Excerpted from Instant City by Steve Inskeep.

Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin

Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Steve Inskeep, 2011.

1 | PROMENADE

A short walk from the old city hall, beside the faded crosswalk and the memorial
stone, a banyan tree spreads its branches over a patch of dirt. The dirt fills a triangle
where two streets intersect. Somebody must have planned a park there long ago, judging
by the battered iron fence, but street hawkers occupy the space today. They sell shoes,
spread on wooden carts or hung from a rack like prize fish. Sometimes a man sits with his
back to the fence, mending a castaway shoe he’s plucked from a pile on the ground.
The vendors work at one of the city’s more colorful corners. Shops on all sides sell
curtains, clothes, and ceiling fans. A restaurant facing the banyan tree serves biryani, a
spiced rice dish commonly cooked with meat such chicken or beef, stirred in a pot by the
entrance. The owners call their restaurant the Delhi Darbar, in honor of their ancestors
from nearby India. When I have eaten there the manager has waved me toward a table at
the back, near the wall fan; but I have preferred the table at the front, where I can see
outside past the cooking pots, looking back toward one of the onion domes atop the old
city hall.
Anyone who looks closely at city hall will notice that city hall is looking back. A
security camera hangs on the corner of the building.
It was aimed down here toward the banyan tree on December 28, 2009.
On that day an annual procession was scheduled to move through Karachi. It was a
religious march, affirming an historic faith: Muslims from the Shia sect were mourning
the killing of the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson more than thirteen hundred years ago.
But the procession also reflected the present. It put the whole community on display,
much like parades in America. Although Shias are a minority in Pakistan, the shops along
the route were closed that day, a national holiday known as Ashura. People climbed on
their rooftops to watch, and some of the city’s majority Sunni Muslims always held their
own march following the Shias. Pakistan Boy Scouts led the way— local youths who
were part of the same worldwide movement as the Boy Scouts of America. Politicians
and celebrities showed up, while police and paramilitary forces provided security.
The procession route led past the banyan tree, where on that morning the shoe
vendors were temporarily replaced by Boy Scouts running a first- aid station.An
ambulance was parked a few feet away.

