i live in… khair choro

this is based on a post originally made by the author on the karachi metroblog two years ago to the day:

like all the other denizens of our concrete jungle i know, cannot claim to have seen the whole of karachi. this is both a tragedy and a comedy. it is also largely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. for this post is about the bits of karachi that i have seen. that and the funny names they have. its amazing some of these are actually officially recognized names. sometimes it makes you think how crazy the city planners must be to actually have come up with names like these ones. then again, they’re planning a city which was named after a dancing girl from a fishing village on the coast of sindh. that brings lurid and largely unmentionable images of a makrani gentleman’s club to mind with a plump sheedi girl in a grass skirt and a shocking pink teeshirt that reads baybee gurl dancing on a table to the tune of jiye bhutto benazir… but lets not dwell on that.

dear reader, if you exist, keep this post interactive because there is no way in hell i can cover all the locations with names thought up by a committee chaired by manto’s lunatic from toba tek singh which included the mad hatter and the march hare, among others. feel free to add
 any in khi-town which you can think of in the comments section – just stick to the unusual ones please.

1. geedar chowrangi: a place in landhi not far from bhains colony (buffalo colony) apparently so named for the hyenas or jackals or maybe just wild dogs that used to be seen around here when karachi had not sprawled as much as it had.

2. golimar: the unofficial name of gulbahar. golimar (which literally means “fire a bullet”) attained notoriety in the 90s as a hotbed of violence lending some reason to the name it is known by. it is much better known these days as home to one of the largest plumbing products market in the city.

3. nagan chowrangi: a major traffic junction in north karachi, this roundabout which would be called the female cobra roundabout in english, branches off in so many directions its impossible to count them from a moving vehicle. indeed, one story goes that it was actually named nau gun initially, meaning “nine ways”, which later got distorted into nagan. in karachi, everything’s possible.

4. do minute chowrangi: as wierd names go, the two minute roundabout probably has the wierdest of them all. and i haven’t even been able to find a single story for why its named what it is. to further compound the wierdness, to get here you have to cross unda mor (egg turn) and karaila mor (bitter gourd turn).

5. perfume chowk: this is not such a wierd name as it is an interesting story. the perfume chowk person who basically owns or owned an eastern perfume pushcart which was permanently parked at a spot in gulistan-e-jauhar, marketed his business with a can of spray paint and the confidence that graffiti was his right as a citizen of karachi. you can find the words perfume chowk spray painted on walls and shop shutters from gulshan-e-hadeed to surjani town to clifton. the spot has become so famous that bus conductors call out “perfume chowk” to commuters to signal the arrival of the bus stop.

6. chaakiwara: they tell me the name is not actually that wierd. if you’re balochi. or maybe martian.

7. khamosh colony: khamosh (or silent) colony is actually a place in karachi. at least i’ve heard of it often enough to think that it is. now why anyone would to name a place something that sounds so creepy and graveyardy is beyond me – unless – it is actually so named because it is or was near a graveyard. which is a silent place. and this is something truly possible.

8. “san day”: i’ll level with you. this is not really a name of a place. but its what every bus conductor in karachi calls out when his bus passes a place he wants to call “seven day”. which still doesn’t make sense. if, that is, you don’t know that he is referring to the seventh day adventist church behind empress market.

9. “naitee jaitee”: again, this is a mispronunciation. one used by almost every karachiite when referring to the place. the place in question being the native jetty, reknowned as the most enduringly popular spot for comitting suicide in the city of lights (or light bulbs. kesc ensures they’re never lit).

10. chacha chachi park: (uncle aunt park) this is a tiny green patch in district central hardly large enough to park a small skateboard. the funny thing for me is not that it is for some obscure reason named as a tribute to an even more obscure pair of paternal relatives but that it has the grand idea that it is in fact a park – even though there is only enough grass on it to cater to a gandhi-esque goat on an afternoon when he is not in a particularly hungry mood.

this list could go on for ages. but i’d like to hear your contributions. so give us a name and a story to go with it if possible.

(note: i may have gotten some of the geography and most of the history wrong here. being what it is, there is no way some of this can be verified. most of it comes from stories of people who live nearby. but sometimes that adds spice to the local flavour. so don’t kill me if you know something i don’t.)