This is part of a long Pakistan narrative I’ve been working on for a few years. I spent six months in Pakistan in 2006. Karachi was a wild city, a cross between Baghdad and Singapore with South Asian spice.
(Karachi traffic at 2am, Ray LeMoine)
VISIONS OF KARACHI: Karachi Nightz, April 2006
Summer of 69’
“Bryan Adams played to ten thousand people down that road a few weeks ago,” Zaryan Zaidi says, pointing to the right, as we drive through Karachi at night. “To get to the concert, my cousin said the traffic was so bad it took 4 hours to get 16 miles. They’re still playing Bryan Adams day and night on the radio. Imagine if a bigger band came?”
Our driver speeds over the webs of elevated highways spinning around Karachi’s center. Men and boys sleep, sit, and stew along the roadside by the dozens. A few lonely towers sprout in the middle distance. The tallest, the MCB Bank tower, is a 70-story tan spike. The harbor dots orange boat lights amongst endless darkness
Zaryan and I have been friends since 1992, when we met in middle school back in Massachusetts. This is his first time returning to Pakistan in a decade, and I’ve joined him. We’ve been in county for three months, but have only now come to Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and its commercial capital.
Few other cities on earth were flourishing like Karachi, with an expanding economy, media boom, and young population. Yet decades of Islamic dictatorship made it arguably the most culturally starved mega-city on earth–as proven by a Bryan Adams concert being cause for national celebration. But it wasn’t always this way.
Do the Hustle
Because of the intense daytime heat, Karachiites are a nocturnal people. People often sleep through the middle of the day and eat dinner past midnight. Past 1am that night, Zaryan and I find ourselves on the top floor of a modernist tower in the upper class Clifton neighborhood, sipping after-dinner cocktails with some of Zaryan’s father’s bohemian buddies—two painters, a playwright, a poet, and an art professor. All aged 50 and older. Miles Davis’ sullen “Kind of Blue” fills the penthouse.
Stepping out on the apartment’s deck for some fresh air, I glance down at the street but am shocked by this colossal, gaudy building that looked like a small Atlantic City casino. The sign reads The Clifton Grill. A gold-framed glass elevator framed the left side. Bright, glimmering chandeliers were visible through huge glass window. There was an abundance of palm trees both inside and out. Inside, business seemed to be booming on all three floors.
I learn from the elder bohemians that the Clifton Grill’s owner was Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of former Pakistani leader Benazair Bhutto, of the Pakistna’s Peoples Party (PPP). Zardari was purely corrupt—his nickname: Mr. 10%–and he was sentenced in 1997 to eight years in prison for looting state coffers. He was called a “playboy” by the BBC; Mr. 10% and Benazir not only met at a UK disco but they later installed a private disco in their Karachi home. (Note: Zardari is now PPP’s chief; his wife was assassinated in fall 2007.)
Read all the Studio 54 books you want, but to truly appreciate the 70s sexual revolution it takes looking at how it affected sexually repressed societies. Cities like Karachi, Baghdad, and pre-Revolution Tehran all loved disco. Lionel Richie, Donna Summer, and Abba are still among the most popular Western acts in the Greater Persian Gulf. But after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, cultures in the Middle East and Pakistan grew more conservative and closed. Now, thanks to Musharraf, Karachi and Pakistan were blooming once again with (pop) culture. After all, Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Jinnah, was a Bombay raised cosmopolitan who wished his new country to be a liberal democracy: “The foundation of our Islamic code is that we stand for liberty, equality and fraternity.”
After break, I go to a beach front mansion party and more…
A Night Out With Burgers
It’s Saturday night. While talking with the bohos about Zardari and the Clifton Grill, Zaryan gets a call from a girl he knew from Islamabad. She and a friend were in Karachi. There’s a party—do we want to go? Sure. We agree to meet the girls at 1am at a McDonald’s, down by the beach.
A taxi drops us at the Clifton Beach McDonald’s. An esplanade and waterfront road converged at a roundabout, hitting a main inland artery. Traffic was intense considering the hour. Hundred of rickshaws, motorbikes, taxis, cars and SUVs, rainbow painted buses, choke the bottleneck. Gangs of boys—six, ten, twenty even—sped by riding fixed gear bikes, each posse a mini-critical mass. Beach dust and noxious fumes burn the eyes and scratch the throat; sporadic streetlights curse this a shadowy landscape.
