Karachi, You're Killing Me!

by Saba Imtiaz

  I really want to get the file away from this maze of government buildings and random security checks. It’s a hotchpotch of colonial buildings and grimy concrete blocks that seem like they were transplanted from the former Soviet republics. The mood is as stilted, everyone walks around with the look of the clinically depressed. Even the stray cats and dogs lie around listlessly, clearly having lost their will to live amid the stacks of files full of bureaucratic correspondence and memos.

  I hail a rickshaw and as we reach the main road, I realize the guard was right. The traffic is pretty bad, even for rush hour. Horns are blaring fruitlessly, almost as if the collective noise will somehow propel the traffic forward. The driver gets out of the rickshaw angrily. ‘I’m going to find out what’s wrong.’ He confers with a traffic cop sitting on the sidewalk, who has clearly also given up on ever resolving the snarl and walks back. ‘There’s a protest up ahead, some religious group. These bloody beards never stop.’

  The driver has a fairly long beard himself and I’m just about to point that out when there’s a loud boom in the distance and a jolt, like an earthquake. The rickshaw actually shudders as if it’s about to topple over. I can hear a woman screaming from the car next to us. I look up and there’s a plume of smoke in the distance. I look back and there are cars reversing madly to try and get out of here. There’s a wail of ambulance sirens and the rickshaw driver looks like he’s about to pass out from fear. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say, even though I have no idea what has happened. ‘I’ll be back,’ I say and start running in the direction of the noise. A cop waves me back. ‘Bomb blast. At the protest. It was pretty bad.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I say. He gestures to his wireless. ‘Just go back, please.’

  ‘I’m a journalist, at least tell me what happened,’ I say, scrambling in my bag for my press card.

  ‘Five dead so far, at least forty injured. They’re taking them to Civil.’ He takes out a handkerchief and mops his forehead. ‘God saved us, god saved us, I was supposed to be there on duty. Just go back, otherwise other people will start walking too and we don’t know whether there’ll be another one.’

  I reach for my cell phone to check if I have any alerts from the hospital. The phone services seem to have gone down. I walk back slowly. My legs feel like they’re made of jelly and it’s like all my organs have been rearranged. My eyes are stinging from the smoke in the air, combined with the fumes from the dozens of rickshaws and cars all stuck on the road. ‘AYESHA. AYESHAAAAAAAAAA.’ I look around and it’s Kamran, his head out of a car window, waving madly. ‘Hey,’ I say.

  ‘I need to get out of here, I can’t do this.’ Kamran looks ashen and absolutely terrified. ‘I can’t be here, I think I’m having a fucking panic attack.’

  ‘Kamran! Breathe! We can’t go forward, I just asked.’ How does he expect me to get him out of here? I don’t have a bloody helicopter. I’m about to ask why he doesn’t own one when I look at him again. His hands are shaking on the wheel. ‘Ok, get out of the car,’ I say. He jumps out, slams the door and I take his hand. ‘Now just walk with me.’

  My plan is to get him some water and calm him down enough so he can get back into his car and drive but he’s so panicky he’s talking about five hundred words a minute. ‘I was in a meeting at the governor’s house, the bloody driver decided to take the day off so I’m driving myself around like a bloody pleb. My wife wanted me to take her to the tailor, what does she think I do, run a newspaper stand? I decided to take the longer route back home and Jesus, I could have bloody well died. What the hell is happening? Did you hear that blast? Good god. I thought my car was about to melt. Is it hot? Why is it so hot here?’ Kamran is tugging at his tie and I’m convinced he’s going to have a heart attack. ‘Okay, Kamran, you’ve got to breathe.’ We’re standing in the narrow space between my rickshaw and a truck. I dig out a water bottle from my bag. ‘Drink this, and just calm down, okay. You’re alive, see. We’re really, really lucky.’

  Drinking water doesn’t seem to be helping him. I don’t see a way out of the traffic jam, which has grown even worse. How the hell do people not know that there’s been a bomb blast on this route and they should head the other way?! It is at times like this when I wish for a massive, citywide PA system. Kamran is still hyperventilating. We’re going to have to get out of here on foot. I pay the rickshaw driver a thousand rupees and tell Kamran to follow me.

