Letter From Karachi:
Inside the Emergency
By Shahid Khan

Randolph resident Shahid Khan, a Pakistani native, was on one of his regular visits home when the State of Emergency was declared in that country. (Herald file photo / Bob Eddy)

KARACHI, PAKISTAN, NOVEMBER 5, 2007—I finished this piece on the afternoon of Nov. 3, planning to email it to The Herald the next day, but here I am late on the same evening having to re-write the introduction. I am still not sure whether I shall be able to do so because things have changed.

At 5 p.m., all of the news channels on television went blank and according to others the internet was unavailable to everyone too. By 6 p.m. I was beginning to think that "something" was happening. My father and I speculated that the government had decided to take extraordinary action in Pakistan and very soon after we received a telephone call from Dubai that martial law had bee declared in Pakistan. Five minutes later the phone rang and we found out that PTV, the government-run channel, had announced that the government had declared an "Emergency" and the constitution had been suspended.

General Musharraf is apparently going to speak to the nation soon but no one knows when. PTV is broadcasting Pushtu classical music and I am sitting here waiting for more news. When such things happened in the Soviet Union it usually meant that the chairman of the Communist party had died. Right now,

I don’t know what to feel. Time will tell what the citizens of Pakistan will do. One thing will always remain true. For every action there is a reaction. If I stay up late enough, I will fill in the blanks as far as I can, but the plan at the moment is to go to a wireless site tomorrow and try to send this off.

I am often asked by friends and acquaintances in Vermont about what it is like in Pakistan during my bi-annual visits to the city of my birth. I am writing this piece in the hope that others might have an interest in a country that was recently described as the "most dangerous place on earth." While I cannot claim to be an expert on Pakistan or its politics, through this piece I hope to provide readers with a flavor of the rhythm of those parts of Karachi with which I am familiar and a sense of the major issues facing the country.

What is important to understand is that Pakistan is a country of contradictions and currently going through what might be the greatest challenge to its existence as a nation state since it emerged from colonial rule 60 years ago.

I arrived in Karachi on Oct. 28 after a 24-hour journey which began in Burlington, with stops at New York’s JFK airport and in Dubai. Happily, my arrival did not cause any large crowds to turn out at the airport as they did when Benazir Bhutto arrived ten days before. Nor was there any evidence of the carnage resulting from the worst terrorist attack in Pakistan’s history. Two suicide bombers killed 140 people and injured 500 more as Bhutto’s motorcade snaked through the city’s avenues in a victory tour celebrating her return from exile. By the time I arrived, Karachi seemed to have settled down to its regular pace–at least until the next time something happened.

A major factor in turning attention away from that tragedy and the daily problems of life was the fact that the South African cricket team was engaged in a series of five one-day test matches with the Pakistani national team. The series stood tied 2-2 and Pakistan was favored to win. An explanation of the finer points of cricket will have to be the subject of another letter (should there be a clamor for it) but suffice it to say that nearly all 160-million Pakistanis were at the same level of excitement and anticipation as Denver and Boston fans during the World Series. Watching the match on TV between jet lag-induced naps was a great way to adjust my body clock.

Since then there have been two other suicide bombings—in Rawalpindi 1000 miles north of Karachi and another in Sarghoda, the Pakistan Air Force’s main base in the country. Both attacks were aimed at busses carrying military personnel. Twenty personnel died.

Daily Life Continues

But daily life goes on. After the obligatory three days of adjusting to the fact that I am now nine time zones ahead of Randolph Center, I managed to get a full eight hours sleep and decided to go for an early morning walk in my parents’ neighborhood. The night guard from a local security firm who sits armed with a pistol inside the eight-foot wall that surrounds my parents’ home let me out onto the street around 6 a.m.

The sun had not quite risen but there was enough light to see by and the traffic was sporadic, with an occasional bicycle, motorcycle or school bus whizzing through red lights, picking up kids outside all the other high-walled homes on the street. There was some evidence of the day’s heat yet to come, but a light breeze off the Arabian Sea was keeping it at bay.

