From above, I willed home to look like the cities I was returning from—rooftops and rooftops sectioned by tail lights that still glittered in the pink of dawn. My suitcases were stacked with notebooks, each one filled with maps that I had penciled and sectioned myself, souvenirs of streets I had discovered doorstep by doorstep. I had fallen in love with urbanity: with the way a city could make me feel anonymous and infinite at the same time. Places not my own had sewn themselves to me through the thrill of moments that were quiet on the surface, but that rang inside me for days afterwards. I wanted to be able to feel this way in my own city, a metropolis of over 20 million that I had spent almost my whole life in without ever really getting to know. 

Because I had largely experienced it from the rolled-up windows of my parents’ car, Karachi had always existed outside of me and I came back desperate to venture into it, to press myself against its profile until I could help define the shape of its landscape. Away, I no longer woke to pick up the neatly wrapped bundle from just inside the front gates of the house I had grown up in. Between working, travelling, loving, there were countless moments that I could have checked up on what was going on. But, I was terrified of the images of bodies that lined the streets leading my sister to school and my mother to work. So, I avoided them. And over time, my mind painted over Karachi until it looked like the elsewhere I wanted it to be. 

At first, I saw only what I wanted to. On the drive from the airport, Karachi stirred, gently from a night of humid sleep; flower-sellers, corn-roasters, sweet-hawkers crawled out from beneath their wooden carts, yawning. Belted in the back seat, I listed aloud all the places I wanted to explore and write about. In the rear view mirror, my father nodded. His smile crinkled the dark circles under his eyes so well that I failed to notice they were even there. 

The next morning, on the way to pick up breakfast from a local bakery, we detoured to the beach just down the road from our house. There was nobody else for miles other than a camel: decorated and embroidered, hungry and alone. I pulled my pajama bottoms up to my knees and ran into the waves, while my father watched baby crabs clawing around in the sand with a childlike fascination I had never seen in him before. 

“Why is today the first time we’ve done this?” I asked, on the way home. My father shrugged as he plaited the car around the barricades: huge, concrete blocks that have multiplied over the years, turning our neighbourhood into a quiet war zone. There were vans parked at every corner, jam-packed with rangers clutching rifles. I remember staring at the pistol tucked beside the handle controls, realizing immediately that my father no longer drove anywhere without it. In that moment I understood exactly how Karachi had made it possible for him to forget that the seaside was five minutes away. 

In the days that followed I sat at the dining table long after breakfast reading the papers cover-to-cover, catching up to the kidnappings, the rapes, the bombs, the murders. Slowly, I gave in and resigned myself to loving my city as I always had: through the smell of watered lawns in the afternoon heat, through the music of the pigeons lining our neighbours’ roof.

Once, I heard an orange-seller’s call as he wheeled his cart down the street. I ran to the window and stared at the exertion of his shoulders as he pushed the pyramids of fruit around the corner on a pair of wheels too broken to last another day. I longed to pull on a pair of flip-flops and wander after him, following him across streets that throbbed with donkeys and rickshaws and through markets bursting with colour and conversation. 

It was a few more seconds before I twisted the shades shut, with a bitterness that almost killed the dream of consummating my love for a city I fear I will always be forbidden from touching. 

...

This essay was written for Rent and Ice Cream, a project I collaborated on with designer Oliver Ballon. I wrote, he designed, and back then it felt like we could afford neither our rent nor ice cream.