Guilty and anxious, I rang Tara again but there was still no answer and the flight was closing. At the desk I asked if Ayesha Rahman had checked in and if I could sit beside her, but the Pakistani Airlines clerk shook his head. ‘You’re the last passenger, sir; there’s one seat left and it’s in the last row.’
I looked for Ayesha in the departure lounge. The boarding process was chaotic. I couldn’t spot her. The gate was manned by PIA staff, I was the only white face and 450 Pakistani travellers were besieging the exit. Precedence seemed to go not by row number but by subtle gradations of social rank that are invisible to non-Pakistanis. People pushed and shoved; all struggled to board first, but there were fiercely proclaimed levels of self-perceived importance. Elderly gentlemen of military bearing and smartly dressed businessmen harangued the ground staff demanding to be let on first, demands that were usually complied with. Once on board, families manifested their standing by displays of gold jewellery, by shouting, argumentative children and by the loudness and rudeness of their complaints to the air stewardesses. One man berated a steward because someone’s case was in the luggage bin above his seat. The steward offered to place the gentleman’s bag in an adjacent locker but was rebuffed. The dressing-down continued, imperious and audible to the whole cabin, until the steward pleaded with the owner of the offending case to be allowed to move it.
The seats next to mine were occupied by two young Asian men. They were in jeans and T-shirts and addressed each other in what I took to be Sindhi; when they spoke English it was the slangy, dismissive argot of young British Pakistanis parodied by Ali G. They looked at me, I thought, with suspicion; there was no attempt at conversation.
After take-off I went looking for Ayesha, who was seated further forward on the other side of the plane. Judging by her smile I evidently looked relieved to find her. When I got back to my seat lunch was being served. The two young men had lamb curry on their trays, but the stewardess offered me the choice of Pakistani or English food. I asked what the English dish was and she said ‘Chicken Forestière’. One of the young men sniffed. ‘That’s a bit racialist, isn’t it? She didn’t ask us!’ It was unclear if he was joking or serious, or to whom the remark was addressed, but I tried to lighten the mood. ‘You’re right. And what’s worse is that the English food is actually French . . .’ They didn’t smile. I decided we weren’t going to have much in common.
An hour into the flight an announcement came over the Tannoy, in Urdu then in English. ‘If there is a doctor on board, please would you make your way to row fifteen.’
I looked to see if anyone was responding and was surprised when the man on my right tapped my shoulder.
‘Excuse me – can I get out?’
I let him past and was about to sit down when the other man raised a hand.
‘Sorry. Me, too.’
When they returned they told me an elderly woman had fainted but been revived with a glass of water and some deep breathing.
‘We weren’t even needed; there were four doctors there already. That’s Pakistan for you – endless supplies of qualified medics . . .’
My preconceptions were confounded. Conversation flowed. The men were brothers and both were doctors, the elder a GP in Bradford, the younger a surgeon at Leeds General.
They had been born in Yorkshire and were thinking of emigrating to Australia, where there was a shortage of young doctors and pay and climate were considerably better.
I asked where they were travelling to and they said they were going to visit their parents. Their father had decided to sell up in England and return to his roots by building a house to retire to in the Orangi district of Karachi.
‘But isn’t Orangi meant to be dangerous?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I’ve heard a lot of bad things about it . . .’
‘Karachi’s the most dangerous city in Pakistan, and Orangi’s the most dangerous part of Karachi,’ the brothers said, laughing. ‘At least it is if you don’t come from there. It’s overrun with criminals, Taliban and terrorists. But we know the place and our parents live there, so we’re okay. Where are you heading for?’
‘Well, eventually I have to go to a place called Kahin Nahi. Do you know it?’
The brothers grimaced.
‘Yeah, sure. And you were calling Orangi dangerous! Good luck in Kahin Nahi, mate!’
Four hours into the flight, the older brother asked again if he could get past me. I expected him to go to the toilet, but he took out a mat from his rucksack and laid it on the floor. With the aid of a pocket compass he aligned himself with Mecca and prostrated himself to pray.
