Wanderlust (15 page)

And so I visited a polyester factory, where the owner gave me a tour and let me watch the machines that melted plastic pellets into strings of thread. He wanted lower tariffs on his exports. I visited a judge in her chambers, who seemed exhausted and distracted, waving flies away as she discussed her family court caseload. I had my driver stop on a bridge in the middle of Karachi, so that I could get out and confirm to myself what I thought I had seen. Along the banks of a riverbed in the middle of the city, there had sprung up a
kachi abadi,
one of Karachi's slums. Ramshackle huts made of tin, wood, and flapping sheets of bright plastic lined the two banks, and the residents went about their lives, cooking over smoky tin stoves, playing on garbage heaps, and selling betel nut and Coca-Cola to one another. The water that ran between them had shrunk to a mere stream, within and around which rivulets had formed, and it was these that had caught my attention. Winding between sandy islets and trash were streams of fluorescent purple and glowing turquoise, making their lazy way to sea.

Kamran's friend Obaid belonged to a new boating club on the Malir river, and had a car to get us there. He was proud of his car stereo and always sped. The first time I met him he told me to call him Obi, “like Obi-Wan Kenobi!” The two of them invited me to go water-skiing. I knew, from my research, that a tannery upriver dumped its effluent
into the wide brown expanse, but I could now see that that was beside the point, just as it made perfect sense, now, that environmental issues had been handed over to the intern. Things that could kill you slowly receded in importance compared to things that could kill you quickly.

I was attracted to Kamran for his sheer beauty, and because he was—more or less—native to this place. He was a cultural bridge, familiar to me through his striving to be American, yet able to show me parts of Karachi I wouldn't have found on my own. They were all places that he thought were attractively shiny and modern—the boating clubs, the sushi restaurant at the top of Avari Towers, the elaborate liquor-fueled parties in private homes. It was David and Nirit's friend Ahmed who took me to eat unbearably hot chicken tikka from a street stall; another Pakistani friend who took me to the Sufi shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, which was candy-striped and lit up like a carnival ride; and a Scot with whom I hitched a latenight ride in the cab of decorated cargo truck. Kamran didn't see these things as interesting. He had neither the native's pride of place nor the foreigner's appreciation for the exotic. Still I thought of him as a prize, a jewel to tuck among my things like a souvenir. He must have thought of me as a trophy too, with my undisguisably foreign appearance. Looks, I discovered when I kissed him, didn't translate into the kind of physical spark I wanted, the kind I had with Graham, the kind I felt the first night I met Stu. Maybe he discovered the same thing, but that didn't stop us from going around together.

I began to feel duplicitous. My contacts thought they were getting the U.S. government; I had no way to convince them that while I worked inside that building with the guards and barricades and trudging, patient lines, I was utterly without influence.

I felt this particularly with Mr. Masih. He wanted to show me the plight of Christians in Sindh Province. Pakistan is mostly Sunni Muslim, with Shiites, Hindus, and Zoroastrians the biggest religious minorities. The Sunnis are in turn riven along tribal and political lines. Lost in this demographic patchwork are a tiny minority of Christians. Most of their forebears had been low-caste Hindus, and their conversions hadn't saved them from entrenched poverty.

On our first outing Mr. Masih took me to a slum of narrow concrete alleyways lined with dingy square homes, where the stifling heat settled into a stillness disturbed only by the flies. He introduced me to a mother and her four children; she sat listlessly and glassyeyed on the floor as if stunned. Mr. Masih propelled me into her cubbyhole and urged me to talk to her, so I shook her hand and asked the first rote words that came to mind.

“How are you?” She twitched her head and flicked a fan in front of her face. When we emerged from the mazelike slum and were driving back to the consulate general, Mr. Masih explained that this community, lacking title to their land, was about to be bulldozed by a developer. Could I stop it?

“I—I'll look into it,” I stammered, but then that seemed like a lie, so I said, “No, I don't think so.”

“You see the problems my people have,” he said.

“Yes.”

“There are many churches in America, I think.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you try to do something.”

“Yes.”

