by Saba Imtiaz
‘Zara!’ Saad exclaims, waving, as he spots her in a group of people milling by the bar. She walks over and takes a sip of my drink. ‘Zain isn’t here,’ she says to me. ‘And hello, Saad.’
‘Zara, you look absolutely fantastic. How is it that you’re even more gorgeous than the last time I saw you?’ Zara rolls her eyes. ‘Saad, save the charm for Dubai’s burqa babes. Finish your drinks and move. We have a lot of places to get to.’
We put in an appearance at Saad’s cousin’s house, except his cousin is nineteen and is only serving beer. ‘Ah, Justin Bieber,’ Saad nods authoritatively as the music changes. We’re squashed together on a sofa along with three other girls, who look young enough to be our children. ‘Duh. It’s One Direction!’ one of them squeals.
‘Why am I listening to Bieber or whatever this One Direction crap is?’ Saad moans in my ear.
‘Why am I being offered a joint?’ I hiss back, as I pass the joint, which has made its way through everyone sitting on the couch, to Zara. ‘I’m twenty-eight years old. Surely a joint is not the height of excitement in my life.’
‘Clearly it is to this lot.’ Zara takes a drag of the joint and stubs it out in a paper cup. ‘Okay, guys,’ she calls out loudly. ‘The grown-ups are leaving!’
Twenty minutes later we finally end up two streets away from what Zara claimed was the best party this New Year’s, except the road to the house has been blocked by a massive container. ‘Can’t we just move it?’ Saad asks. ‘No, you’re going to have to walk,’ the driver informs us. ‘In heels?’ Zara screeches. ‘Jeez, we’re going to get mugged.’
We end up walking anyway, Saad holding on to our bags and saying ‘Look, it’s just like being in London!’ A group of guys are trying to manoeuvre their Charade around the container, and then get out to move it a couple of inches so their car goes through. ‘Can’t we just ask them to drop us?’ Zara moans. ‘My feet…’
We finally make our way to the house, where the hosts—Zara’s second cousin and his wife—direct us to the bar. ‘Get a drink, and join us on the dance floor,’ her cousin booms. ‘We are going to celebrate all bloody night.’ Zara hands us tumblers of what I can only hope is whiskey and Coke. ‘To 2012!’ she says, holding her glass aloft. ‘To getting the hell out of Karachi,’ I say, taking a large sip, and then spilling half of the rest of it on my jumpsuit when Zara grabs my arm as the DJ plays The Way You Make Me Feel. ‘We have to dance!’
Saturday, January 1, 2012
Headline of the day: ‘Faqir’s pet snake stolen’
8 a.m.: Stick arms out to investigate poky thing digging into the small of my back. I can tell it’s my hairbrush from having a feel, which is just as well as my eyes are as if glued shut. This is it, I decide. This is going to be a completely different year. I will never spend another New Year’s party having arguments about extortion rackets. I will not go to parties where the line for the loo is taken up by coke addicts pretending that their 50,000 rupee a night habit is ‘totally under control, dude’. I will produce an excellent piece of investigative journalism this year, the kind that wins prizes, gets me headhunted to a fantastic job in New York, or at the very least, Dubai. Okay fine, I’ll consider an international network in Islamabad. I desperately need to get my act together and this year, I will. Oh, and I will not be single. Is it sad that this is the last thing on my list of priorities? No, I remind myself. I’m being realistic. Where am I ever going to find a guy in the wasteland that is Karachi where it’s easier to hire an assassin than meet an attractive, intelligent, normal single man? There are twenty million people in this city, you’d think this would be easier.
Attempt to sit up, which proves tricky in a jumpsuit that appears to have shrunk overnight. Lie there wondering why I’m not in my pyjamas.
8.25 a.m.: A POX ON THE CROWS. WHY ARE THEY SO BLOODY NOISY!?
9 a.m.: Find myself completely unable to get up and go to work. Would much rather lie under the comforter all day. The cat has just come in and looked at me with disgust.
10 a.m.: Still in bed.
10.15 a.m.: Text from Saad: ‘Missed my flight. Literally got to the airport just as they closed boarding. Now on standby for the next one. FML.’
Text from Zara: ‘Head exploding and I can’t feel my neck. Think I might go to the doctor.’