  Except I have no idea where I’m going. There’s a narrow alley squeezed between a shop advertising camel milk—‘Health benefits from the finest camels’—and a men’s clothing store with a massive set of briefs fluttering outside. ‘Let’s go.’ The alley is full of water dripping from the air conditioners in the shops and houses above and I can see a rat run by. I curse myself for wearing sandals. Kamran and I walk through the alley and reach a lane of shops that I vaguely recognize, but all the shutters are pulled down. Kamran’s tugging at his top shirt button and still frantically asking me where we’re going. ‘Stop, stop!’ he gasps. I look around and he suddenly doubles over.

  Oh my god, he’s having a heart attack, I think. I am reaching for my phone to call an ambulance when Kamran starts throwing up. I crouch beside him and rub his back. ‘It’ll be okay, just let it out.’ I hand him the last dregs of water and dig out a few tissues. He shakes his head and starts hurling again. The smell of the vomit is making me nauseous and I feel like I’m nine again, stuck on a class trip to the Pepsi factory where five kids threw up on the bus ride back to school because they drank too many free drinks. After what seems like a few hours, Kamran reaches for the bottle of water I’m still holding on to. ‘Let’s go,’ he mutters weakly.

  ‘Kamran, just keep walking, we’re going to find a way back out.’ The lane has been barricaded off but there’s another alley up ahead. ‘In there,’ I say, hoping this will eventually lead somewhere. We walk through a deserted neighbourhood of crumbling apartment buildings and I can see a few rickshaws parked in the distance. ‘Oh thank goodness. Kamran, do you think you can walk till there?’ he nods and we head towards the rickshaws. If there are no drivers, I’m prepared to find a way to drive one myself. A group of boys suddenly emerge from one of the buildings, their faces covered with scarves. One has a gun.

  Oh great. Now we’re getting mugged?! Kamran is fumbling for his wallet. ‘What are you doing in this neighbourhood?’

  What is this? The neighbourhood watch? ‘Our people have been slaughtered and you’re traipsing around here. Don’t you know we’re in mourning?’

  I realize with a sickening sense of dread that these folks are out for revenge. One of the guys is rubbing a gun in his hand, as if he’s warming it up. ‘Look guys…’ Kamran starts and I interrupt. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, it is the most horrible thing that could have happened,’ I say contritely. ‘Please accept your sister’s condolences.’ How am I coming up with this stuff? Have I spent so much time with religious activists that their mannerisms have seeped in through some bizarre personality osmosis? ‘I am your sister,’ I say and look into the eyes of the guy with the gun. ‘Look at my brother here, he works with me. He’s very sick. We weren’t supposed to be here. We are looking for a clinic. He needs to go to a doctor and the streets are blocked. There is no humanity left in this city, look at what they just did to your brothers.’

  The guy with the gun looks at his friends and then at Kamran and I. I can actually hear my blood thrumming in my veins. ‘Go,’ he says, pointing to the path with his gun.

  I touch my hand to my heart and bow my head, trembling slightly. Kamran and I look at each other and start walking towards the rickshaws. He’s going to shoot us the moment we turn around. I imagine him training his gun at us, laughing inwardly at these naïve idiots. ‘Wait,’ I hear him say. This is it. I’m going to be a story in tomorrow’s paper. In fact, Kamran will be a story and I’ll be lucky if I even get a mention. ‘SHEHZADAY!’ he yells out and a man pops out of a rickshaw. ‘Take these two wherever they want to go.’


  I turn around, smile gratefully and shepherd Kamran into the rickshaw. I give the driver the office address and he expertly navigates through lanes and alleys and a park to get onto the bridge that leads to the office. We don’t talk at all, in fact, we don’t exhale until we’re at the office gate. I pay the driver and he trundles off. I call out to the office guard. ‘Take Kamran sahib inside,’ I say when Kamran suddenly turns and gives me a hug. ‘Thank you. You saved my life. I would have died if it wasn’t for you.’

  ‘It’s okay, I’m just glad you’re not having a heart attack or something.’

  ‘Come into the office. Have some water. I’ll get someone to take you home.’

  I walk in and Kamran’s wife is sitting in the lobby, looking worriedly at the television screens showing visuals of the bomb blast. She jumps up and hugs him. ‘I have been calling you for hours,’ she says, and Kamran disentangles himself. ‘Thank Ayesha. She rescued me from that hellhole.’

  Kamran’s wife awkwardly hugs me and I cough. ‘Let’s go to the newsroom,’ Kamran says.

