Like always, my heart lurched when I stepped off the jet bridge and into Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport. I’ve crossed the walkway to customs so many times over the past two decades and in that time the space has hardly changed at all. This time was no different. What was new was the surge of pity that I felt for this forlorn passage. Everything — from the bleary brown tinted glass separating the arrivals corridor from the departure lounge, to the dim lighting and the shadowy men lurking in alcoves and doorways — all of it was bowed down, reconciled with neglect. It was sad. This bit of the Karachi Airport — the part that welcomes international arrivals — should have changed, it should be fresher and brighter. Karachi is a city of twenty million people. This morose arrivals gate, through which throngs fresh off foreign planes first meet our country, is like a synecdoche for how this megacity has been ignored and disconnected from the world beyond it. In my father’s words, “No one comes here unless they have to.”
He is right. Almost no European or U.S. carriers fly to Karachi anymore, save perhaps a single British Airways flight that takes loads of British Pakistanis back and forth from weddings and shopping trips. Even the Pakistani national airline, PIA, no longer uses the city as a hub. And Gulf states that ferry droves of migrant workers taking their annual leaves don’t use their own planes to fly there. When I fly in from Washington, D.C., I buy the ticket from Qatar Airways, but the plane is actually operated by Air Maroc, the Moroccan carrier which would otherwise not fly here either. Karachi’s neglect is a recent development. In the early aughts, many European carriers flew into the city. There was even a direct flight from New York City. In those days this crumbling airport was sparkly with new paints. Now, though, it is as if Karachi is a city unplugged, with few of the usual channels of exchange one would expect a city of twenty million people to have. In the place of multiple nodes of exchange there is only a thin and frail pipe through which some people can pass in and out. Everyone else — many millions — must simply stay put.
I am one of the lucky chosen who can come and go. My father, now in his late seventies, still lives in the same rambling house where I was raised. I reached the house from the airport early enough in the morning that the housekeeper still hadn’t arrived. My father, a little older but otherwise the same, was waiting. It was eight A.M. on a November morning and 90 degrees — in Karachi the fall is still hot enough for the house to feel stuffy. My father was wearing shorts. This house — a mid-century modern that my grandfather built in the 1960s — still has the indolent energy of a summer afternoon full of napping family members. I dragged my suitcases inside, confused the way a person always is when she has suddenly left the frenetic energy of the jammed streets for the still and quiet of a silent house. I was going to be there for three weeks.
To be clear, there are still people pouring into Karachi but they are not from outside the country. A few days after I arrived, I went to visit my aunt who had recently had surgery on her arm — a protracted and painful affair that involved a bone graft and a metal plate — she was in a wheelchair and needed an attendant at all times. The attendant is named Seema, and she accounts for one of the many who pour into the city each day. Seema is the eldest daughter in a family that migrated to Karachi from southern Punjab. Seema has had basic schooling, and she likes working for my aunt who lives alone. It is an escape, she says, from the drudgery of the non-compensated work she was doing before this which involved taking care of her four younger siblings, the youngest of whom is five, and tending to the usual household chores.
My Aunt has need of Seema because the grandchildren who were meant to fill the house our grandfather built have all fled Karachi for glamorous and fast-paced lives in cities across the globe. We jet in once a year or so and cram all the meals we missed into the days allotted. The elders await our visits which leave them exhausted from the whirlwind of activity sped up to compensate for the time spent away.
Seema takes our place, but she will not be there forever. My Aunt dreads the day Seema’s parents decide to marry her off and they will likely do so sooner rather than later. Then Seama will probably have to return to the village and marry a man who may not even be educated, and who has none of the city ways to which she has become accustomed. The fear of returning home forever is something Seema and I share.
Her fear manifests in an odd way. She begs my aunt to forego the popular Pakistani television dramas to which the rest of the country’s women are addicted. These shows are chock full of the woes and worries of women locked in terrible marriages with demonic mothers in law and philandering husbands. Watching them forces Seema to worry about what the future has in store for her. She prefers translated Turkish soap operas. Their drama is foreign enough to be enjoyable.
