Karachi. A murder.

Of crows. Tsk. What were you thinking?

This is from my hotel window on the last evening. 

There will probably be one more photo post and then I'm done talking about my trip. Mostly because I'd like to let the experience steep in silence but also because the series is now in serious danger of becoming exotic and banal all at once.

Karachi: Cricket

On a day when India and Pakistan are playing in the World Cup, there must be cricket photos.

These are at the Aga Khan University Medical College, where Kavery and I had gone to do a reading with writers from the University.

AKU cricket

AKU pavilion

Karachi Diary: Goodbye Karachi, Hello Lahore

It's been six days since we got here. In an hour or so I will be at the police station for paperwork before I leave for Lahore. There will be other ends to tie up and then it's a new city and a new air.

I've made so many friends in these few days and if I stop to think about how wonderful people have been, I will want to behave in an extravagantly foolish manner to accurately express how I feel.  

I arrived in Karachi in the dark, on a night when the full moon had not yet set and was hanging over the airport like a paper cut out. Tonight we will see Lahore for the first time, also in the dark. 

It's apt - this slow revelation, this adjustment of the eyes and the senses to something new.

Goodbye, Karachi. Hello, Lahore.

Karachi Diary: Sleeplessness & solitude

I can't remember when I got a good night's sleep this last week. It certainly wasn't on the day I landed but in the days since, though I've had an opportunity or two, I can't say I've caught up on lost sleep.

For one thing, rising early is a hard habit to break. I'm up with the azaan no matter when I go to bed. Unfamiliar beds, the light all wrong, snoring neighbours heard loud and clear through remarkably thin walls - many things make a good night's sleep impossible.

But mostly it's the reluctance to wind up the hanging out. 

Yesterday, over different conversations, I said and heard others say how important solitude is to them as writers, how they are essentially people who are not just happy to be alone but actively prefer it.

And yet, at lit fests and in the days here before this one started, there's scarcely an hour in the day where we've been free to just stare out at the water, read, make desultory notes in the journals I'm sure we've carried with us assiduously everywhere, even moving it from bag to bag where necessary.

At the festival, there are more crowds than at Goa or Hyderabad during the festival and it's rather scary to be amongst so many people. I scurried away to my room between sessions and was immensely grateful for being able to do so. 

I intended to spend last night alone in my room. I managed to get two hours to myself. This is not a complaint.  

When I'm home, I go for days without speaking to another person except my mother. My phone is always on silent and if there were a way to mute construction sounds, where I live would be the perfect place.

But when I travel, I don't expect to be left alone and I am happy to pack in all the conversations I don't usually have, into those three or four days when I see other people. 

And I don't know how other writers do it but I'm generally socially awkward so making conversation is hard in the company of people who tend naturally to silence. Asking questions is one way in but by themselves they don't constitute a conversation. I've been finding it interesting to watch how we all construct our public personhood via the few anecdotes we recycle for public consumption, how little or how much we give away even in broad, potentially fraught subjects such as politics.

I tell myself there's a time for solitude and that time is not now. I'm trying to be an accurate recording device but without my batteries recharged with enough sleep, it's hard.

Karachi Diary: Placeholder

My S10 is more than ten years old and is now on its last legs. The photos it can manage are grainy, even in adequate light. There were reasons I couldn't bring my SLR but since the reason I'm not blogging in words today is because there's barely time to sleep, let alone process things and blog about them.

So here's the creek by our hotel. Early morning and at around sunset.

Creek. Early Morning. Karachi.

Creek. Sunset. Karachi

Karachi Diary: Day 2 night

By rights I ought to misspell night, to be even-handed and impartial. Surely I must suffer from typing thumbs late as I clearly do early? Or, ealry.

Anyway. I am exhausted but I must report that I will shortly have things to say about donkeys.

That is all.

[for now].

Ok, fine. I'll tell you one thing: there are many of them on the roads and they are all uniformly adorable and just half an hour ago, I saw two donkey carts transporting really large steel rafters and someone should rescue donkeys from such cruel and unusual punishment, though it's mainly the rescue story that I will save for later.

Another thing about one donkey I saw: it was hurried along by the cart driver with a paper bag rattled by its ears. Dried beans? Something truly scary?

The third and final thing [for now]: there are donkey markets. We will probably not get to see it though. Sometimes I feel that the most useful and interesting things are the ones that you never get to see when you're travelling elsewhere. It's all heresay and anecdotal evidence. Produce the donkeys, I say, and I'll believe there's a market for them.