The girls pull up in two small cars, each driven by a guy with a spiky hair-do and collared shirts with buttons undone. A third small car zooms up. In it: two guys. “That’s like her fucked up old gay uncle and Ali Salim on E,” says one of the girls, Rasmullah, about the other’s (Asra) uncle. The uncle has a shaved head, bugged out eyes; Ali, long haired, wears t-shirt that read “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics.” We whizz off following the goggle-eyed gays.
Passing a crowded mobile Pizza Hut on the beach, I notice hundreds—no thousands—of fully clothed people swimming. The black ocean ripples with foamy slow rollers.
The party was nearby, at a mansion one block from the beach. Dozens of cars are parked out front. A light show burst skyward and music floods the block. Approaching, I see three men with machine guns guard the entry point. One guard wears military green ammo pouches—the same type of thing a terrorist would wear in a propaganda video. Waltzing up to the gate: “Whose list are you on?” asks a bald guy with a Roy Lichtenstein print on his T-shirt. Before I answer, the bald uncle and Ali the Explicit Lyricist whisk us in.
Inside could’ve been a Miami nightclub. Couches straddle a courtyard that leads to a dance floor. An open bar is set up in the side yard. The DJ alternates between disco and newer Anglo pop without consistency. The crowd: media set Karachi, the Burgers (wanna-be Westerners), as they’re called in Pakistani slang—or the top .01% of Pakistani society. Boys and girls in green Fidel Castro caps mingle. Males in incongruous print t-shirts with jeans and matching sneakers. Girls: pointy tipped shoes, flowing asymmetrical tops, skirts, and tight jeans. English is the language of choice. Burgers are General Musharraf’s Children, the products of media deregulation, an ambitious globalized elite soaking in modernity via cable television and the Internet.
I try talking to Ali the Explicit Lyricist. Closet-less as any gay man, he dusts me in glitter and flutters off like a butterfly, in obvious, uh, ecstasy.
“You have to admire that guy’s balls,” I say to Zaryan. Here was this flaming gay man running around in public. In Pakistan…
“I’m not admiring anyone’s balls.”
“Oh, I did say that…” I say.
Our party settles on a few couches under palm trees on the edge of the dance floor. The air’s dashed with sea salt and tobacco.
I ask Rasmullah what it was like being a young woman in Islamabad.
“I’m just not happy,” Rasmullah said. “Like, with life.” She was only 19 and in a pre-med program. The song LA Woman by The Doors plays. “I need to come to the US, to California, actually. To LA,” she laughs, sipping her drink, her pony tail hair flopping, wearing a conservative shirt and dark jeans. “Some of my family is there–in LA. I haven’t the energy for Pakistan anymore. I hate the decadence,” Rasmullah’s father is one of Pakistan’s richest men. “I think it was the quake that really did it for me. Like, these people died because they couldn’t afford decent housing. 70,000 people! Everyone I know here or in Islamabad has five servants and a mansion. It’s too unfair–feudalism is too total. And as a woman my options are what? To be told by men what is right and wrong. I want to experience a progressive society, like the US or UK. Like, now.” She scurries to the dance floor to dance.
We left at 5am. The party raged on.
Megopolis
Few good things have been written or said about Karachi. Pakistan’s largest city is a hive of instability with little history and an uncertain future, known for ethnic and sectarian violence, lawlessness, corruption, terrorism, car jacking, kidnapping, inequality, poor urban planning, overpopulation, and pollution. The city’s population grew from 50,000 in 1850 to a half million by partition in 1947. But over the next 60 years Karachi exploded. It’s now home to some 20 million.
Karachi operates as a virtual city-state (think Baghdad meets Singapore), generating over 60% of Pakistan’s GDP. Still, the economic inequality is unprecedented: it’s home to both South Asia’s highest per capita income and largest contiguous slum. Little of Karachi’s money makes its way back to Sindh Province, of which Karachi is capital. Therefore, Sindh remains Pakistan’s second poorest state after Baluchistan. And as Pakistan’s most cosmopolitan city, Karachi’s a bouillabaisse of Mohairis, Sindis, Punjabis, Baluchis, and Pastuns. It’s majority Sunnis, minority Shiites, with even fewer Christians, and, smaller still, the largest Zorastrain population in the world (yes, those who feed their dead to crows).