In the passport queue at Karachi, the brothers complained about the squalor, the smell and the chaos.
‘It’s so third world. God knows what Westerners must think when they come here for the first time. This country could have a massive tourist industry – there’s so much to see and so much history – but the Pakistanis can’t get their act together. Wait ’til we get to customs. There are queues for everything, the luggage always gets lost and nothing works.’
Ayesha appeared as we were waiting for the bags, spoke to the brothers in stumbling Urdu then laughed and switched to English as we said goodbye. In the crowded arrivals hall we found our driver and set off into the smothering heat of Karachi’s fieriest summer for twenty years.
CHAPTER 20
Karachi is a city of havoc, misruled by violence, patronage and greed. It holds impressive, unenviable records – for murder, kidnapping, corruption and torture. Three decades of political civil war have left its inhabitants looking over their shoulders and its streets littered with bodies.
It wasn’t always so. Karachi was once the pearl of Sindh, a southern paradise of fruit trees and butterflies, where children played safely and doors were left unlocked. A guidebook for US troops posted there in 1943 called it ‘the Paris of the East . . . the cleanest city in the whole of India . . . with beautiful beaches and bathing places’. The 1950s and ’60s were Karachi’s pur sakoon dor, the era of serenity, when restaurants, nightclubs and cinemas flourished and no one questioned the right of women to visit them unchaperoned. A catchy Urdu rock number with electric guitars from the 1964 film Chingari gave Karachi its enduring sobriquet Ae Roshniyon ke Shehar Bata, City of Lights, evoked with wry irony in today’s era of power cuts and darkened streets.
The seeds of future conflict had been sown in 1947 when partition sent millions of Muslims scurrying into the city, tripling its population, and hundreds of thousands of Hindus, Karachi’s traditional administrators, managers and businessmen, fleeing from it. The incomers, the Mohajirs, vied with established communities to fill the economic and political vacuum. Arguments flared over property ownership and land rights, electoral representation and community identity. Seared by the horrors of partition, fearing discrimination, the Mohajirs mobilised and organised. Their political party, the MQM, fought for power with such ruthless tenacity that it became respected and feared in equal measure.
The British settlement had left Pakistan with democracy, but it developed in its own way. Votes were something to be bought, extorted or wheedled out of a population that went for the highest bidder. All political parties took and offered bhatta, bribes and protection money. Rival factions competed for jobs, land, water and public funds; many of them acquired a militant wing with knives, guns and grenades. Karachi became a battleground, whose spoils were control of the state and city governments, the police, the courts, rents and revenues. The MQM proved the most efficient manipulator of people and of the system. Maintained in power by Karachi’s preponderant Mohajir population, it ruled with impunity. The party distributed largesse to its influential supporters, political and criminal, in the form of contracts for grandiose public schemes – roads, housing, power stations and dams – that existed largely on paper and whose purpose was to enrich grantors and grantees alike from public coffers.
People came to dread the MQM’s wrath. The party’s thugs kidnapped, tortured and murdered with a growing se
nse of entitlement. Most of the city’s police were in their pockets and those who tried to curb their activities met grisly ends. By the mid-1990s armed clashes were an everyday event, a rumbling civil war between the MQM and its rivals that caused thousands of deaths. Political factions and criminal gangs maintained secret facilities where skilful torturers would mutilate opponents before dumping their corpses on the street. Body bags were a ubiquitous, reliable barometer of the violence.
But Karachi remained Pakistan’s economic powerhouse, generating two-thirds of the nation’s income and over half of national tax revenues. In the 1990s, war in Afghanistan turned it into the hub of Pakistan’s trade in heroin and smuggled arms, boosting the black economy and the city’s murder rate. The prizes are extravagant, the incentive for politicians to retain power massive. Karachi’s wealthy elite now live in barricaded security, armed guards every ten yards, high walls and barbed wire. The state has been displaced by informal power structures that people recognise, despise and obey. No other city in the world can match its unique, flaming, depressing energy.