10.30 a.m.: My father, a long-suffering single parent, has just sent me a text message from his office instructing me to feed the cat before I go to work. It’s 10.30 a.m., but even he knows that there’s a 90 percent chance I’m still in bed trying to find the will to live. Last Monday he found me crying when my alarm went off and asked if I needed psychiatric help. ‘NO ABBA, I JUST HATE WORK,’ I yelled, before he backed out of the room to feed the cat, who, unlike his daughter, never yowls at him.
Find lucky reporting kurta—a faded red shirt I bought on sale and have worn every time I’ve landed a good story—and plan to finally leave for work. Today’s going to be a good day, I’m going to find a great story, I can feel it.
11 a.m.: Phone buzzes. It’s a text from Kamran. ‘Blast at train station.’ Does this mean I need to go cover it? Which station is it? There are three. I vacillate between texting him to ask which station or just trying to figure it out myself. Kamran can sometimes explode if you ask him a simple question. I make my way to work.
The Daily News office is in a decrepit building in the financial district, which would be depressing if it weren’t like every other newspaper and TV channel office I’d been to in Karachi. It’s as if the media moguls of Pakistan devised their own building code: ‘Our offices must be housed in broken down buildings with one functioning light bulb in the lobby and permanently out of service elevators.’ It’s always amusing to see a visitor gingerly ask in the lobby if they really are in the building of an influential paper, or a fresh-off-the-US-flight Pakistani asking if this is ‘midtown’. A stray dog tries to wander in through the metal detector at the same time as I walk through. I head down to the basement, the twilight zone of misery and bad news.
Dial the cafeteria and beg for tea, Diet Coke or any form of caffeine. E-mail from Kamran: ‘Can you make a timeline of all bomb blasts at train stations last year?’
Six months ago I offered to do a timeline to accompany a story and that was the end of my reporting career. I am now called, texted, dragged out of bed and forced to sit by myself at restaurants while everyone else enjoys dinner, to make timelines. I am a glorified intern. Can no one else use Google? I am utterly resentful of reporters who write graphic and moving accounts of blood and limbs strewn everywhere, are seconded for junkets to Thailand, and receive writing grants while I trawl through newspaper archives to make a flowchart that will be squeezed onto the bottom of the page.
March 23 – A two-foot section of rail track was damaged when a blast took place on the railway line near the Larkana Press Club.
February 25 – Four improvised explosive devices were detonated in Hyderabad, six in Benazirabad, three near Kotri railway station in Jamshoro, and two in Bin Qasim, Karachi.
July 13 – The bomb disposal squad defused four bombs found by residents on the tracks of the Odero Lal railway station in Hyderabad.
This is thrilling, thrilling stuff, I think to myself.
‘Your life sounds like a dreadful Irani film,’ Saad once said to me. His favourite film is Iron Man, which is what I tell people when they inevitably ask me why I’m not dating my single, straight male friend.
One of the copy-editors asks me what I got up to last night and I’m about to answer when Kamran sticks his head out of his office. ‘Why aren’t you at the station?’ he bellows. ‘The other reporter is stuck in traffic. Go. Get out.’
I scrabble about for one of the TV remotes. The television channels are saying the blast happened outside the Central railway station.
Get to the site after spending twenty minutes stuck in traffic begging the cab driver to find a shortcut out of the snarl. He asks me why I’m in such a rush, and when I tel
l him I’m a journalist, he tells me about his nephew who was shot in broad daylight when a thug from an anti-Pashtun political party heard the Pashto song that was his phone’s ringtone.
The Central railway station is a decrepit but elegant colonial building. I’m the first reporter there. There’s a pool of blood on the pavement and I can hear the glass from the blown out windows of a nearby building crunch under my shoes. A cop sees me walking around gingerly and tells me to step right up. I realize I am tainting the crime scene but it’s hard to tell where the scene is. The police appear to have run out of tape to cordon it off.