  An hour later, he’s retelling the story for the fifth time to a group of editors and sub-editors and the heads of marketing and sales who’ve all amassed in the office to check in on him. Each version is more exaggerated than the last one. Someone has ordered lattes from Espresso for us, and I am sipping on mine and smoking—no one, I have realized, dares question the girl who has just saved the boss’s life—and listening to Kamran rattling on. ‘And then Ayesha so confidently talked to the guys, you should have seen it!’ he crows. It’s hard to believe he was hurling a short while ago, except my shoes are covered in his puke. ‘Ayesha, you’re a star. I’m so proud of you. We should talk about you contributing at some point. We’ll match whatever the people abroad are paying you.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ I say. I really need to get out of the office before he eventually talks me into coming back to work. ‘Kamran, can someone drop me?’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ he says, and jumps to his feet and hugs me again. ‘The receptionist will get you a car. Thank you so much once again, you’re…’

  ‘A genius, I know,’ I say, and smile. Who knew it would take a near-death experience to turn Kamran into a human being?

  CHAPTER 13

  Thursday, May 7, 2012

  9 p.m.: I’ve thrown out the puke-covered shoes and taken the world’s longest shower. News channels are one-upping themselves in the race to show the grisliest visuals possible of the bomb blast. ‘And as you can see we were forty seconds ahead of our rivals in reporting the blast,’ one anchor crows. Another is shrilly narrating CCTV footage of the blast.

  Kamran has sent about a dozen text messages. ‘What if I hadn’t been stuck in traffic? What if I had just driven into the blast? What if those guys hadn’t let us pass?’ I want to be annoyed at him but I know he’s now in the throes of the guessing game everyone plays when they’ve had a near-miss like we did. It’s the Karachiite version of ‘the first time I had sex’ story. You’ll always remember your first time. Zara is on television. She’s standing in front of the hospital’s ER sign and patiently replying to questions thrown at her by the news anchor. ‘Well, obviously, the injuries are severe, they were caught in a bomb blast,’ she says tiredly before the anchor quizzes her on whether the hospital was able to deal with the influx of patients. ‘Yes, the hospital was prepared for an emergency, this is, as you can see, the emergency room.’ I feel a rush of fondness for her and send her a text: ‘So, can you tell me what kind of injuries they are?’

  Five minutes later she replies: ‘I’d tell you to fuck off, but I’ve actually been asked that question twice on air. Where are you?’

  ‘Finally home. Don’t ask. Got caught in the post-blast madness.’

  Most people would offer trite phrases of concern and ‘are you holding up okay?’ Zara knows better. ‘Could be worse. You could be mopping up the blood here. Looks like the aftermath of Bakra Eid.’

  I close my laptop. I don’t think I’m going to get any writing done tonight. People tend to think living amid bombs and blood is inspiring. It isn’t. It just makes me feel exhausted with the sheer pressure of either trying to shrug it off like nothing happened or having to write about it—how many new ways can one come up with to write about blood and gore?

  Might as well call Anil. He’s in the neighbourhood and five minutes later, I’m standing at the apartment gate collecting a bottle of scotch. ‘Hurry up,’ he says, as I count out the money. ‘The entire city seems to be drinking today. Bomb blast happened in a place they’ve never heard of, yet they’re all shaken up.’ I’m assuming at least one of the orders is Kamran’s, who is probably now regaling his entire family with the story of his brush with death.

  As Anil drives away I’m almost tempted to call after him and ask him if he’d like to drink with me. I really don’t feel like drinking alone. And Saad hasn’t called yet. Should I call him instead? Do the same rules of calling someone after a fight apply to a friendship as they do to a relationship? I don’t want to seem like I’m desperately eager to patch things up, especially since he’s the one who should be apologetic for being such an ass about Jamie. Even if I did want to talk to Jamie, why is that Saad’s problem?

  I’m pouring out my third drink and surfing Facebook. Carla, the BBC girl, has added me on Facebook and I’m scrolling through her wall posts to see if she seems like a sane person to work with for three days. I stop at the second post. Dammit. I should have done this before I told her I would be available to work with her. ‘James has a fabulous story on a drone attack survivor who is undergoing psychiatric counseling in Peshawar’.