The procession could almost have been designed to offer a tour of the changing city.
The marchers planned to begin near the great white dome of the tomb of Pakistan’s
founder, who grew up in Karachi. They would pass near Empress Market, its stone tower
built to honor the nineteenth- century empress of India, also known as Britain’s Queen
Victoria; today the market is notable for rows of caged birds for sale in the back, as well
as the acrid smell of hashish that men smoke in dim corners. Surrounding streets form the
heart of an area called Saddar, once a great cultural district including nightclubs and bars,
now shabby but dotted with billboards featuring Bollywood movie stars. Farther along,
past the banyan tree, rose the redbrick minarets of a mosque called the Memon Masjid,
and the spire of a Hindu temple. The route ended in one of the oldest sections of Karachi,
several blocks from the waterfront where ships regularly glide into the harbor and the
city’s elites enter children in rowing competitions at the Karachi Boat Club.
Each of these landmarks hints at the city’s past and present. The harbor and the old
signs of empire remind us how this city has been shaped by different forms of
globalization. Other landmarks might puzzle a newcomer. What caused all those old bars
and nightclubs to close? And why, in a city that’s overwhelmingly Muslim, would a
Hindu temple occupy such a prominent place near the old city hall? The answers to these
questions are revealing, as we will see, and also relevant to the fate of the Shia
procession.
The Boat Club is the most revealing landmark of all. Club members meet for dinner
on a terrace by the water, men in suits and ties, women draped in brilliantly colored cloth.
Everything about their surroundings— tables overlooking a placid channel off the harbor,
a perfectly tended garden, uniformed waiters delivering deliciously cooked fish— serves
as a reminder of Karachi’s wealth. Those who imagine masses of poor people in a
metropolis like Karachi have an image that is accurate, but incomplete: the laboring poor
can make a fortune, even if they make it for somebody else. The marchers on December
28 were walking through the economic heart of one of the world’s most populous
nations, home to textile mills and a vast steel mill. The last part of the procession route
ran parallel to the financial district, within sight of office towers and the red neon sign of
the Karachi Stock Exchange. Nearby are the offices of several media empires, with
newspapers and television channels serving the entire country, in English, Urdu, and
several regional tongues. Karachi’s seaport is a gateway to Central Asia, one of the few
harbors within range of Afghanistan and other fabled lands over the mountains to the
north. At the waterfront piers, truckers load supplies for shipment to American forces
fighting in Afghanistan. Other shipments move contraband: drugs, weapons, fugitives.
And for almost any business transaction there may be a local port official, policeman, or
politician who quietly extracts a share of the profits in exchange for his invaluable
cooperation. Measured by their income, education, and health, Karachi residents are
living better than people almost anywhere else in Pakistan.
Of course, prosperity is not spread evenly. In poorer neighborhoods, some within a
few blocks of the procession route, textile workers commonly bring home the equivalent
of a few dollars per day. Many people have no jobs at all. And millions live with the
consequences as well as the benefits of Karachi’s economic activity. Pedestrians dodge
streams of reddish liquid in the streets, said to be pollution from tanneries. The crowded
neighborhood called Machar Colonyis bisected by an open sewer the size of a river, its
surface clogged with so many plastic bags and other debris that it almost seems possible
to walk across the water. The sewage flows untreated into the same coastal waters where
Karachi fishermen cast their nets.
“We’re not a poor country,” a Pakistani businessman once told me over dinner at the
Boat Club. “We’re a poorly managed country.” To find evidence of this we need go no
farther than the nearest electric light. Karachi, like all of Pakistan, has so badly outgrown
its electricity supply that the power must be cut off for hours every day; this suggests the
struggle for basic resources that threatens the future of many an instant city. To spend
time in Karachi is to know the change in a room when its ceiling fan slows down and
stops— and you feel it instantly, because the local weather combines the withering heat
of the desert with the humidity of a swamp. Then again, the daily blackouts also
demonstrate people’s adaptability. They ignore the heat, or cover their windows to keep
out the sun, or just wait. And Karachi rewards their patience. The temperature drops
when the sun sinks low, and a cool ocean breeze blows on soaked shirts. By evening boys
are playing cricket in the street, bouncing the ball off the asphalt in total disregard of
traffic, while lovers discreetly encounter each other in the lengthening shadows of the
park surrounding the tomb of Pakistan’s founder. City life expands as the mercury
contracts: ten o’clock, or even midnight, is not too late for friends who can afford it to
meet for dinner at a rooftop barbecue restaurant.
If only it were so easy to find relief from the violence that stalks the city. Much of the
world knows Karachi as the scene of the videotaped murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl
in 2002, but Karachi residents are intimately familiar with many other killings— 1,747,
by one count, in the year 2009. Karachi is hardly the deadliest city in the world, but it’s
notable for spasms of political killings that can shut down parts of the city for days.
Gunmen on motorcycles commonly weave through traffic, shoot a man in the head, and
roar away. Armies of security guards watch over the wealthy and powerful, but when
people move about the city they have reason to wonder if they will return home alive.
Everything that makes this instant city vibrant can also make it violent. Its swift and
disorderly growth creates room for corruption and organized crime. Ethnic groups
migrate here from different places, speak different languages, and coalesce into rival
political parties that battle over money, power, and real estate. It’s notable that most of
Karachi’s violence is not blamed on Islamist extremist groups. But extremists have
established a presence in Karachi, attracted by many of the same factors that make the
city rich. Karachi’s commercial connections with northern Pakistan and Afghanistan also
link the city to the region’s wars. Migrants move south from the war zones seeking work,
making it easy for militants to blend in with them. Taliban fighters are believed to visit
Karachi when they need places to hide. In the years before al Qaeda founder Osama bin
Laden was found and killed in northern Pakistan in 2011, several of his associates were
based in Karachi or arrested there; al Qaeda used the city as a receiving station for
militant recruits and a base for attacks outside Pakistan. This should be no surprise; the
international airport and financial system offer links to the outside world, while some
universities and religious schools have become centers of Islamist political thought. If
militants merely hid out in mountain caves, they would only be a local threat, but like so
many people they have seized the global opportunities of the instant city.
Karachi residents used to speak of their city as a back office for militants, who
unfortunately made use of the metropolis but fortunately did not attack it. To believe this
comforting thought, however, people had to overlook a variety of extremist attacks within
Karachi itself. On December 26, 2009, an explosion injured people at a Shia religious
procession. The next day an explosion struck another procession. They were small
explosions, killing no one; but the city was on alert as marchers formed the procession on
December 28.