‘I saw it happen! I did!’ a twenty-something guy who runs a mobile phone shop nearby excitedly tells me. ‘Basically this guy was on a motorcycle and…’
I’m taking notes and nodding encouragingly at him when Ali strolls in. The sight of Ali, smarmy reporter unextraordinaire for News 365, the country’s largest news network, makes me want to hurl. His entire career is built on quid pro quo favours for politicians. According to Zara, who quite possibly hates Ali more than I do, he helped a provincial minister’s son get out of a drunk driving charge by pulling strings with his uncle, who was then head of the police. It would be fine if he was just arrogant, but he’s also incredibly rude and one of these days I’m going to find a way to crush his soul. The cops wave at him like he’s a long lost friend. He slaps one on the shoulder, hugs another. He clocks me and the eyewitness instantly, and the eyewitness unfortunately recognizes him too. My heart sinks. There goes my exclusive. Please make Ali go away, I start praying fervently.
Ali’s green-and-yellow mic has the same effect on interviewees that Ryan Gosling has on women. He trains the mic on the witness who subsequently forgets about me and my notebook. Twenty other reporters suddenly descend, cameramen in tow, following Ali like he’s the Pied Piper of journalism. Someone steps on my foot. Ali’s cameraman shoves me with his tripod. I shove him back with my handbag. The eyewitness is saying something fascinating, I can tell from the look on Ali’s face. I try to lean in and listen but Ali’s cameraman starts screaming at the eyewitness to step into the sunlight.
‘What’s this guy’s name again?’ Ali’s cameraman asks me, even as he continues to try to edge me out of the way with the camera. I glare at him. ‘Uff ho, attituuuude,’ he says, in a singsong tone.
I walk away and see another guy standing there, who with any luck might be another witness. ‘Were you here when this happened?’
‘No,’ the guy replies. ‘Wait, don’t you write for that blog?’ he says, looking at my Daily News badge.
My newspaper runs a wildly popular comment section filled with posts such as ‘why I hate my hairstylist’ or ‘I was discriminated against at a job interview because my family is wealthy’ and ‘I left my air-conditioned room to join the protest for your son’s murder case’. It has nothing to do with journalism, but now everyone assumes it’s what all of us do.
‘No I work for the paper,’ I say.
‘There’s a newspaper?’
I hate my life.
I speak to four other people at the site, who all tell me the same story of having seen a van go up in flames. One claims he heard gunshots. Another claims that ‘Blackwater did this’. The other two are 10-year-old kids who are collecting pieces of twisted metal and glass. They speak in monosyllables.
Did you see this happen? ‘No.’
What are you doing? ‘This.’
Why? ‘I’ll sell it.’
To who? The kid shrugs, and then dances off in a different direction. The other one runs up to me, smacks my butt, and scampers off singing Munni Badnaam Hui.
I walk up to the police van on the site and hide behind it to light a cigarette. Ali’s cameraman has a penchant for filming footage of women smoking, and showing it to everyone in the News 365 office. Clearly women smoking passes for pornography these days.
A cop pokes his head out of the van. ‘Can I have one too?’
We smoke, and he looks at me again. ‘You seem like a nice girl. Why do you smoke?’
Even though I’ve been smoking for years, the question always sends me into spasms of guilt. I think of my father, who disapproves of the fact that I smoke but is glad I’m not doing drugs instead. I want to tell the cop off for asking me this when every other man on the site is also smoking but I don’t want to piss him off. In twenty years, he’ll be giving press conferences and I’ll still be here, clutching a notebook and scribbling down answers that I can never make sense of afterwards. ‘I don’t know, I got into the habit and it’s so hard to quit you know,’ I gabble. ‘And we never get any food when reporting or water and you know what I mean, right?’
He’s already bored of my explanation. In the distance, I see Ali interviewing the head of the Karachi police. I should really go over and listen but the cop is saying something.
‘What?’
‘Can I have the lighter?’
‘Sure. What are you doing here?’ I ask. Every other cop on the scene is gathered around the Karachi police head hoping they’ll be noticed and fast tracked for a promotion.
‘I’m guarding this,’ he says, pointing to a bundle of sheets.
‘What is that?’ I ask, moving towards it hoping to get a look inside.
‘It’s all we recovered of the bomber’, he says. I step back hurriedly. Suddenly, my job doesn’t seem so awful.
I trudge into the newsroom and see ten sub-editors watching TV. Ali’s exclusive with the eyewitness is on. ‘He’s such a good reporter,’ says Sara, a 24-year-old liberal arts graduate who’s under the impression that Imran Khan is going to save the country because she and her friends think he looks good in footage from old cricket matches.