Not all the girls coming into the city are doing domestic work. A friend who runs a well-known clothing line tells me that some of the young women around Seema’s age decide, sometimes against their family’s wishes, to stay in the city and work in his stores. Many had come to the city originally to work as attendants or nannies, and were exposed almost on accident to a world far more refined and affluent than the one they had left in southern Punjab. “They learn how to speak and carry themselves and operate in an urban environment — they become city girls,” he tells me. A “city girl” is not an easy thing for them to be. There are few protections for a Pakistani woman fending for herself in Karachi.
I’ve never visited one of his stores but I have seen women like the ones he described to me in the many shopping malls which fill Karachi. The malls are crammed with women — some shopping but many working either as shopkeepers or security guards — hundreds of them. Female security guards stand at entrances and in front of the escalators making sure that the swarms of women march in an orderly fashion and keep out of the brawls which occasionally disturb the customers. Shopgirls stand at attention in the glitzy stores, poised to help potential customers. I asked one of them how long she had been working there. “Oh about six months” she told me, her Work Smile frozen in place. “Do you like it?” I asked. The question thawed her cheer. “Do I like working?” she mumbled in confusion before looking away. It was a definitive response.
At breakfast back home my father, whom I found in a terrible mood, grumpily suggested that I should shorten my trip and return early. It was a mean thing to say and meant to elicit a reaction. I am used to this sort of treatment from my father, who gets provocative when he cannot process his feelings. I do not take the bait, but it takes me a day and a half to figure out why he is in this latest combative mood.
What I discovered was this: the day I arrived the Government of Pakistan turned off the internet. In addition to power blackouts and the non-existent water supply the current — Government which represents a dynasty that intermittently comes to power and then is thrown into jail and exile — has devised this new means of making Pakistani lives more miserable. My father is in his late seventies — not the typical doom scroller profile, but his daily life is dependent on the internet. This is not because he wants to keep in touch with the children and grandchildren who live in America — but because his daily digital diet is made up of hours of TikTok and YouTube. He has always been an introvert and uninterested in social events, but he is increasingly becoming — in his own words — a hermit. “I am happy alone,” he announces to me every morning at breakfast, which is held at 9:30 A.M. At that hour, his housekeeper shows up and puts on the tea. The two of them sit on opposite ends of the table and discuss what the menu for lunch should be. She brings in the newspaper, which my father peruses perfunctorily. She does the same — even though she cannot read English. That interaction over the breakfast table constitutes the extent of social interaction that my father has decided he can tolerate. Our house is, in some ways, rather like the airport I flew into. No one comes here, either.
After breakfast, my father retreats to his room, lights a cigarette and gets online. In addition to YouTube my brother has set him up with access to all the streaming platforms and a VPN. Usually this is enough to bypass the typical government roadblocks and it allows my father to maintain the illusion that he does not live in Pakistan at all. He was an unwilling migrant, born and raised in Bombay, India, until his parents — who had not followed the millions of Muslims that moved to Pakistan in 1947 — sent him across the border as a teenager to apprentice at his uncle’s advertising agency in the late fifties. He insists that his biggest regret is that he ever left the city in which he was born.
The internet is shut off for political reasons. The current government imagines itself under threat from the previous government, whose leader — Imran Khan, a man with a huge populist following — was thrown in jail under what many believe are trumped up charges. His angry followers have taken to the streets to stage protests and sit-ins. They have been arrested en masse, disappeared, or simply killed. The army, without whose assent or collusion no Government ever does anything in Pakistan, appears to condone this, but it has not stopped Khan’s followers either. The government shuts off the internet to make it more difficult for Khan’s party to organize. All the other attendant pandemonium seems of little concern to the powers that be, whose coffers are only intermittently filled with IMF loans and remittances from the millions of Pakistanis that live abroad.
Unsurprisingly, shutdowns have incurred heavy losses of all kinds since business screeches to a halt on every such occasion. In fact, Pakistan leads the world in monetary losses owing to internet shutdowns. According to a report published in Dawn — Pakistan’s largest English newspaper — losses from internet stoppage over the past year add up to $1.62 billion dollars, more than the losses incurred by the similar outages in both Sudan and Myanmar, which are currently ravaged by civil wars. The internet was completely shut down by the Government of Pakistan for 9,735 hours in 2023.