The ambulance parked by the banyan tree had a word in red on the side, in English
and Urdu: “Edhi.”
Identical ambulances were parked some distance down the street, in front of a shabby
suite of offices. Telephone and electrical wires spread like vines over the office walls;
men studied newspapers and waited by the phone in case anyone should dial an
emergency number. This was a station of the Edhi ambulance service, which for more
than half a century has served the sick and the poor.
Faisal Edhi, son of the old man who founded the service, sometimes settled behind a
desk in these rooms; but Faisal would have little use for a desk on the day of the Shia
procession. He would be out riding ambulances, as he commonly did, coordinating the
response should anyone need medical attention.
Faisal, a thin man in his late thirties, was easily recognizable with his black-framed
glasses and close-cropped beard. He had a trait that I found often in Karachi: he laughed
when talking about disasters. He needed this trait, because when he heard reports of
gunfire, his job was to take the wheel of an ambulance and drive toward it. Faisal hadn’t
always lived this life. In his late teens he moved from Karachi to New York City. He
slept in other people’s apartments and got a job. He stood in traffic in Brooklyn, hawking
the newspaper Newsday.
By moving to New York, Faisal put some distance between himself and his
dominating father; but in one of our conversations he told me he always knew that duty
would call him back to the family business. His father, Abdul Sattar Edhi, was renowned
in Pakistan and abroad. The Edhi ambulance fleet provided cheap service— and it had to
be cheap, since very few people had health insurance in Pakistan. An Edhi ambulance
was a simple white van with one driver, two gurneys, and not much medical equipment;
its virtue was not its level of sophistication, but that it showed up. Edhi drivers were poor
men who were given a little training, paid a modest wage, and sent out to respond to
almost anything that went wrong in Karachi. More than Karachi— the service had spread
outside the city to other parts of Pakistan.
In his eighties, the elder Edhi still ran the service. Wearing black clothes, a white
beard, and a wry expression, he suffered from many ailments but still looked spry when
climbing a flight of stairs. And the ambulances were only the most visible part of his
dominion. The family ran two blood banks and a home for poor children and runaways.
Edhi offices were equipped with cradles, where unwed mothers could give up their babies
for adoption. Edhi operated a graveyard in a distant sector of the city; it was said that he
had personally washed thousands of bodies in preparation for burial. And sometimes he
still climbed into an ambulance to catch a ride to a crime scene.
The old man was one of the migrants who turned Karachi into an instant city. He’d
arrived with his parents in 1947 and went to work as a street peddler. He was part of a
mass move to Karachi, which more than doubled the population within a few years. The
growth never stopped. And so Abdul Sattar Edhi had witnessed the creation of one of the
larger cities in human history. It happened within the span of his life. He also had a front-
row seat, or more precisely the front seat of an ambulance, to witness the violence that
had grown along with the city. Karachi had suffered spasms of political killing and
warfare for the past twenty- five years, and was known for rebelliousness and riots long
before that.
Edhi thrived in this environment— he once described himself as being “obsessed with
self- imposed discomfort”—and built a service meant to alleviate his city’s sorrows. Now
that he was older he leaned on his wife, his daughter, and his son to continue his
enterprises. His son Faisal would be filling a critical role for the ambulance service on
busy days like December 28. Thousands of people gathered that day at the start of the
procession route, intending to promenade for miles through the dilapidated grandeur of
the old downtown. They were marching in the direction of the banyan tree.
It grew in an area called the Lighthouse Bazaar.