With walking stick in one hand and my cell phone in the other, plus a few hundred rupees in my pocket, I stepped into the service road and headed towards a commercial area about one-and-a-half miles away. Carrying cash and a cell phone is standard operating procedure for anyone venturing out for early morning walks just in case one is held up on the street.

In the nine years I have been visiting my parents though, not once have I felt threatened by anyone on my walks. Family and friends, though, continue to advise me that I be careful citing personal experiences of being robbed at gunpoint.

In the past I have driven the ten minutes to Karachi’s Clifton Beach which is a pleasant but lonely walk if one ignores the trash left by weekend beachgoers. My father would prefer that I go to a fenced park where other early risers walk around a cinder track and do push ups at designated stations, but I miss the smells and flavors of a city waking up to its daily chores.

City of 12 Million

My parent’s neighborhood is one of many suburbs planned and developed by the Pakistani army in this city of 12-million which is a sprawling urban area consisting of a number of townships. It being one of the newer suburbs, I counted 14 houses in various stages of construction. There are still more empty lots where construction has yet to begin but they have a use nonetheless—people tend to throw plastic bags full of garbage attracting wild dogs and flocks of grey-hooded crows that fight over the spoils. This year I have noticed orange-clad sweepers collecting trash and depositing it in bins at various street corners.

Typically, several workers sleep at these construction sites so that materials are not stolen at night. Homes here are built with cement blocks covered in plaster and many have bougainvillea vines hanging over their walls. At this time of the morning the workers are rising from their rope beds wrapped in their night shawls, putting away their makeshift mosquito netting, starting wood fires, putting kettles on the boil for sweet milky tea, kneading dough in bowls and flopping flatbread onto big convex black metal pans. The smells are mouth watering. Most of these workers are from Afghanistan and the northern areas of Pakistan (Pushtuns) come to Karachi looking for work. Some of them have been here for years—since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 when Pakistan became a refuge for three million Afghans.

My walking outfit consists of black warm up pants, sneakers and a white Manhattan College T-shirt, making me the object of some curiosity. "Salaam Aleikum" I say. "Valeikum As-salaam," a chorus responds. Similar greetings are exchanged with several other walkers and domestic servants arriving at their jobs.

I watch a blue shalwar kameez-clad man on a bicycle stop and pick up paper trash on the side of the road. He has a huge billowing plastic bag draped over the rear wheel in which he stuffs the paper. I ask him what he is doing. He is clearly from the north—light-skinned and speaking Urdu with a Pushtu accent. He tells me he arrived in the city recently. Unable to find other work, he has been hired by a company which specializes in recycling paper. All along the road, blue-uniformed guards are stepping out into the street going home from their night duty.

Further down, I approach the commercial area. There is a 24-hour Pizza Hut delivery franchise with a dozen specially outfitted delivery motorcycles all parked in a row, guarded by two uniformed security men toting sinister looking automatic weapons.

At the intersection a large glass and concrete building houses a Citibank branch next to an ABN-Amro bank office. On the other side of the intersection there is a fancy coffee shop called Expresso and new Subway that wasn’t there the last time I was here.

Produce by Pick-Up

Glancing down an alley I see a fruit and vegetable shop open to the street. They are receiving their day’s supply brought in to the city on a small pick up truck. I go down to take a look and see large baskets of beautifully arranged produce covered with flies. The plump white-bearded shopkeeper ineffectually waves a rag he keeps on his shoulder causing the flies to stir briefly and settle once again.

I survey his wares—bunches of sweet green grapes, big red juicy pomegranates from Kandahar, three kinds of melons, squash, turnips, limes and many others—the selection is impressive. I buy two pounds of squash, a pound of white radish, a pound of guavas and half a pound of carrots. The owner carefully picks out the best of each basket for me.

The bill comes to 120 rupees—or two US dollars. This is high-priced for a country where the average daily wage is three or four dollars, but I wouldn’t mind these stickers at the local Shaw’s. Meat is beyond most people’s budgets. The poor get their protein mostly from a huge variety of lentils.

On the way back, the sun has risen and so has the temperature. The traffic is beginning to build in numbers and decibels. No matter the form of vehicle, drivers favor their horns and full beams indiscriminately, paying little attention to what you and I might consider the rules of the road.