The rooms of my childhood home are filled with memories and old, dusty furniture. For all the time my mother was alive, and despite her ill health, the rooms were always immaculate, if simply furnished. My father let the dust settle and the housekeeper has decided to follow his lead. Why dust furniture in rooms where no one sits or talks or laughs? As the years pass, my father foregoes even simple repairs to the house — including ones my brother could arrange to have done from abroad. Each time we visit the house is a bit more uninhabitable. My father is testing our loyalty — will we still visit despite the discomforts?
One evening a good friend — Dee, a successful businessman — asked me to join him and his friend for dinner and conversation. We are meeting at Boat Club — one of Karachi’s oldest, most exclusive colonial-era Gentlemen’s clubs. It admits women, but they have to be related to or invited by male members.
A friend and I drive together to the club which is nestled among the understated homes of Karachi’s old coastal elite. We arrive before Dee who is stuck in the gridlock of Karachi rush hour, and we are ushered into a wood paneled lounge with a bar and bartender. The air is already redolent with cigar smoke and expensive cologne and there are people seated in the tasteful little alcoves and seating circles. It is very early by Karachi standards, where evenings do not begin until 9 P.M. It is only 7 P.M. The scene is from another era, and in its odd merging of an overheated Karachi and colonial rites it reminds me of Isak Dinesen and Out of Africa, even though we are nowhere near Africa and no Dinesen presides.
We make small talk and introductions on leather chairs surrounded by verdant indoor palms. The air conditioners are running full blast to provide respite from the ninety-degree heat. We have just been served drinks when a waiter in a starched white uniform sidles up to one of the men and whispers something in his ear. When he leaves, the rest of the group breaks into murmurs until one of the men in our party announces, “Guys we have to go outside.” I was startled — we had just begun to order some appetizers — but he ushered us insistently outside. We head to one of the tables set up on the patio where a waiter informs us that we cannot order at all.
Apparently, the shoes that the man who gave me a ride is wearing do not conform to the Club’s dress code. Only leather dress shoes are permitted on the premises. His are a pair of very expensive leather sneakers with white soles. Naturally, he is embarrassed and everyone else is confused and nobody is sure about what to do next. Many calls are placed to the host who keeps telling everyone that he is on his way which everyone then keeps repeating to each other. In the meantime, the shoes and the man in them must wait in the parking lot. Another of the party goes with him and the rest of his wait. The evening has been waylaid by a colonial era rule instituted by some long-gone British East India Company official who decided many decades ago that leather shoes were essential for Club decorum.
I chat with a fellow stranded evening guest on the patio to pass the time. He is an openly gay, wealthy man. The wealth eases otherwise unbearable burdens. We have just met, but he openly boasts to me about his Friday-night sexual conquests. These sorts of exchanges feel like a test to me. If I don’t act impressed, I scan as homophobic, but if I do I feel like I am condoning and even inviting a sort of salacious oversharing. I’m familiar with these sorts of tests. They are administered to determine what sort of immigrant Pakistani I am. (Usually the test is being offered an alcoholic drink, not the details of a strangers’ sex life.) Pakistani immigrants who live in the U.S. tend to be one of two kinds: middle class folk who moved abroad and immediately became more religious, building mosques and Islamic schools. This kind is odious to the elite of Pakistan not least because of their fondness for proselytizing on their trips back home. The other sort is those who care mostly about economic mobility use their new fangled status as middle class Americans as an entrée into the cadres of the Pakistani elite. The first group is not welcome at the Boat Club.
While we wait my salacious interlocutor calls home and asks his cook to prepare snacks for the group he may be bringing over. When he hung up the phone I wondered aloud, “Why are you all holding on to these stupid colonial rules here in Pakistan when we are trying to eradicate them back in America?”
“Why are you trying to eradicate them?” He quips, only half joking. “I love colonialism, I wish they would come back and take us over all over again.” Before I can respond to his provocations, Dee, the host, arrives at last. Clad in an impeccably cut three-piece suit and perfect Italian leather loafers he looks like he belongs at a colonial-era Gentleman’s Club in Karachi. Within five minutes all problems are solved. Somehow a pair of club approved leather loafers in the right size materialized to replace the banished man’s leather sneakers. In a flurry of apologies the entire party was hastened back into the space upstairs now full of Karachi elite.