Hashish and marijuana flowed freely through Karachi nightlife, but the Pakistanis couldn't have cared less. They got much more excited about alcohol, which was illegal and had to be smuggled in. The American diplomats, on the other hand, talked nervously about the marijuana—not that they would partake, of course, but they had tried it once in college—while not giving a second thought to their own easy access to alcohol, which came through the commissary and foreigner-friendly hotels. David told me once that he couldn't possibly be seen at an Afridi party, as the Baluch family were known hash exporters; one of them, David said, had packed the sticky stuff into the shape of a chair and sent it off as furniture. While David erred on the side of caution, the teenage son of the deputy chief of mission, who lived next door to me, smoked pot in his bathroom and sent it to his friends in Washington via the APO U.S. Post Office in the consulate general.

One night we drove in a two-car caravan to Sandspit, the long, narrow peninsula that partially shelters Karachi from the Indian Ocean. As we drove west, we passed through a sprawling district of light industry and few lamps, turning from one dark street into another until I was sure that Ahmed must be lost. And then little lights flickered ahead on either side of the road. Maybe candles, I thought. As we got closer, each yellow pool illuminated crouching men, swaying like druids. None of them cast so much as a glance at our sturdy Pajero; it was as though we were invisible. The men stared at their flames, which leaped up from lighters and makeshift gas stoves. The flames heated small cones of aluminum made from old soda cans, and at the bottom of each cone, brown liquid bubbled on the heat. I watched a slackjawed man tilt his head back against the wall in the spectral light, his arm extended, a needle hanging off the crook of his elbow.

After the industrial zone the buildings petered out into wooden
huts, and everyone in the car started talking again. We arrived at the point where the spit met the mainland, and here it was possible to imagine the city as a onetime fishing village. Ahmed lowered his window and said, as he often did, that the world would be a better place if everyone would just turn off their air conditioners for a few hours a day. Fishermen came out of their huts and offered to sell us things: a cooked meal of crab or fish with rice, or a case of contraband beer. Ahmed stopped the car, and we loaded two cases of beer into the back of the Pajero. You had to buy when you had the opportunity.

The spit was a hundred yards wide, with a dirt road running most of its length. We drove out a mile or so and got out. Nirit and I took off our shoes, cracked open beers, and sat down on the sand. A full moon dappled the rolling surf. Ahmed scoured the beach for turtle tracks, finally settling on his stomach to keep an eye on the water's edge. And then we all saw what we had come to see: one of the great beasts herself, prehistoric and guileless, five feet wide under a hard, shiny shell. She lumbered up the beach to lay her eggs in the sand, programmed to reproduce against all odds. And now I felt unalloyed pleasure at the sand, the surf, the moonlight, and the turtle. Beauty is so uncomplicated to love.

Mr. Masih had another trip in mind for me. It was far outside the city, in rural Sindh, someplace the congen drivers didn't go. So Mr. Masih picked me up in his little beater of a sedan that had no air-conditioning or working seat belts. We headed north on the main road out of Karachi, dodging riotously decorated cargo trucks. Whenever two truck prows bore down on us at once, which happened often, Mr. Masih careened onto the shoulder and back again without losing speed.

He took me to a brick factory. Men and women squatted in square fields of mud and water, working in family groups. The women and older children shaped the bricks out of the mud, kneading, slapping, and patting them into rectangles, and then laying them out in rows to dry. Smaller children fetched water in buckets to keep the mud muddy, and kept an eye on the toddlers. The men collected the dried bricks, some in wheelbarrows and some using a carrying device that would have worked on a pack animal: a board slung across the shoulders with sacks hanging off either side. They took the bricks to the kiln, five hundred yards away and dominated by dun-colored chimney, where fires baked the clay into uniform hardness.

Mr. Masih took me to a dusty courtyard and introduced me to the manager, who offered me tea, and they explained how things worked. The families were technically paid by the brick, but at minuscule rates, and they were all working off debts that made them indentured laborers. In a typical case, a father had borrowed enough from the factory owner to pay for a daughter's dowry. Now the family worked off the debt brick by brick. “They will not pay it in his lifetime,” Mr. Masih. “Not even in his children's lifetime.”

They were, in effect, slaves.