Coming towards me I see our night guard walking alongside his bicycle on his way home and he raises his hand in a salute. I nod and smile, wondering why the poor fellow is walking. Maybe his bike is broken. As I look back behind me he climbs on the bike and pedals away briskly. It dawns on me that he spied me first and although he is my senior in years he would have considered it disrespectful to have merrily ridden by me so he dismounted and walked the short distance until he was past. Some in his generation are still bound by class distinctions and follow prescribed rules of behavior that Americans would find decidedly undemocratic.

Back home my father and I sit in a screened porch and pour hot cups of tea with steamed milk and share the newspaper. The news is not good, including the fact that Pakistan frittered away a nice lead in the last cricket match with South Africa and lost five wickets in 20 balls (I know, I know.)

Overloaded Busses

Later in the morning, I accompany my father on some of his errands—a visit to the bank, the supermarket and the pharmacy. By this time city life is in full swing and so is the heat. There are more vehicles than the roads can handle. Colorfully decked out busses with creative horns and slogans are overloaded to the point that passengers sit on the roof or hang on to the grill on the back windows with their feet resting on the bumper. This does not seem to bother anyone, least of all the passengers. Although the government has declared such overloading unsafe and illegal, threatening bus companies with fines, the police see this new rule as a means of increasing their take-home pay—tax free.

Downtown, businesses are doing well. Parking is hard to find around shopping centers. The stock market is humming along breaking new records every week. It is one of the best performing indexes in the world. The city is full of restaurants for people of varying economic means and shops are open until 10 or 11 p.m.

Karachi contributes up to 60% of the country’s tax revenues so it is a busy city. But the infrastructure is old and new capacity cannot keep up with the demand. This means power outages, water shortages and flooded streets during the monsoon. Everyone who can afford one has a big noisy diesel generator in their yard. The water pressure is so low each house has an underground tank from which water is pumped to another tank on top of the house. Occasionally, my father is forced to buy water from a private company because water flows in the city pipes just two days a week.

The majority of Karachi’s residents don’t have these problems. They live in slums where streets sometimes function as sewers and running water is a communal tap at the corner. Karachi-ites living in better neighborhoods only see such sights on television and read about them in the newspapers. While the printed media have always been well represented in Pakistan, about 50 private TV channels have started operations in the past five years.

Programming runs the gamut, from cooking shows to political panels discussing every development as it occurs. This has given the average Pakistani unprecedented access to what is happening around the country. Cable TV is widely viewed in homes—even in the poorer townships. The current military-dominated government has not clamped down on what many view as a hyper-dynamic press, free to analyze and criticize government policies.

‘Talibanization’

The current talk is all about the government’s mishandling of the creeping "Talibanization" of the country. An extremist Mullah from the beautiful northern valley of Swat, which I visited back in the ‘80s, has been haranguing the airwaves through an illegal FM radio station for over a year. He has issued so-called Islamic Sharia laws and his armed followers have forcibly closed music, barber and tailor shops and blown up girls’ schools, branding them un-Islamic.

The army finally moved into the small town he is headquartered in and conducted a limited operation. They succeeded only in creating a refugee problem and the situation has become a standoff. Militants from the Waziristan area are making public statements in support of the "Radio Mullah." The government has come off looking weak and ineffective.

Many in Pakistan do not see any way to stop Pakistan’s eventual descent into a theocratic, Taliban-run country. Others see democracy as the only solution. National elections have been scheduled in the New Year, but in a country where feudal loyalties and extra-constitutional political machinations trump the rule of law, people are unsure of what will actually happen. Pakistan’s Supreme Court has recently shown its independence in a number of important cases with the current leadership respecting their judgments, but what the country lacks is leaders who are ready to put the interests of the country before their own.

(Shahid Khan, formerly a resident of Brookfield, recently moved to Randolph Center with his wife Lee. He is a native of Pakistan, where his father was once part of the foreign service, and takes annual trips back to that country. He is currently president of the board of Vermont Public Television. His daughter Sultana is a student at New York University.)