‘Seriously. Why can’t our reporters be like him? They’re all lazy idiots,’ says Kamran, who once told me that Ali’s refusal to join the paper meant he was a horrible human being and that I was so much better by comparison.
So much for that.
‘Hi, I’m back,’ I announce. ‘Hey,’ says Sara waving cheerily at me, ‘How was it? Was it fun?’
7 p.m.: Have filed copy, two press releases from political parties condemning the attack, done the timeline, and edited a reporter’s story on a dolphin that was found dead near Sukkur barrage. Dead dolphins. Because life couldn’t get any worse. I call Zara. ‘What happened? Did you go to the doctor?’
‘Yeah, it’s an infection. She said I should give my liver a rest. Whatever. Are we still on for dinner tonight?’
Oh crap. I’d completely forgotten that I had agreed to go out for dinner with Zara’s friends from business school last night in that joyous ‘I can totally socialize till 5 a.m. and go to work four hours later’ spirit that seems to overtake me when I drink on weekdays. ‘Do I have to?’
‘Yes. Aliya is bringing along some of her friends, PLEASE don’t leave me alone to deal with them.’
I have about an hour to get home, dress and get to the restaurant. What I really want to do is go home, get into my pyjamas and never leave the house again. But no. New Year. New Ayesha. Must socialize and meet new people, preferably of the single male variety. ‘Ok, fine.’
I start walking out of the newsroom when Kamran calls me into his office. ‘So listen…’
I freeze, petrified at the thought of being sent to cover something worse than body parts wrapped in sheets.
‘… can I have your bootlegger’s number?’
Ali’s editor would never use him as a source for cheap alcohol.
8 p.m.: Meeting Zara for dinner at this new seafood restaurant owned by a notoriously sleazy businessman. Zara and I had considered boycotting it on ethical grounds, but the prawns in lemon butter garlic sauce turned out to be too good to abandon on principle. The address is ridiculously vague. House number 34, C-Street. This used to be a residential neighbourhood but now commercial ventures are being run out of several of the houses. Instead of tearing them down to build proper cafés and shop fronts, restaurateurs have just moved into the houses
as they were, which makes you feel like you’re having dinner in someone’s drawing room, however done up it may be. Though I’ve been a few times, it’s impossible to remember where the place is. All of the houses look the same, with fairy lights in the trees and police cars outside, presumably guarding politicians out for dinner. I finally find the restaurant after I wander into someone’s driveway and get shooed away by the gardener. ‘Next door, next door,’ he shrieks.
Walk in and find Zara sitting at a table by herself in the ‘courtyard’—the back garden that’s been converted into an outdoor seating area. She looks very pale. ‘My stomach feels like it’s on fire,’ she groans when she sees me. ‘What the hell did we drink last night?’
None of our friends are on time, which is typical for Karachiites, who start contemplating getting dressed at the time the invitation is for. Zara lights a cigarette while I consider ordering a starter to keep me going. ‘I just overheard Kamran book a table at Okra. Okra, for the love of god,’ I tell her, referring to the lovely if overpriced Mediterranean restaurant on Zamzama. ‘We haven’t been paid in a month and a half and he’s having dinner at fucking Okra. I just spent an hour on the phone with the WWF rep talking about dead dolphins in Sukkur.’
Our phones start beeping simultaneously. It is our respective offices letting us know we’re due to cover Imran Khan’s arrival at the airport next week: which means three hours of sitting at the airport, drinking cups of overpriced tea and trying not to get trampled by cameramen.
‘Oh for the love of god,’ Zara starts off. This rant could go on for a few hours. It has been five years, but Zara—who’s had a poster of Imran Khan holding the 1992 World Cup trophy tacked above her bed for most of her life—has never forgiven him first for joining politics and second for everything that’s come out of his mouth since.
Before we’re able to fully settle into Imran Khan-bashing, her phone beeps again, and her face registers disbelief. ‘That was Aliya. She says none of them can bring any booze.’
I call Anil, our bootlegger. ‘Do you have vodka?’ I ask. ‘Yes. Jasmine vodka!’ Anil says, with the triumphant air of a sommelier unveiling a 25-year whiskey.