Just to prove that I am done with donkeys for the moment, I have to tell you that I saw the sweetest tree of kettles in a crowded market lane in between somewhere busy and somewhere posh. Like, you know shoe trees? Only, this was a kettle tree. Even in the almost-dark I could tell there were blue ones and green ones and they hold maybe two cups of water and I want one and I probably will not manage to get one and how can I leave Pakistan without a tea kettle.

No, I'm not tipsy - what kind of a question is that? - just exhausted and I had silly thoughts and instead of getting out my notebook and the pen I have handily tucked away into it, I thought it was right and just that I take out my laptop, connect to an iffy wifi and tell you these things instead of keeping it all quiet and private.

Until tomorrow, then, good night.

One of these days I will have coherent, thoughtful things to say about my trip. But not now.

Karachi Diary: Day 2 ealry morning

The early morning needs to be said because I was up at 4.40 only to realise that my phone died in the night and my alarm would not work. I
ve made myself tea and am waiting for the crows to tell me it's properly morning before I call my mother.

In a couple of hours, we'll be grabbing breakfast on the run, on our way to Habib University, where I meet four young poets and Kavery 15 young fiction writers. I have given them a huge set to look at and my night's anxieties included lying awake wondering what I would do if they forgot to bring the poems with them.

I have been teaching middle school children for too long.

Outside my window the lights along the creek are blazing orange. In Hyderabad the sun might be about to rise but here it is still not dawn.

I have  little time to gather myself and my thoughts before the morning comes. If I look at this moment for too long, or sideways, I might find I am like a person in my own poems.

Maybe I should call home now.

Karachi Diary: Day 1

Before Karachi, there was Hyderabad. Hyderabad, India, as I'm growing used to specifying; not Hyderabad, Sindh.

At the Hyderabad Airport, first the man at the ticket counter and then the man at Immigration, took a long look at my Pakistan visa. They called their superiors, claimed they were too new and had no experience in handling Pakistan visas. They took copies of my documents. They asked me to say what I did and where I wrote. I wrote out a list of places where my work has appeared. (This blog did not feature in this list).

It is now nearly 6pm in my lovely hotel room in Karachi. I have just returned from my police verification where there were more copies of documents made, more genial questions. This seems worth noting, that at none of these places were people actually hostile. They were merely taking note of where I was coming from and to and acting accordingly.

Of the 24 hours between the ticket counter in Hyderabad and the police visit in Karachi, I can tell you very little. Moments of anxiety that come with any form of international travel: will I make my connecting flight? What time is it there? (there being unspecified) Will my baggage arrive? In one piece or several - bite your tongue on that thought!

The lack of sleep. I have slept for maybe four hours in the last 36, in snatches of two hours or so. I am light-headed with lack of sleep and yet I daren't lie down just now. There are still things left to do before tomorrow and if I sleep now i will probably be up at 2am and in no condition to do anything tomorrow.

But these are not the things you want to know.

You want to know about the airport at 4am, with the unexpectedly cold breeze, the yellow full moon setting, the hordes of people with rose garlands wrapped in plastic, waiting for their people to emerge from the maws of immigrations.

You want to know how wonderful and gleaming the roads seem after Hyderabad, how they're still shiny at noon and later, though clogged with traffic as any road might be in this part of the world.

And how the air feels like Bombay and the trees feel like home though there are some I cannot identify. My friend says to me, "If you find someone in Karachi who can name these trees, let me know." I can name ashoka, neem, peepul and banyan, but there's a shrub-like tree that reminds me of something I can't remember the name of. Then, in conversation about habitat, it occurs to me: it must be a variety of mangrove tree. I've seen leaves like it in Pichavaram. 

There was shopping. I have a list of requests but it seems likely that I will buy even half of what people say they want. One, because there will be no time, and two, exhaustion does not sharpen the eye. Nothing I saw pleased me enough.

The place where I bought shoes, though. They gave us chai and chatted with us and gave us discounts. They called me their mehmaan. I can see I am going to get called this often, and I preen a little inside when they do.

Then the sea. A sight of the creek from the hotel room, a quick drive by the beach - not enough but it will do for now.

Tomorrow and the day after, I will do a poetry workshop with people at Habib University and Kavery Nambisan, who is also with me on this trip, will do a fiction writing workshop with other young people.

