Controlled mayhem in a strange land

Published February 16, 2010

Syaf Omar and Liyana Low are Mass Communication students from Singapore working in Pakistan for a short time period. The following is their take on Karachi’s rickshaws, bomb blasts and never-ending protests.

Sitting here in the corner of a café, sipping my frothy latte, it feels surreal how slightly more than a week ago, two sectarian blasts had rocked this city.

Karachi had been destabilised once again. The peace that had followed only 40 days since the last Ashura bombing had proved to be merely ephemeral. A rude awakening arrived again, this time in the form of bombs planted on motorcycles.

Coming from peaceful Singapore where nothing ever happens (I should be thankful, shouldn't I?), this scene is totally new and perversely refreshing to me.

When the news broke, people in the newsroom rose to their feet. Phone calls to family were made, quickly followed by the task at hand. Controlled mayhem (a paradox by itself I must admit) is a phrase I would use to describe it.

The first blast had happened not too far away from the office and even nearer to where some of us were living. And then, less than two hours later, another blast was reported. By now, I was trying hard to conceal panic or fear. Too late, a colleague had spotted it.

“Wrong time to be in Pakistan yeah.”

“You guys should go home before it gets worse.”

Soon, we (me and another fellow Singaporean on internship here) made our way back home, wondering if there will be rickshaws -our mode of transport here - on the streets.

As we were walking out of the gate, the company driver offered to send us back home.

“Koi baat nehin, it’s okay, we’ll just find a rickshaw.”

He then pointed out to the street and we saw that it was empty. He then explained with animated gestures that two blasts had happened, his hand pointing beyond, as if to tell us where exactly they had occurred.

“Ji haan”, we nodded. Not sure how to say “we know” in Urdu so we let him continue.

The streets were deserted except for a few military vehicles. Roads had also been cordoned off. An ambulance drove past, its siren continues to ring eerily in our heads.

Back home after updating the situation to our family, I sat on the edge of the bed, staring into space.

It disturbed me how I felt strangely calm. In a country where blasts happen almost every other day, surely I must get used to this, I told myself.

I then lay down on the bed staring into the darkness. It was 3 a.m. and ambulances sirens could be heard, arousing an unsettling feeling in me.

Soon fatigue befell upon me and before long, I slipped out of consciousness, the sound of sirens slowly dimming away. ***

The next day, cries of outrage had ensued in the aftermath, as people marched down the streets, beating their hands against their chests. One after another, the caskets of the dead — labeled ‘martyrs’ by the media — were hoisted up on the shoulders of men.

I had watched this scene on the television screen, my eyes having been glued to it ever since I woke up from sleep. Suddenly, the Shia leader who was leading the prayers fainted, overwhelmed with grief.

Tired from the grim images I kept getting bombarded with, I got ready to leave, almost relieved that I had dinner plans with a friend to save me from the depressing state of mind that I was about to fall into.

Before leaving the house, I walked towards the room opposite mine where a Quranic recitation session for victims of the blasts was about to take place. The old lady who lives in the building had earlier in the morning come knocking on my door to invite me.

“Inshallah,” I had replied in my semi-groggy state.

I glanced into the room and saw that chairs had been lined against the walls, while a set of Quranic texts sat on the table in the middle of the room. It was only the old lady and another woman, quietly reciting verses from the Holy book.

I explained to her regrettably that I had already made dinner engagements. She nodded in understanding. Still I could trace a note of disappointment as she wished me farewell.

“Khuda hafiz,” she called out after me, blessing my journey.

I stepped out onto the streets, being greeted by the cloudy sky, almost as if mirroring the mood. A heavy sense of disorientation hung low in the air. Most shops were closed down, in adherence to the three days of mourning that had been declared by officials.

Still, people were out, determined to prove to the extremists (and perhaps to themselves) that their lives must carry on as per normal and the ghost town that I was half-expecting was non-existent.

Back from Friday prayers, men stood huddled together in groups along the pavement. I was almost sure that the blasts were occupying their midday chatter.