On the way from the airport we passed a dozen checkpoints, manned by machine guns of the Pakistan Rangers. The road, which in British times had been wide and smooth, was potholed now, clogged by brightly painted buses and lorries with passengers clinging precariously to roofs and rails like bees swarming on a honeycomb. In the scrubby wasteland to either side, the needy teemed. The air conditioning in the car was at full blast but still the heat clung to us.
Entering the hotel was to pass from one world to another. Security guards directed the car into a steel cage, where hydraulic barriers pinned us in place while doors, bonnet and boot were opened and searched. Mirrors on poles were rolled beneath us looking for bombs; our luggage lifted, taken for x-ray then returned by scurrying attendants. Cleared for entry, we emerged into flowering gardens where water sprinklers irrigated immaculate lawns; billowing marquees with tables covered in white linen were presided over by khaki-clad guards in watchtowers, idly flicking the safety catches of their Kalashnikovs.
In the marble reception hall, men in suits with bulging breast pockets spoke into walkie-talkies. A tall, distinguished commissionaire with the high plumed headdress of the Frontier Corps greeted us with a bow, snapping his fingers at two bellboys who ran to take our cases. It was an island of unlikely civilisation in a ravaged landscape.
Ayesha said she needed a shower and a change of clothes, but suggested we meet in a couple of hours for a drink. I had just begun unpacking when the phone in my room rang.
‘Martin, I need a favour. I need you to ring room service and order me a bottle of wine. I just tried them and they say only non-Muslim guests can have alcohol. I gave them an earful, but they won’t budge. See what they’ve got, will you? I don’t want anything rough.’
I made the call, but the service wallah said the hotel’s policy was not to serve wine; they had Murree Beer, which he described as tasty and nutritious. I ordered three bottles and dropped them off at Ayesha’s room. When we met an hour or so later, I had the impression she had drunk them.
‘So, finally . . . we’re here,’ she said as we sat in the hotel lobby. ‘I hope you’ve got our plans worked out. I don’t want to spend more time in this place than I absolutely have to.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Neither do I. But I do think we need to see all the players in this drama . . . suspects as well as witnesses.’
‘Oh God, Martin; don’t start that again. You know what I think about all that . . .’
Ayesha wasn’t slurring her words, but her voice had the emphatic edge to it that comes with drink.
‘Yes, I do. And I don’t want to do anything dangerous, any more than you do. Imran will be here in half an hour and he’ll be able to tell us who we should be talking to . . . and who will agree to talk to us.’
Imran Hayat was a young Pakistani academic, an expert in the history of his country’s chaotic legal system and a supporter of liberal politics in an increasingly Islamic state. I had been put in touch with him by a friend at London University and Imran had spent a month working on my behalf, trying to find addresses, fix meetings and arrange interviews. Ayesha was in a mood to find fault with everything.
‘Oh, bloody Imran! You keep talking about him as if he’s going to solve everything. I thought you were meant to be the great journalist. How come it’s Imran and not you doing all the research?’
The animosity in her words demanded to be taken seriously. She asked me to order her a drink and I hesitated. She insisted. Her voice was raised. We were beginning to attract the interest of people at other tables. I ordered the drink.
Imran arrived late. Hotel security had been reluctant to admit him and phone calls to our rooms had gone unanswered. I apologised, but Imran was gracious.
‘Oh, no. It is much better for them to be over-vigilant. There was a suicide bombing at this hotel three years ago that caused fifty casualties. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed it . . . Al Qaeda people, you know . . .’
Imran was polite and intelligent, his English unaccented to the point of sounding almost too perfect. I liked him at once.
‘Thank you, Imran. I’m drinking coffee, but Ayesha has a beer. Would you like one?’
Imran shook his head and asked for a mint tea. He was wearing traditional Pakistani clothes, a light-coloured shalwar kameez with leather sandals. He seemed at ease in the Western plush of the hotel, but at the same time keeping his distance. Ayesha had been weighing him up since he arrived.
