The rain on your parade

the fields of laloo July 14, 2009

“kahan ja rahay ho, bhai?” he asked.

“aap mujhe bas nazimabad ki taraf direct ker dijiye“.

“come on, yaar. i’ll drop you” said the guy. i looked at the kalashnikov and considered my options.

wait. time out. i have discovered, over a lifetime of telling stories, that it is not very easy to decide the exact point at which you start an anecdote. spend too much time setting up atmosphere and you lose your audience before you get to the point. jump right into it and your audience loses you before you can call pir pagara a ”najoomi” – though why you would want to do that remains a point of contention. experience tells me, however, that it is best to start at the beginning.

for those of you who don’t know me – and i don’t see why you would read this blog if you did – i’m a karachiite, born and (half)bred. and while i was never your desi angraiz, my influences – for want of a better word – were more joan jett than nayyara noor. so the only way i knew i was passing through lalookhait was spotting the sign which has read “satter saala sinyaasi baba” since as far back as i can remember – and i can remember the days when they showed david hasselhoff’s hit tv series on national tv. admittedly, it was knight rider and not baywatch, but it was something. apart from that, the only time lalookhait would ever figure into conversation was when the fat kid in class, while consuming his third sandwich would burp and some smartass who was already done with his lunch (usually a handsome little kid called abbas) would ask, “yaar, tumhara pait hai ya lalookhait hai?“. that was more or less it. but for the advancing middle class, nouveau riche, bourgeoisie and old money types; lalookhaiti was then and continues to be an opprobrious epithet. this was confusing. a big city kid, i know its slightly demeaning to be referred to as a pastoral type and i would not willingly adopt laloo as a pseudonym, let alone a name, but why the combination of the two was such an insult was beyond the faculties of a ten year old kid.

i suppose that when his parents named the young boy ”lal bukhsh”, they had no idea that his name would overshadow that of one of the founding fathers of a country, a man who would be not only the first prime minister of that great state but also the its first victim of a political assasination. they couldn’t have. if they did they’d have named him something cooler. like abbas, for example. but be that as it may, “lalookhait” (laloo’s field) has survived three generations (i suppose thats how many you might expect in 62 years) and is still the en vogue name  for what is now known as liaquatabad town. but if you want documentaries go to the discovery channel. i don’t do that kind of thing. of course i can tell you that the place has 165 mosques but only 6 mandirs and 3 churches. that would mean that minorities have 5.14% representation in the places of worship department which is probably over the national average (and impressive, considering that there is a 99% muslim population). and that each mosque is expected to cater to 2,250 muslims (i’m assuming the women pray at home). but i’m not known for my fondness of statistics. no. this post is about what the word lalookhait means to those who by the machinations of fate have managed to occupy real estate beyond the bridge that connects the karachi of bund kababs and the karachi of burgers. for those living in the cocoon of elitedom there has always been something mysterious, perhaps even taboo, about lalookhait – something like the concept of a grown man’s boxers way above the waistband of his jeans is in a place like, say, federal “b” area (by the way, there is no federal “a” area. f.b. area is f.b. area only because its next to f.c. area – federal capital – which, in case you didn’t know, karachi was until ayub khan decided to bring it closer to home.). lalookhait is more than just a wierd place on the way to the dreamworld (or is it dreamland?) resort. its more than the “dangerous” place you have to go through if you are feeling all desi and want to try that karhai on the superhighway.it is not, for crying out loud, where altaf hussain lives. but even the well informed have got it wrong in the past. the glaring mistake in kamila shamsie’s (a grammarian i think) otherwise superb salt and saffron is the fact that her guy from lalookhait has the kashmiri surname, butt, but is presented as an urdu speaking mohajir*.

i haven’t researched lalookhait – i mean i have read the wikipedia page on the place, but that’s it – so i can’t tell you much about the wholesale gold market (saraafa bazaar) that lies smack in the middle of it. i can’t tell you about the workshops in there that make allegedly japanese electronics out of chinese parts. i can’t tell you about the best metalwork market in karachi. i can’t tell you about the now-almost-extinct qawwali scene that produced pakistan’s greatest exponent of the classical qawwali, the sabri duo. i can’t tell you how their batsmen were about the only ones in karachi who could compete with nazimabad’s “finger” bowlers in the ramzan cricket tournaments everyone seemed to take part in before 1999. in many ways, lalookhait and the nazimabads were to karachi what old dilli used to be delhi – the melting pot that defined the city’s culture and lifestyle beneath the pomp and imagery of the royal courts. for lalookhait is as multiethnic as it gets for an area in which people settle for no other reason than that they can. biharis, rajputs, u.p.-ites, people from andhra, bangalore, madras, calcutta, wherever they could migrate from – found their way into lal bukhsh’s lush green fields near the lyari river and built a base. the ride from refugee settlement to commercial hotspot was shorter than the dupattas of the mid nineties.

and yet it is the part of karachi we love to hate. the dirt swept under the carpet when visitors arrive. the bottom rung on the ladder. the elephant in the room which no one discusses. the place from where no one is really a nice guy and everyone is suspect. because its politically charged? because it has been a victim of ethnic violence? or is it beacuse english is not the lingua franca and their showbiz repertoire consists of omar sharif and moeen akhtar as opposed to vaneeza ahmed and jamal shah? it was the only calm place in the city the night benazir was assasinated. i should know. i dodged mobs and bullets on foot all the way from sharae faisal that night and somehow entered lalookhait en route to nazimabad. there were kids playing in the street. women shopping for groceries. men buying those 5 rupee seekhs available throughout karachi on pushcarts that i have always supected are dogmeat (the seekhs not the pushcarts). and then this guy comes up on a chinese harley imitation with a kalashnikov on his lap, sees i’m exhausted and terrified, and offers me the ride.

i took it. i’m alive.

i’m still not naming any of my kids laloo.

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*now this blunder may not seem so significant but you have to consider that liaquatabad is the only area in pakistan that i can remember where the mein tay honda hee lay saan campaign billboards read mein to honda hee loonga.