Karachi Vice, page 10
The wedding day passed in a haze. There was music and dancing, although not for Jannat. A bride couldn’t dance at her own wedding, or even laugh or smile much. It was immodest to look as if she was too happy at the thought of getting married and ending her innocence. Jannat was respectful of propriety, so she stayed as still as she could, watching the festivities unfold around her. She was still young, but she was tall like her mother. When she stood next to her husband, she realized that she was taller than him.
After the wedding, she went to the home that Ghulam had built for them. Like the others in Lal Baksh, it comprised a single room. The white corrugated-iron roof was adorned with wedding tinsel that dangled from the beams. Across the long back wall were built-in shelves. The pillows from her mother were stacked up all the way to the ceiling, a comforting backdrop to her new life.
Ghulam worked long hours at the business he ran with his brothers, selling chicken meat from the many poultry farms in the area to restaurants and wedding caterers. Their small shop was far away from Lal Baksh, past Kathore, just off Super Highway. The shop was behind one of the big chai hotels that catered to long-distance truckers and commuters with vats of oily dhal and sweet milky chai. Much of their business was done at night: the caterers drove out from the city to pick up chicken to prepare for their restaurants the following day. All three brothers would come home exhausted, covered in dust from the bumpy motorbike ride, soaked in sweat, the smell of meat clinging to their clothes. Chicken was the currency that kept Lal Baksh afloat, now that agriculture was practically impossible.
When Jannat had travelled out of the village – to school in Kathore or to a wedding – she had occasionally seen lush green fields, a striking visual contrast to the monochrome sand and thorns that covered the rest of the area. These fields, Ghulam told her, were owned by wealthy villagers who had the means to irrigate the land. Those who could not afford to cultivate crops in this costly way were forced to find other work. Some built poultry farms, rearing chickens to sell to market traders in Karachi. Some, like Ghulam and his brothers, slaughtered the birds and sold the meat directly. The Kachehlos had been on this land for hundreds of years and in that time it had changed to the point it was barely recognizable. But they clung to it and to Shafi Muhammad’s words: ‘This land is all we have. We are free on this land. The land will sustain us.’
Jannat had moved only a few metres away from the house she had grown up in, but her centre of gravity shifted. Now she was part of Ghulam’s broader household. Unlike her own home, where Amma had borne the pressure alone, here there were many women to share the load. Ghulam’s sister was still a child, but both of his brothers were married and all three wives divided most of the tasks between them. At first, the two older women left Jannat to her embroidery and cooking while they cleaned and tended to the cattle and goats.
Soon after the wedding, Ghulam sat Jannat down and told her that although he couldn’t take her to school in Kathore every day, her education was important to him. ‘I’m going to get you all the textbooks and materials you need, and enrol you for the tenth-grade exams next year,’ he told her. ‘You can sit the exams as a private candidate. I’ll drive you there myself.’ Ghulam was true to his word. He brought Jannat the textbooks and encouraged her to study. ‘Your dada wanted you to be the first girl from Lal Baksh to finish tenth grade, and I want that for you too.’ But without the structure of school, the words in the textbooks washed over her. She had never struggled with concentration before, but now she would read the same page repeatedly without absorbing a thing. She was also getting used to the new demands on her time. Some of these were enjoyable, like the daily walk to get firewood, a leisurely stroll with the other women. Even the laundry, which was hard work – filling up the low metal basin from the manual pump that supplied water to the village, rinsing clothes by hand under the blazing sun – was tolerable, because all the women did it together. She often sat with her mother, squatting by one of their houses, chatting as they used a stone to scrape the soap suds out of the clothes, before hanging them to dry on one of the gnarly trees that stood between their homes, trying to find a spot where they wouldn’t immediately be covered in dust again. Other tasks had fewer redeeming features. She now had responsibility for Ghulam’s goats, taking them out to pasture each morning and bringing them back to the village in the evening. Sometimes as she was sitting propped up on one of the beautiful pillows her mother had stitched for her, trying to read her Urdu or maths textbook, one of the goats would amble into the house and have to be shooed away.
