Cruelty and chaos in Karachi

Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the award-winning journalist Samira Shackle writes that the city’s penchant for extremity and eccentricity kept luring her back from London for almost a decade. During these visits, made between 2012 and 2019, she navigates the darkest corners of the metropolis’s maze and documents some of the lives that exist on the peripheries of society.

In a city where violence is constantly simmering beneath the surface and lines between law enforcement and crime are blurred, locals develop their own mechanisms for coping with trauma. For instance, Safdar, an ambulance driver who survived a suicide bombing at a religious procession and a gun battle at the airport, continues to go about his business despite the risks. When asked how he copes, he tells Shackle that he doesn’t think about it much, adding: ‘Memories are a prison.’

Yet memory serves an important function in this work of literary nonfiction, where Shackle vividly reconstructs the past experiences of her subjects by immersing herself in their daily lives, languages and customs, without exoticising the experience. She notices that Safdar’s speech takes on a respectful tone when he converses in Pashto, his native tongue, but exudes the cockiness of a Karachiite when he switches to colloquial Urdu.

Shackle describes Lyari, one of the oldest and most dangerous neighbourhoods of the city, as ‘a geographically contained trauma’. Parveen, one of its young denizens, is shocked to find that amid the garbage-lined alleys, the home of the gangster Uzair Baloch is, by contrast, palatial, with a swimming pool, waterfall and giant, ornate swing, all incorporated within the lobby, and where the echoes of screams can be heard from a nearby torture chamber. When Parveen’s mother learns of the scolding that she gave Uzair during the visit to his lair, she refuses to get out of bed for days.