Where have all the Great Men gone?

The Karachi, my parents recall, is much different from the one I’ve seen. Lasbela district is now a crumbling shell of its former self and the only similarity left to justify calling Karachi the ‘Paris of the East’ would be the ever-present smell of piss. Frere Hall, while undoubtedly an iconic Karachi landmark, impresses me no more than Oak Park’s local church. Commerce and heavy industry are what keep the thankless millions of Karachi afloat and keep life in the city polluted, cutthroat, and uninhabitable for the gutless.

My parents love the city out of necessity and nostalgia, for somewhere to anchor their hearts (being migrants), and for somewhere to anchor the memories of who they grew up with. At times falling on deaf ears, at times absentmindedly recorded, they regale me with stories of their uncles and cousins and friends and acquaintances, all characters with personalities larger than life. My mother, an excellent narrator, would make the walls lean in to listen, and I’d be arrested with every pause and there would be heat in the room as if from alchemy, and she would end it with a smooth quip, and all that energy would collect for a minute and dissipate, totally lost into the ether. My father would speak about them with a reverence that would instill in me the obedience of a good son for once, and it would always be in short snippets, seemingly cut off by the life he had to lead, but he would’ve stayed in Karachi if he could.

Tying all these vignettes together, there is an ache for those lost. In my short stints of living in Karachi for a month or two every year, I try to fill in the blanks of these characters. They’d left behind so much of themselves in every inch of the city. They left it all in bygone institutions, in the ways of life of people rapidly being left behind, in metaphors where certain words in their phrase have had their meanings forgotten, like the barren railyards on Chicago’s south side that now resemble scars, massive arteries torn out from the beating heart of the city. Every year the waves climb higher, washing away more and more of the city my parents lived in. I am left kneeling on the beach, shoving sand into my pockets.