The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Karachi, confidential
A high-octane study of Pakistan’s coastal megacity follows five lives in the vast, gangster-ridden slums
KARACHI VICE by Samira Shackle
272pp, Granta, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £14.99
How to live in Karachi? If you are rich, it is relatively easy: neat lawns separate the houses in the well-protected neighbourhoods of Clifton and Defence. When the journalist Samira Shackle arrived in 2012, this is where she landed, staying with relatives in a house with guards. But for the poor in Pakistan’s hulking coastal city – its most dangerous, most entertaining, most just-about-anything city – life is more like a gauntlet where any slip can be fatal. It is into this world that Shackle expertly and empathetically leads the reader in Karachi Vice, often not telling her family where she is going so they do not worry.
And worry they might. Shackle seeks to explain Karachi through the lives of five of its 20 million citizens: a teacher, map-maker, ambulance driver, crime journalist and villager. Most of their lives eddy through the gigantic slums, Orangi Town and Lyari, where the gangs that run the heroin trade from Afghanistan to the West dominate and residents have a term – hulki phulki (or “lightweight”, normally used for snacks) – for when there is minimal gunfire in the neighbourhood. Shackle lives in Karachi for one year, but returns often to chart its progress from practically lawless to a form of order imposed by the deployment of the khaki-camouflaged military in 2014.
She profiles heroes in miniature. Take Parveen, whom we meet as a teacher in one of the slum’s openair schools. She wants to change the world, talking back to gang-lords and threatening to take her family to court if they marry off another of her young siblings. Or Siraj the map-maker, who hopes that his laborious work will force the authorities to recognise the people who live in these slums. (When ethnic tensions surge, Siraj arranges to meet his contacts at roundabouts to avoid crossing into the wrong turf.)
But who are the authorities? The Muttahida Qaumi Party has historically controlled the city – often described as an armed militia with a political wing attached. When new political forces intrude they seek to win over the gang-lords rather than get rid of them. Benazir Bhutto, the late former leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, which has long controlled the provincial government, was pictured in a car with Rehman Dakait (or Rehman the Bandit), then the city’s number one drug kingpin. Dakait became something of a politician himself: setting up neighbourhood improvement
schemes and running a “clean streets” programme that took drug dealers (many of them his own) off the corners.
The pace of the book spikes in the second half, as the lives of Shackle’s cast start to intertwine. Zille, the crime reporter for Geo TV, is the most ethically ambiguous. He does not fret about being on first-name terms with the gangsters; after all, he thinks, that’s his job. His extraordinary nose for a story sees him first on the scene at the Taliban’s 2014 attack on Karachi airport that convinced the army to essentially take over the city. The terrorists were watching his broadcasts inside, adapting their tactics from what they learned. When his name is put on a Taliban hit-list, he considers fleeing to London: but what would he do there, he wonders – “take a job in a corner store?”.
Karachi Vice is often wrenching. Shackle winds the reader in gently; her evocation of the desperate affection of Nazir, a young bodybuilder, for Parveen shows their chaste, protective relationship develop over time. Its end is a hammer-blow. However, unlike in Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012), in which Katherine Boo lived in a Mumbai slum for three years, Shackle is mostly forced to reconstruct her characters’ lives through their memories. That can lead to a touch of remoteness in the retelling. One might wish for more immediacy, or moments like that when Shackle accompanies Parveen to her sister’s house, once used by squatting gangsters as an execution hall – “Her voice got smaller and she stared at her hands, as if trying to avoid taking in her surroundings”.
Still, the book reveals a city, a people – and through them a country – with tremendous poise and the skills of a fastidious reporter. It leaves the reader contemplating the construction of Bahria Town, a vast city for the wealthy in the suburbs of Karachi, where model Eiffel Towers and Parthenons and Nelson’s Columns overlook neat, welllit and empty houses, as if in some kind of sci-fi dystopia. It was built illegally, but such is the power of Bahria Town’s founder that it cannot be stopped. The map-maker Siraj wonders if he will soon feel too embarrassed even to visit the rich neighbourhoods of his city. Pakistan may be growing but its worlds only seem to be moving further apart.
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