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…
(more…)
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