By this time, electricity had come to the village. For years, pylons had stood, unused and unconnected, spaced at regular intervals from Lal Baksh out into the distance. No one in the village could say exactly when it happened, but at some point around the time of Jannat’s marriage they had wires connected to them, loose loops strung across the sky. Now they had power for a few hours a day, enough to light their homes in the evenings. The single bulb newly attached to most houses provided far more light than the lanterns had done previously. Electricity was useful in other ways too. Some years earlier, the government had sunk a borehole for a well in the middle of the village. It was wide and square, surrounded by a low brick wall, the earth beside it turned to a muddy sludge by the overflow of water. It had run on an expensive diesel generator that everyone chipped in for, but now it was connected to the mains supply. It didn’t work all the time – only for the few hours a day that the power was switched on – but it was less laborious to get water here than at the hand pump. Each of these small changes made life so much easier. Jannat had only a loose understanding of the forces that decided which services would come to their village and when, but she knew from listening to the men speak that everything good that happened was because of the PPP and the Bhuttos. They were powerful people, far away in grand houses in the city, but they were Sindhis too, and that meant they cared about Lal Baksh. Villagers across their region shared this conviction, despite the fact that decades of PPP provincial government control had not led to gas lines, running water or hospitals. The celebration of Jannat’s wedding had coincided with the happy news that the 2008 election had returned the PPP to national government, even though it was tinged with sadness that their great heroine, Benazir Bhutto, had been assassinated. Jannat didn’t pay close attention to politics, but after the electricity came her cousin Ataullah got a TV and sometimes she watched snippets of the news. As the men talked in glowing terms about the changing times, she daydreamed about a hospital, or a secondary school in Lal Baksh, so that other girls could finish their education. If a few hours per day of power could change so much, it was dizzying to imagine how much easier life would be with better facilities.
A year into her marriage, the day of the exams arrived. Jannat got on the back of Ghulam’s motorbike and they drove to Kathore. Each bend in the road was at once familiar and alien, like scenes from a past life. Instead of Dada, she clung to her husband’s back. She was full of a low rumbling anxiety that reminded her of her very first day at the school. Although she had ramped up her efforts in the weeks before, she knew that she had not been able to study effectively for the exams. When the results were ready a few months later, Ghulam drove her back along the same track to pick up the envelope. She had passed, with a D. ‘My wife is the first girl in Lal Baksh to finish her intermediate study!’ Ghulam whooped. When they went to her family house to tell Dada, his age-cracked face softened into a beaming smile. Jannat was happy to have graduated, she really was. It seemed churlish to mention to anyone that this was the first time in her life she had got a D in an exam instead of an A. Everyone in the village was celebrating her achievement. ‘We didn’t think a girl could finish school but she’s done it,’ people said. Ghulam began to talk about Jannat continuing her studies into the eleventh and twelfth grades. She nodded and smiled when he said this, but they both knew it wasn’t on the agenda for now. They were expecting their first child.
Jannat watched her body change. Her belly swelled out of all recognition and she found herself fatigued by the simplest tasks. The goats exhausted her, the laundry even more so. Many women never went for a single doctor’s appointment during their pregnancy, but Jannat was relieved that Ghulam did not want to take any risks. He took her on the back of his motorbike for regular check-ups with the doctor in Kathore. As Jannat waited anxiously for her baby to come, she began to question her life in Lal Baksh. Why didn’t they have a doctor here? Why was it so far to get to the nearest hospital, so far in fact that her own father had dropped dead before getting the treatment he needed? What if she had a baby girl who wanted to study as much as she had? Jannat loved the land, just as the elders had always told her to, but she found herself wondering quietly if it was enough. They were free here, but they needed other things too: schools, hospitals, roads.
The baby came abruptly. There was no time to call a doctor. Jannat’s mother and some other women from the village rushed over and they delivered the little girl – fair-skinned like Jannat and her mother – at home. She was named Aziza.
5
ZILLE
When I met Zille in 2015, he had been working as a crime reporter for over a decade and dissembling had become second nature. The job required it: he had to maintain good relationships with the police, with gangsters, with his own TV channel. His was dangerous work that involved angering powerful people. When he was reporting on screen, the truth was ostensibly the point. But Zille had also learned to self-censor, to hedge around the subject, to avoid mentioning a specific party name. And off screen, where risks lurked at every corner, he took this further: holding back, contradicting himself, leaving some mystery about his family, his past or even his whereabouts. Perhaps it was a rational response to a high-risk job.
We met after nightfall, on a pleasant Karachi evening in springtime. I had just arrived from London to research a story on the city’s crime reporters and was groggy from the flight. Knowing that shadowing a crime reporter might be dangerous, I had opted not to stay with relatives, who would have concerns about my safety. Zille met me at my guest house, an unassuming building on a run-down side street off a main road in the affluent district of Clifton. The guest house was unmarked and from the outside looked like another rich person’s house, protected by a low metal gate and a sleepy-looking guard. Men sat outside on stools, chatting and spitting out rust-coloured paan that resembled blood splatters on the unpaved street. After we had exchanged greetings, Zille darkly told me that I should move hotel. ‘This place is full of criminals,’ he said, and didn’t elaborate further. I didn’t sleep well that night.
Zille is a small man, very thin, with hooded eyes and a sharp gaze, constantly reaching for one of his two phones, lighting a cigarette, surveying his surroundings, or leaning sideways as if to avoid being seen. Over the next few days as I researched my story, I saw him only in the dark, on late-night drives to meet police contacts, snatching meals at anonymous roadside stalls. I asked his age three times and received three different answers. He told me thirty-two, thirty-three and thirty-eight, but when he gave me his birth year, it would have made him forty-one.