I made my way slowly to the café, the rhythm of my walk punctured by a perpetual habit of looking around for “suspicious behavior”. I couldn’t even look at the public buses without feeling fear as images of the blasts were brought back to my head.

But seeing the calm dispositions reflected by people along the streets, I soon adopted it as well. *** Now, almost a week later, calm had again been restored. But, for how long?

Last Tuesday, people took to the streets near Sheraton Hotel in protest of the blasts.

Traffic was almost at a standstill. What was usually a 10-minute rickshaw ride from home to work turned into a two-hour nightmare.

How does staging protests in any way, alleviate the situation, I thought to myself? Besides bringing a huge amount of inconvenience to people, don’t they also provide the best scenario for extremists to attack again?

I have since realised that I cannot afford to be so liberal with my use of the word “peaceful” for it had taken a totally different meaning ever since I got here. Peace is temporal and fragile — that, I’ve come to understand.

Pakistan’s engagement in a never-ending battle with militants up north has spilled over into the cities, killing many and crippling the already-weak economy.

For however long, its citizens have been grappling to make sense of the things happening around them, but having failed to do so, they have resigned themselves to the situation.

Now, it has finally dawned upon me how dangerous being in this country can be. I am even starting to internalize paranoia so well like the people here.

I wonder if my six-month stint here in Pakistan will leave me terrorised.

Or even worse, desensitised.

Written by Syaf Omar

His name is Latif and he has a family of seven to support. He lives in Karachi’s North Nazimabad area. His eldest child is just twelve, and yet he looks like he could be someone’s grandfather. He smokes while waiting for rickshaw customers – his green spacious rickshaw is powered by CNG.

What struck me about Latif was his good heart.

You must understand why I am amazed by this man. I am a Singaporean Chinese, so when I walk along Karachi’s streets, I get “ching chong-ed.” Pakistani men never fail to go “ching chong ching chong” when they see me walk past, as if I am the catalyst that brings about their “ching chong” reflex.

So I’m into my second month in Karachi, and my impression of Pakistanis (actually, just the random men) – not so good. Then I met Latif, the nice rickshaw walla, who showed me that I was too quick to judge, and opened my eyes to the goodness in Karachi.

One evening, my friend and I hailed Latif’s rickshaw to get to work. And who would have thought that our usual 10-minute journey to work would stretch to two hours in Latif’s rickshaw? There were protesters along Dr Ziauddin Ahmed road, blocking our typical route which caused our driver to make a wide detour.

We ended up getting stuck in a bad traffic jam, like everyone else who had decided to take the detour. So in those two hours we spoke to Latif where he communicated using his limited English (somewhere he muttered “typical situation” in reference to the atrocious traffic jam) and we used our Urdu vocabulary which contained a grand total of ten words. It was like a chicken talking to a duck. A cluck and a quack, a cluck and a quack.

But in those two hours, something that Latif had said stayed with me. When we wanted to get off the rickshaw and walk to work to save time, he had said, “No, you foreigner in Pakistan, my responsibility. Walk, dangerous.”

I was touched, surprised and overwhelmed, that I had the good fortune to meet this man who was a white sheep in a sea of black.

And to top it all off, because we were stuck in the jam for so long, Latif’s fuel tank had begun to run low. He had then parked his rickshaw at the corner of a street and insisted that he walk with us to work.

And in between the gesturing, the awkward smiles and laughter, he invited us over to his house for a small celebration for his eldest 12-year-old daughter who had finished reading the Quran.

“I bring you there, and go home. No pay, my party,” he had insisted.

In the end, we agreed to go to the party (with a little apprehension). We paid him a little more than the original price that we had settled for, thanked him profusely and asked him to pick us up again for work the next day at the same time using whatever little Urdu we could conjure up, with a little compulsory referencing to our Urdu guidebook of course.

I realized that when you’ve had so many bad experiences in a foreign land, and suddenly, a random stranger does something out of the goodness of his heart for  you, you’d feel all the more thankful, and most importantly, your badly bruised faith in humanity, gets restored.

Written by Liyana Low

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

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