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KARACHI IS MY CITY, my home, but I was seven
years old the first time I set foot on its soil. I was
boarded onto a Pakistan International Airlines
plane by my father from our exile home in Syria,
and told I would be seated next to an old Sindhi woman who would look after me should I need anything.
We never said a word to each other, the old Sindhi
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woman
and I. She smiled at me nervously from time to time, and
I grimaced back. I was anxious. It was my first time flying
alone, my first time going home. Sometime after midnight
the crew of PIA stewardesses, clad in deep green shalwar
kameez with their pastel flowered dupattas neatly pinned
across their shoulders, filed out along the aisles holding
a cake and singing Happy Birthday to a Very Important
Passenger. Everyone on board clapped and waited patiently
for a piece of birthday cake. I didn't sleep a wink that
night.
My grandmother,
Joonam as I called her in her native
Farsi, picked me up that bright December morning at Karachi's
Jinnah airport. At the time, it looked like a small bus
shed. Cement walls, grey and unpainted, dirty tiled floors
and creaking baggage belts, badly needing to be oiled.
In the city, palm trees that bore coconuts, not the dates
our palms carried in Damascus, lined the wide streets. The
air was thick and smelled of the Indian Ocean, sweet with
a touch of salt.
My first trip home was a whirlwind of winter days spent
doing decidedly non-winter things. Joonam took me to the
beach at Hawkesbay, where turtles come to lay their eggs,
and where I sat on a camel for the first time and played in
the dark golden sand. I counted trucks and buses, noticing
their obnoxious colours - pink, orange, red, yellow. Joonam
assured me they looked like that on purpose. I wasn't sure
as a seven year old whether I preferred Sindhi truck art to
Syrian utilitarian bus art. We trawled old book bazaars,
scouring stalls for second hand books and comics. I ate
milky kulfi skewered on sticks and drank fizzy sodas until
my teeth hurt.
It's been twenty years since I landed here in 1989. Karachi
looks even more like a city of refugees, a condition of
all modern cities. It's messy and chaotic, like a construction
site. It is an ugly place. The coconut palms and banyan
trees that lined the older avenues and had first caught my
eye, have been cut down. Roads have been widened to make
room for ever more traffic. And there was an oil spill that
damaged our beaches in 2003, during my third year in college.
I only recall the smell of petrol in the air that made
us sick days before the government admitted the accident -
the worst oil spill in Pakistan's history. It's a damaged city,
my Karachi. Beaten and bullied but not bowed. I joke sometimes
it's like an ugly girl with a great personality - though
no one ever laughs. Yet on my first trip home, at just seven
years old, I knew I had fallen in love.