I listen in as the businessmen talk shop and politics. “This Government has destroyed everything in this city, we need to just break off and be our own city state,” one says in disgust. I listen closely to this — he comes from one of the oldest business families in the city, one that owns everything from clothing brands to restaurants. Evidently the stress of doing business in a neglected and crumbling city is overwhelming even to him. “People are leaving in droves,” he tells me, “and I don’t blame them.” It is a damning statement from someone who has chosen to stay.
Another young businessman has been even harder hit. A few years ago, before the internet stoppages began, he had founded a successful e-commerce platform for home goods and luxury lifestyle brands. He hasn’t given up on it, but he doesn’t have to spell out the difficulties he has faced over the intervening years. He confides that he is applying for Canadian citizenship for himself, his wife and his son. “It’s a points-based system” he says, pursing his lips together. “Let’s see what happens.”
The conversation surprised me. These sentiments are gloomier than the ones I had overheard in previous years. These are all confirmed members of the “people who stayed” Karachi cohort. When members of the “people who left” group show up every year and criticize the city, the ones we left behind never used to join us in enumerating Karachi’s many failings. I had grown to expect the usual response: “Yes, yes friend but at least it’s my own land and no one here calls me a terrorist.” And the two men who had just spoken were both educated abroad, in Canada and the United States, and they came back.
Now, their despair is palpable. “Democracy is a lie,” says my friend. “Karachi has no business being a part of Pakistan — it should be its own state,” he repeats just as we get up to leave.
The host sees us out. On the way we pass the list of past Presidents of the Club, prominently displayed on a shiny wooden plaque in the lobby. The list is made up entirely of European names stretching all the way back to the late fifties, at which time leadership passed over to the local brown elite. In that decade, the names alternate between Pakistani Muslim and European ones. The host points out his grandfather who held the position in the 1980s. Dee’s grandfather’s name appears after this one. “They were buddies,” he says, throwing his arm around my friend of the errant footwear, “just like we are.”
I thought about this gathering for a long time. What is it about the current set of dismal circumstances is distinct from what has come before, I wonder. At my aunt’s house, I watch my uncle, both of my aunt’s, and a guest scrolling on their phones. It is odd to watch that generation engage in such behavior. But by the end of my visit I understood it. The phone is an escape from where they find themselves — a bit bewildered and baffled at the shape their older years have taken. They knew that they would grow old, of course, but they did not expect youth to be so absent. If they want to see us, or any of the rest of the world, if they want to laugh a little or learn a little, they have to look inside their phones. So naturally, they look inside their phones out of habit — even when we are in front of them
The Boat Club is also an escape. The place is like a time machine and its rules, however bizarre and oppressive in origin, represent a curious sort of order, a reprieve from Karachi-chaos, as much a relief as the air conditioning offers from the heat. The social order, the governmental order, the legal order all seem in disarray, and in a city of twenty million people, that disorder engulfs you. You feel like you’re constantly drowning but never die.
The day I left was tense. My father detests goodbyes and his detestation makes them worse. To avoid the bitterness I passed the hours until my 11 P.M. pick-up to the airport alone in my room. The house was lifeless because my mother, who gave it life, is gone forever. She has never visited and in the near decade that she has been gone the house, like my father, seems to have given up.
When I reached the airport my eyes were burning. The forecast most nights in Karachi is “smoky” and it means exactly that. Fumes emitted all day still linger in the air along with particulate matter. I could barely open my eyes without eye drops. Inside, the airport was filled mostly with religious pilgrims on their way to Saudi Arabia. This bit of travel is consistent even as the rest has grinded to a halt. My eyes hurt so terribly by the time we took off that I could not open them all the way even for a last look outside the window. I knew the city was there — its lights dim and wavering, its connection to the world flimsy. The next day I learned that my plane was one of the last to take off from Karachi that evening — before a ground stop owing to poor visibility shuttered the airport for three days. I am, I suppose, one of the lucky ones.