That and other things in the next post. If I continue now, I will scatter words here and there more for sound than sense. I'm not even going to read over what I've written because I might not reach the end of it. Please excuse typos and incoherence. I will gather myself by and by.

Spaniard Goes West

A little more to the West as Calculus might have said.

I am off to Karachi for the Lit Fest and after that, to Lahore for two days. Of course, it's impossible to make the short hop from Bombay to Karachi in the civilised hour or so that it should take, so I will be jetlagged with a day-chewing couple of flights, but hey - I'm westward bound!

Unexpectedly, for me, I think I will blog as often as time permits. I won't be able to take my SLR because baggage rules about one bag are very strict and I really can't stuff a camera into my laptop bag. There will be another camera, though it's old and the images it produces are rather grainy but that can't be helped.

What has been interesting has been the reactions of people to the news in the last two days. 

"Why are you doing this?!" one person said. "You'll never get a visa to the US again." 

"Karachi? Oh! Oh!" said another friend. The second oh was both exclamatory and silent. I could tell.

Another misheard me and was puzzled. "What?" I asked, maybe a little aggressively. When she asked what I'd said and I repeated myself, she said, 'Oh, Karachi! I thought you said Karate."

One friend of my mother's has just been and back and she had much advice to give me. We've made a date to compare stories once I return. Another sounded wistful; she had tried so hard to visit her sister for a whole year and at one point it looked like the visa might come through. But then it didn't and her sister died.

Visas. Let's not talk about them.

Let's talk about PACKING!

(Actually, let's not. You lot know me and know it was and continues to be epic. One day, I will inaugurate a new genre of travel writing that is almost entirely told via the packing for it.)

Maybe let's talk about shopping instead? Or things I absolutely must do and see in both these cities?

Suggestions, please!

Permanent Revolution, Public Space, Fox on Acid, Dalitness and Manu Joseph

Some things I've been reading:

1. Permanent Revolution by Hossam el-Hamalawy

The military has been the ruling institution in this country since 1952. Its leaders are part of the establishment. And while the young officers and soldiers are our allies, we cannot for one second lend our trust and confidence to the generals. Moreover, those army leaders need to be investigated. I want to know more about their involvement in the business sector.

All classes in Egypt took part in the uprising. In Tahrir Square you found sons and daughters of the Egyptian elite, together with the workers, middle class citizens, and the urban poor. Mubarak has managed to alienate all social classes in society including wide section of the bourgeoisie. But remember that it’s only when the mass strikes started three days ago that’s when the regime started crumbling and the army had to force Mubarak to resign because the system was about to collapse.

Some have been surprised that the workers started striking. I really don’t know what to say. The workers have been staging the longest and most sustained strike wave in Egypt’s history since 1946, triggered by the Mahalla strike in December 2006. It’s not the workers’ fault that you were not paying attention to their news. Every single day over the past three years there was a strike in some factory whether it’s in Cairo or the provinces. These strikes were not just economic, they were also political in nature.

He ends by saying 'we have to take Tahrir to the factories now'.

2a. Gautam Bhan in Kafila about Egypt and public spaces.

Another thing that keeps returning to my head is the images of the numbers in Tahrir square and how important the square was in and of itself spatially in the moment and the movement.

I think of a rally a few weeks ago for Dr Sen. After a long time, a protest in Delhi wasn’t at Jantar Mantar but actually walked its streets – from the Red Fort to ITO. I remember being struck by how different it felt, and how long it had been, to walk in the city in the name of dissent and protest. Images from Tahrir and the streets of Tunisia now stand next to that feeling in my head. Dissent need not be but often necessarily is deeply physical – the presence of the bodies on the street is as near an experiential sense of the “public”, in one sense, that one can get. Public spaces are the heart of challenging the centralization of control and of creating cultures of equity and dignity – be it in the city or in the nation-state.

In Delhi, for example, the increasing instances of gating, the control over gathering anywhere outside the two hundred square feet of Jantar Mantar, the spectre of Section 144, and a deeply inequitable and fractured housing and land market, have, in very different yet particularly spatial ways, all render the idea of the “public” as an afterthought, a residue – a space that no one can claim. The physical absence of residents in public spaces is both the chicken and the egg of a story of a changing and depleted imagination of a shared public among the city’s residents – be it of services, of resources, of aesthetics, of citizenship and of a very simply idea of dignity, of who can, should and does belong to the city. This story – in similar and different ways – is being played out the scale of a nation as a whole.

