1.

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

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.

An arms dealer near Lyari, where guns and violence are common.

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.