The few Westerners who’ve bothered to visit Karachi have painted a nasty picture. The writer William Darlymple calls Karachi the “saddest of cities.” French celeb-philosopher Bernard Henri Levi levels even harsher condemnation on Karachi, describing its population as a “pack of wolves…drugged on fanaticism and doped on violence.” Marianne Pearl, wife of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl writes, “The city is an intricate puzzle, decadent and beastly at the same time, metastasizing into a capital of blind hatred and violent militancy.” Nevertheless, I found Karachi to be one of the more dynamic cities I’ve ever visited.
On TV
“Hey, is that Ali the Explicit Lyricist from Friday’s party–dressed in drag,” Zaryan says, mystified.
We sit watching TV at Zaryan’s family’s Karachi compound, a huge two-floor modernist manse in an affluent neighborhood numbly dubbed Defense IV.
“It is, isn’t it?” I say, immersed in brown carpet on a yellow couch living.
Joining us is Zaryan’s female cousin, Rebob Zaidi, a 24-year-old television producer who doesn’t cover her head and wears Western clothing.
“This is Late Night with Begum Nawazish Ali,” Rebob explains, “one of the most popular shows in Pakistan. Under the make-up is Ali Salim,” the tranny butterfly from the night before.
And here he/her is, in a golden gown, curled hair, exquisite make-up, interviewing Gloria Swanson’s granddaughter. Ali says, “Tell me about glamour, darling.”
“How is there a trannie talk show here?” I ask.
“Hirjas, the Ladyboys, are a part of the culture,” Rebob says.
Late Night is basically Dave Letterman with a tranny host—guests are actors, politicians, musicians, models, sports stars, and business titans. As London’s Guardian said, “The show is perhaps the most notable example of a television explosion triggered four years ago when Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf ordered deregulation of the airwaves.”
Karachi’s newfangled media boom has been foremost influenced by India but also by Hollywood and the Persian Gulf (Dubai, Qatar), Egypt, and other Muslim programming. Indian-style serial soap operas are the biggest draw, but there are reality shows, cop dramas, and sitcoms. The production values are often lower than the Indian or US counterparts, but the quality improves daily.
Rebob works for ARY TV, a large cable network. She produced a daytime women’s show not unlike The View. Only, instead of three hours, her show was seven hours of women talking about women’s problems. That might sound like a nightmare, but Pakistan’s women are largely confined to the home during the day and these shows give voice to a historically oppressed gender.
Still, contradictions abound. ARY is owned by Haji Abdul Razzak Yaqoob, a notorious Dubai-based conservative Islamist. His other channels include Quaran TV and Al Jazzeera Uudu, both are hardly pro-women’s rights. Programming on ARY is often religious, anti-West, and pro-Shariah law. But Haji Yaqoob also owns Fashion TV, the closest thing to pornography in Pakistani society. FTV’s Programming is based around international fashion shows, model shoots, nightclubs. FTV sponsors Karachi Fashion Week. Contradictory as objectifying scantily clad women seems for an Islamist, religion is often the sheath many Dubai and Pakistani capitalists use to justify their quest for money and power, much like the Protestant titans of America’s Gilded Age.
The Zaidi family has a strong history in Pakistani television and cinema. Zaryan’s grandfather was a famous actor in the late 1950s, and his father was a longhaired, hippy soap star in the 60s. And here in Karachi today his uncle Sonny is a director of television. Meanwhile, his aunt, Rebob’s mother, is a soap actress on a brilliant show. The format is well worn: gangster love drama.
I ask Rebob about her mother’s show.
“Basically, this Karachi smuggler-gangster who moved gems, drugs, and guns from here to Dubai and Kenya started a TV show about his life. He’s not in jail or anything—lives in Dubai—but wanted to tell his story as a soap. It’s like if Tony Soprano was a real guy, produced The Sopranos, and lived in LA—ARY is based in Dubai. Only in Pakistan could a criminal do this.”
Gangsters telling their autobiographies as soap operas, trannies as late night hosts, Islamists owning Fashion TV, disco restaurants owned by corrupt politicians, Miami style partying, million-man beach parties catered by Pizza Hut at midnight—nothing’s shocking in Karachi. I’d live here.
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