Could reclaiming public space for conversations, debates and voices – regardless of what these voices want to say and whether “we” agree with “them” or not – become a single point agenda for a movement of our own? Could the idea of the public bring urban residents together – regardless of what we want to do once we’re in that space? Could public space be an answer that rallies people together – the more voices, the more noise, the more debates, the more antagonism that come, from any point of view, would that noise not represent a resistance to the single story being told about India today?

2b. Serendipitously read the next piece [which is actually a couple of years old] just before Gautam Bhan's thoughts. Khalid Omar on the disappearance of public beaches in Karachi. 

Karachi must be one of the few waterfront cities in the world to have no waterfront at all. Karachi is a city by the sea, but considering the amount of water activities which takes place, it could well be in the Sahara. The primary reason is that most of the beaches in Karachi belong to the military or some other government scheme, and are off limits to civilians, or are private property and once again off limits.

The Pakistan Army, Navy and Air Force have taken over practically all the beaches in the city.

Now, while it is understandable that the Navy needs some waterfront to man their boats, the Pakistan Navy takes the cake by claiming the entire coast of Pakistan belongs to them. Besides their bases, housing schemes, naval clubs and what not all taking up miles of waterfront, they've also cordoned off the best beaches to build huts for their upper brass. Case in point: A number of beautiful beaches are used by the Navy as training grounds, smack in the middle of Karachi. Even there, the best part of the beach has private huts reserved for the top brass -- and out of bounds to civilians.

3. Amitava Kumar interviews Arundhati Roy for Guernica.

Guernica: Your stance on Kashmir and also on the struggles of the tribals has drawn the ire of the Indian middle class. Who belongs to that class and what do you think gets their goat?

Arundhati Roy: The middle class goat is very sensitive about itself and very callous about other peoples’ goats.

Guernica: Your critics say that you often see the world only in black and white.

Arundhati Roy: The thing is you have to understand, Amitava, that the people who say such things are a certain section of society who think they are the universe. It is the jitterbugging elite which considers itself the whole country. Just go outside and nobody will say that to you. Go to Orissa, go to the people who are under attack, and nobody will think that there is anything remotely controversial about what I write. You know, I keep saying this, the most successful secession movement in India is the secession of the middle and upper classes to outer space. They have their own universe, their own andolan, their own Jessica Lal, their own media, their own controversies, and they’re disconnected from everything else. For them, what I write comes like an outrage. Ki yaar yeh kyaa bol rahi hai? [What the hell is she saying?] They don’t realize that they are the ones who have painted themselves into a corner.

4. S. Anand's essay in Caravan on Dalit literature says some interesting things about Manu Joseph's Serious Men [which I admit I liked for the most part].

To come back to the author we began with: Manu Joseph manages to inaugurate a new template—he identifies his characters specifically as Dalits (not as untouchable Chamars or Pulayas) and depicts them as fully conscious of (but enraged by) caste oppression. Joseph’s rationale for making Ayyan Mani a Dalit makes for interesting reading. In an interview with rediff.com, he says:

When Ayyan first formed in my head he was just the same but he was not a Dalit. He had this anger and a comical interpretation of the modern world and modern women and science and everything around him. But he was not a Dalit. Then I asked myself, why is he so angry, can I give him a justification? And the idea of a Dalit male who is trying to create from thin air the first Dalit boy genius just fascinated me.

Consider what kind of social reality leads a writer like Joseph to decide that Ayyan Mani ought to be a Dalit because he is “so angry.” Mani’s specific kind of imagined ‘Dalitness’ is clearly a by-product of the post-Mandal anti-reservation rage of the upper classes of India, represented with deep sympathy by the Brahmin-controlled media. Such a portrayal of a scheming Dalit—who is merely a prop in the novel—would perhaps not have been possible in the period before the 1980s or the 1990s.

It is not that a Dalit character ought not to be dark and devious, especially in a dark comedy. It is not as if one is looking for a portrayal of triumph shorn of the complexities of human nature. What’s worrisome is how Mani’s son Adi has to be a congenitally poor, underperforming student with a hearing disability (to compound matters), who has to cheat his way through tests and quiz shows—lacking inherently in “merit.”