‘So, Imran. Martin has been singing your praises. He says you’ll be taking us to see everyone who’s anyone in this country. He thinks you’re the Pakistani answer to Sherlock Holmes, the great bloody Imran with all the answers at his fingertips . . .’
Ayesha caught my glance and raised her hands theatrically. ‘What? Have I said something? What are you giving me that look for?’
I was about to apologise to Imran, but he smiled and gestured towards Ayesha’s beer.
‘A brewery in an Islamic country; quite an anomaly, don’t you think? The British founded the Murree distillery in the nineteenth century; its slogans used to be “Have a Murree with your curry” or “Eat, drink and be Murree”, which is rather amusing. But things are trickier now. Most of our politicians and our English-speaking elite enjoy a tipple, but the religious right are getting angry about it . . . and quite violent. They posted photographs on the Internet of the Governor of Punjab taking a drink and accused him of being haram, unclean and un-Islamic. That stirred up a lot of fury among the common people; then the Governor was murdered.’
Ayesha sensed that Imran’s message was intended for her; his words sounded disapproving, but his tone was even and friendly. There was a moment of awkward silence.
‘I think we should talk about our plans,’ I said. ‘Imran, can you tell us what you’ve been able to find out?’
Imran nodded. ‘I have been trying to arrange several interviews, with mixed fortunes I am afraid. I have been telephoning Masood Jilani, the private detective you told me about, but so far he is refusing to see us. He was, of course, shot in the course of his investigations, so this is understandable; but I will keep working on him. Inspector Iqbal is refusing to answer my calls, almost certainly because he has been taking bribes in this case. I have made some enquiries about Javed Shafik, our principal suspect, and it is true that he has been linked with criminal goings-on. He has been involved in illegal alcohol distribution, probably in the drugs trade and possibly in human sex trafficking, forcing young girls into prostitution. Perhaps of most interest as far as Ibrahim Rahman is concerned are Javed Shafik’s activities involving government contracts . . .’
Ayesha hit the table with the flat of her hand.
‘Stop! I’ve already said this is wrong! I don’t want to hear any more about my father being involved with Javed Shafik and his bloody gangsters . . .’
‘Ayesha, wait a moment.’ I tried to calm things. ‘We need at the very least to hear what I
mran has found out. This is important.’
Imran lowered his eyes. ‘Well, I was saying that Shafik is undoubtedly involved in organised crime, but, as with so much in Pakistan, there is a nuance. Shafik is a protégé of the UF, the United Front party that is very powerful here. Politicians and gangsters look after each other and make each other rich. But they are both part of the parallel structures of authority that have displaced the state in this city. Men like Shafik provide services to the population – they offer the people protection, find them accommodation, guarantee their water and electricity supplies, moderate their rents and arbitrate in disputes. Shafik does all of this. And he sponsors local youth clubs and cricket teams. So while he is certainly a mafia boss, to many people he is also a legitimate operator, a social activist, a protector of the weak.’
Ayesha snorted. Imran pressed on.
‘This does not mean I wish to exonerate Javed Shafik. But it does mean there may be a way for us to get to him. I have told his people that Martin is a British journalist who wants to write about Shafik’s philanthropic activities. They have relayed the message to their boss and he is interested. I say “interested” because he is not stupid: he would be flattered to have a positive article written about him, but I sense he is suspicious of our motives. We need to be very careful. Shafik is a ruthless man.’
Ayesha leaned forward.
‘So, what exactly are you saying? That my dad was a crook? That you’re going to take us to see his boss? You think you’re going to stitch my father up . . .’
Imran looked at us then resumed with the same unruffled civility.
‘Actually, Miss Ayesha, I have some evidence that might contradict that theory. I believe Masood Jilani told you about Mr Rahman’s activities during his visits to Pakistan, in particular his purchasing of land and the building of a rather luxurious house . . .’
‘You know full well he told me about that! And you know Masood thinks it proves my dad was in cahoots with Shafik . . .’
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