On other points, he was more consistent. Zille said that he had become a crime reporter by accident. It was the early 2000s and he was drifting. He had studied engineering at Karachi University, a subject chosen on his father’s advice; his parents insisted that it would provide solid career prospects. He had four sisters but no brothers, so, as the only son, there was extra pressure on him to do well and get a respectable job. But he was an unfocused student with no interest in engineering. In lectures, the words swam over him, and the diagrams and numbers made him dizzy. He was more interested in going to parties and playing cricket than studying. He loved everything about cricket. When he was a child, whenever the violence wasn’t too bad, he and the other boys from his street would gather after school to play impromptu games outside their houses. As a university student, he had access to proper playing fields and carried this childhood passion into a new phase. More than anything, he liked to win. He loved watching the sport too. When others – such as Safdar, the Edhi ambulance driver – were glued to the surreal TV footage of army tanks rolling into Karachi in 1992, Zille was much more interested in the Pakistan cricket team’s glorious World Cup victory that year. Seeing these men who looked just like him travelling the world and emerging victorious opened a window into a different life. He dreamed of travelling outside Karachi, beyond Pakistan, to see everything the world had to offer. He scraped through his degree with a low pass.
Zille had even less interest in becoming an engineer than he’d had in studying engineering. The problem was that he didn’t know what else to do. He wanted excitement, to be admired, to do something great. But that wasn’t exactly a career plan he could pitch to his father. Zille had a vague idea that he could set up a small business instead. This was a respectable line of work for a middle-class boy and his parents were keen. He took steps towards this goal, even opening a hairdressing salon with a friend, but it floundered and he realized that he wasn’t that interested in managing a business either. Around the same time, one of his friends told him that he should think about working in TV. It was 2003 and television was booming. A couple of years earlier, Musharraf had loosened the censorship laws and private media companies were opening up all over the place.
Like everyone else in the country, Zille had grown up watching PTV, the national state broadcaster and one of the few TV channels, with its staid studio discussions that closely toed the government line. Now, suddenly, there were scores of private media groups producing independent news, drama and political shows. It seemed that a new channel was starting up every week. Money was flying around and commissioners were experimenting with different formats in a dizzying whirl of opportunity. Zille’s friend worked for one of these start-up channels and promised to get him an interview.
Even though, like all the rest, it was a new channel, Geo had a degree of prestige as it was owned by the Jang Group, a media conglomerate that published some of the country’s most popular newspapers. This didn’t mean much to Zille because he rarely read the papers, but even so it was impossible to grow up in Karachi and be unaware of politics. He was from Landhi, the same district as Safdar, but while Safdar resided in a poor, predominantly Pashtun neighbourhood, Zille’s area was mostly populated by Urdu-speaking Mohajirs, who were educated if not affluent. Landhi was overpopulated and sharply divided. Throughout the 1990s and beyond, it was the centre of the Mohajir–Pashtun conflict, with all the political activity and violence that brought. In Zille’s area, either you were with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement or you were apolitical; there were no other options. The MQM easily won every election in his part of Landhi and their distinctive green and red logo was everywhere – on lampposts, bollards and people’s exterior gates. The consensus was that, for all its flaws, this was the only party looking out for Mohajir interests, and the only hope of ending the unjust quota system that kept well-educated people like them out of secure and lucrative government jobs. But at the end of the block was a Pashtun enclave. Sometimes this meant nothing more than noticing a different complexion or accent when you went to the shops there, but when Mohajir–Pashtun violence flared up, Zille and his family avoided even driving through the area. Occasionally you might hear that one of the Pashtun shopkeepers had been shot dead in a targeted killing. But for the most part, the violence remained in the background.
His first job with Geo was in the entertainment division. The office was situated in the heart of Karachi’s business district, on Chundrigar Road, close to the stock exchange and the headquarters of various banks. They towered over the hectic thoroughfare, glass and concrete slicing into the pollution-clouded sky. The Geo office was set back from Chundrigar Road by a series of roadblocks, the entrance obstructed by armed security guards and metal detectors. The interior was decked out in the channel’s signature colours of orange and blue, giving an impression of newness and excitement that was only slightly offset by the battered, wood-panelled lift. Zille worked as a producer across drama and factual entertainment, and from the outset, he loved not only the work but the whole world of TV. For someone who had always enjoyed parties, it was a dream. He was constantly invited to events, and got a rush when he gave people his card bearing the words ‘Producer – Geo TV’ and saw how impressed they were. He met interesting and creative people, both men and women, although he had grown up in a culturally conservative environment where the genders were often segregated. He had lunch appointments most days and the disposable cash to spend on nice meals out. The work was stimulating too. One month he might be working on a drama series, another on a cultural discussion show. That was how he ended up on National Investigation Cell, a new programme that reconstructed lurid crimes using actors.
