Patthar Ka Sheher (City of Stone)

Karachi is an open palm: place a gigantic left hand on the map of Karachi and the palm of the hand will rest along the coast. The centre of the palm is colonial Karachi-- Saddar, Empress Market, Burns Road, Bandr Road-- as well the Karachi of the '50s the post Partition development of PECHS. The fingers, starting with the little finger, pointing NNW to NNE, are where the industrial workforce of Karachi lives.

The rich and the ultra rich live along the coast.

These fingers, Orangi, Lyari, Qasbah Colony, Aligarh, PaharGanj, North Nazimabad have been the killing fields of Karachi since 1986. The Muhajir/Pathan

violence of the late '80s and the MQM vs the state violence from 1990-1995 together made Ashish Nandy tell me, after he visited Karachi in 1988: barring

Colombo Karachi was the most violent city in South Asia.

The ridge between the palm and where the fingers begin locate an actual ridge, the Orangi hills. From the north slope of this hill you see the span of dwellings of the labour force of Karachi, the grist for the heavy industry of Karachi, located in the adjacent SITE area.

I was standing on this ridge taking photographs for a Ford Foundation Project on Women and Violence. The project had interviewers collecting stories of women affected by violence. The stories were of the disruption of their daily lives. These were women whose husbands, brothers, sons and other male kin had disappeared or were killed. The perpetrators were the state agencies, including the paramilitary, and the militant wings of political parties.

If you were to gaze upon Karachi from the south slope, which means you are looking out in the direction of the sea, you see the rest of Karachi, middle class upwards. The closer you get to the coast the richer you get.

 

My paternal family fled Delhi at Partition, in the '50s and '60s they lived in the migrant colonies of Karachi. By the '70s we lived in resolutely middle class neighbourhoods in the palm of Karachi. By the '80s we were getting close to the sea.

OF AMBUSHES AND SUICIDES

Muzammil Sheikh (not his real name) a human rights activist was my guide through Orangi and Qasbah Colony. A gentle man in his late forties he asked me to park the car I was driving within the gates of his apartment complex. The chances of car-jacking were quite high he said. In a handful of trips over the course of the interviews they had already lost one vehicle.

This was the beginning of an afternoon of his softspoken commentary of violence. We took a cab from his apartment in North Nazimabad to nearby Orangi. We turned a corner from his house, it really was the corner at the end of the road from his house, and he pointed out the location where an unnamed political party in 1994 organised a tremendous ambush. They called in the Rangers, a paramilitary outfit, on the ruse of an anonymous phone call informing of a

dacoity.

We moved along what was the main road to Qasbah colony and Orangi. He told me the story of a bank manager who was harassed for months by the army for alleged MQM activism. One day he took his life.

It was 2 pm on a Sunday afternoon. Police in their Nissans roamed about and Rangers in open vehicles with mounted machine guns stood in the corner of a fruit and vegetable market. As I passed this,  I tried not to stare, not bring attention to myself, a man holding a camera. I looked over the armed men as if they were not an unusual sight. Moazzam asked me if I wanedt to take pictures of a house that was razed to the ground by the security agencies. Making their families homeless is a method of punishing suspected activists.

The women in the project are kept anonymous for their safety. Nor should I indicate exactly which roundabout the massacre took place, nor name the political party or the bank whose manager committed suicide, nor  that family in Qasbah colony whose house the agencies razed to the ground.

OF A PRIOR CITY, A HALF-REMEMBERED PAST AND INSENSIBLE

PRESENT

One other thing that the women interviewees have in common besides their anonymity, and the anonymity of the violence (in a journalistic sense), is that all their narratives begin in a prior city or a qasbah. I chose three interviews to read at random, all three subjects began their family history in Delhi, Agra, Kanpur, or some UP qasbah. Moazzam told me that Partition survivors and the younger members of their families tend to refer to Partition violence in telling the story of the new violence and displacement that they face in their lives.

On the way back to his house in North Nazimabad Muzammil tells me that all the nicer houses you see around here are so because labour that went out to the Gulf sent the money to their families to build this. It is not possible to build property if you work in industry here. His family has not been able to put together any property in 50 years, he said.

STONY HOUSES IN A STONY LANDSCAPE

Patthar ka who shehr bhi kiya tha

shehr ke nechay shehr basa tha

Log bhi saray pathar ke thay

Rungh bhi onka patthar sa tha

Goongi wadi gunjti uthti thi

jab koi pathar girta tha.

(from Nasir Kazmi's Pehli Baarish.)

The latest era of violence in Qasbah Colony and Orangi is the violence between militant jehadi organisations. The afternoon I was taking pictures killings occurred rumored to be reprisal assasinations by a Shia militant group of Sunni leaders.

POSTSCRIPT: "THE VISION OF CHRIST THOU DOST SEE IS MY

VISION'S GREATEST ENEMY (William Blake)."

I saw a poster that proclaimed, "Shahadat Conference". Its central image was of a masked man holding a machine gun, the background red, as in the afterglow of an explosion. Along the margins of the poster were photographs of martyrs, all the faces were young, some ridiculously so. The poster also had a date for the conference and promised a "telephonic" address from Syed Ali Geelani. It was placed on the outside wall of a house that served as a school.

I was standing in a narrow lane of houses when I saw this poster. The lane was on a hill. As I looked further up the lane, over the rooftops following the phone lines, towards the hillside, I saw a sign that commanded the community - it said 'Jaish-e-Muhammad'.

I had travelled to Qasbah Colony along broken roads, open sewers and open-air trash burnings. In the entire area I saw only one building that said it was a government-run educational institution.

I wonder if any of the $1 billion that Washington promised Islamabad for the defanging of the madarsas, will make it to Qasbah Colony. I wonder if the most obvious signs of violence will be removed. For once I would like Barkha Dutt and her Star TV crew to cover Kashmir from Qasbah Colony, Karachi.