere, a bullet hit a lady my father new, his friend’s wife or something. She had to be brought to our house (of all the places) and the mania that it left on my mother’s mind Is still un-erased.
I was bound to the chairs, there was nothing left to do. Except go nowhere, and at no time leave the house. Nor open the house to anyone. They will come inside
And take out your nails, burn your hands, tie you up, and rob your house.
I hated life. I hated newspapers. I hated all the places that brought these suspicious stories to ruin my adolescence. Twenty-five people could change the world.
Like say, everyone in this neighbourhood agree that they will walk to the bus-station, (I mean put a bus-station there) and they will not talk to each other with dead eyes.
Deadness would leave this neighbourhood. You see? Then I knew how I would talk people out of sitting in their frozen vehicles, and go to offices in which they
Learnt how to build brick and stone. No wonder when they came back, there was nothing human left on them.
I would talk them out of it, no problem.
I would give them purple irises.
What if the font of the newspaper’s headline changes, you know to say a vine of color.
Wouldn’t that affect the eye then? And all this dead exchange would stop?
Like a purple lightning it would rip apart this empty piece of stock-exchange news.
That place, where people can’t remember they have children, or wives.


I don’t know how they maintained their silence.
It didn’t tear apart anything, nor did it touch anything.
It just existed, like a loaf of bread. But in that Russian novel I was reading those days, the loaf of bread was intrinsic, relevant, Ration. Who were these people?
I left town several times to understand, what this thing was about Bands, music-bands, and a certain deadness had evolved. It had reached somewhere my arms didn’t go. Day after day, it was all dying.
I know now that evenings are made, you have to literally create them.
That is how I started writing poems. It was life or death, life or death, life or death. Unimpassioned.
It was do or this, do or this, do or this.
Unintended. I had to do it. I started writing at the moment I used to make water turn from poison to flower in the garden. It was a birth.
Like an uprooting out of the earth. A thing that grew of its own, and has harassed me ever since. I had to do it, to live.

I’ve written so many Iris-poems. I have died writing. Did it change the world?
Did it affect anyone? Did it all matter? At all? To anyone?