From Karachi, with love, Islamic Society

Islamic Society

From Karachi, with love

By-Rafia Zakaria

The Karachi I grew up in was haunted by memories of Mumbai. My father, grandparents and aunts had all left Mumbai in the decades after Partition, chasing jobs and the promises sold to the Muslims of the subcontinent. At every dinner table conversation, every afternoon tea reminiscence, and every late night stroll, we were accompanied by the omnipresent ghost of Mumbai. Against the mythic Mumbai of their memories, Karachi always fell short: the fish was fresher in Mumbai, my father sighed, and the nights were cooler, my grandmother complained.

The imagined Mumbai that punctuated my Karachi childhood was an idyll of fresh food, better infrastructure, kinder people and those glorious Bollywood movies that lit up our screens courtesy of borrowed VCRs. Impressionistic remembrances muted all dissonance. The imagined Mumbai my father brought with him had been delivered of the daily annoyances that everyday life in the city would undoubtedly have had.

The Karachi of my childhood thus existed very much in relation to and in conversation with a Mumbai whose reality for me was only defined by other people’s recollections. Saddened by the discontent of the transplanted grown-ups, I wanted to exorcise the ghost that seemed to be the ever present lament of my father that inevitably distanced him from loving Karachi, the only city I knew and loved. How could he love me and not love Karachi, I wondered? My twin brother and I, united in our devotion to Karachi would mount vehement arguments in its favour. Our childish reasons for loving Karachi were constructed both from our childlike love for the only home we knew and the propaganda about India that we were regularly fed at school.

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