  Wish there was a way one could filter all mentions of Jamie online. The Eternal Sunshine of the Tweetless Mind? I’m about to ask Zara what she thinks about this but I put the phone down. She might start ranting again because I know what work Jamie is doing these days. I’m staring at Facebook. It does sound like a good story. Probably won’t hurt to click.

  The first frame is of the ward at a hospital in Peshawar. It’s dark and dreary and the man is sitting in a corner, curled up on a chair. He’s going to have a nightmare, I think, and the screen fills with an image of him thrashing in bed before a nurse wakes him up and increases his sleep medication dosage.

  How did I know that? Is this a scene from an all too realistic film I’ve seen recently? That doesn’t seem possible.

  I quickly Google ‘drone survivor’ and five minutes later, I’m watching the same footage of the man thrash around in his bed. It’s part of a story smarmy Ali did last week from Peshawar. Andrea had asked me for some help with translating the dialogue because Ali had jetted off to Bangkok for a weekend vacation with his girlfriend.

  This seems like far too much of a coincidence. Foreign correspondents routinely do the same story—operating like a wolf pack hunting together—but no one uses the same footage. It seems odd that Ali would have shared his work with Jamie.

  Unless.

  I send the links to both stories to Andrea, who e-mails me ten minutes later. ‘Thanks for letting me know. I’m investigating this.’

  Saturday, May 8, 2012

  11 a.m.: Saad still hasn’t called. I scrolled through Instagram this morning and found photos of Saad having coffee at Espresso with his ex-girlfriend Nazia, who went to school with us. I cannot believe Saad is socializing with that cow. She had the gall to show up at my mother’s funeral and ask me why I hadn’t brushed my hair and if that was the only black shalwar kameez I owned? Of all of Saad’s girlfriends—and there were many—she’s the one I hated the most. There was McSweety, a ditzy girl whose name was actually Samira, who thought everything Saad did was ‘soooo cuuuuute’ and that he was ‘soooooo adorable’. Or Nida, who had treated Saad like a possession for all of the month that they were together. Or Urooj, who wrote him poems.

  Why is Saad hanging out with Nazia when his so-called best friend—ME, ME, ME—is a twenty-minute drive away?

  Unless he’s getting back to
gether with her. The prospect fills me with despair. I don’t think I am mentally up to socializing with Nazia. I open up the Instagram photo of them again. Nazia has suspiciously poker straight hair. I bet she’s gone in for that ridiculous hair bonding treatment that all the salons are advertising. Zara tried it out last year and ended up buying a curling iron. ‘I look like a Barbie doll,’ she’d said, mournfully pulling at her hair. ‘I spend all day reporting and it doesn’t move an inch. It seems unnatural. Like Botox for your hair.’

  Ugh. Fuck this. Am going to go get ice cream.

  1 p.m.: Am sitting in a booth and eating a double scoop of chocolate chip ice cream, hoping no one is giving me the typical pitying looks and raised eyebrows that are the fate of anyone who decides to go to a café alone. I spot Farrah, looking completely overdressed for a weekday afternoon in a silk jumpsuit and high heels. I wave at her. ‘Models eat ice cream now? Wonders never cease.’ She slides into the booth and looks longingly at the bowl in front of me. ‘I bet that tastes amazing,’ she says.

  ‘What are you having?’ I ask, mostly to be polite, as I wonder why she’s hanging out at my table instead of at a table of designers, stylists, and other associated folk.

  ‘Oh, a black coffee.’

  Farrah’s black coffee arrives…along with, of all the people in the world who I would rather never see again, Jamie. He’s balancing a cup filled to the brim with coffee and a waffle cone, and freezes at seeing Farrah and me together. ‘Join us!’ Farrah turns to me and exclaims. Oh bloody hell. ‘Actually, I should be leaving soon,’ I say, hurriedly finishing my ice cream and hoping my face doesn’t register the fact that I now have brain freeze. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she drawls. ‘Ayesha, you’ve met Jamie? He’s following me around for a story for CNN.’

  ‘We’ve met,’ Jamie says softly. ‘I’d really like to talk to you Ayesha,’ he says, and for a moment I am reminded of just how amazing he was in bed, how lonely I feel with Saad clearly out and about and having a great time without me. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Look, about what happened,’ Jamie starts. ‘I just wanted to let you know that I didn’t mean to hurt you. It’s a story, and this stuff happens.’