Visiting Pakistan for the first time in three years, Taimur Khan finds its largest city’s resilience drowned out by gunshots, fear and uncertainty. From the National:
Fifteen years ago, late on a cool winter night in Karachi, the acrid air was thick and still from the smoke of countless rubbish-fed fires, burning in the city’s bleary slums and makeshift encampments, keeping people warm through the chilled hours before dawn. A car carrying four men turned off of an empty road and parked in front of my uncle’s house in a subdivision of an affluent suburb, within sight of the Arabian Sea. The men emerged from their vehicle carrying Kalashnikovs, and, without knocking, were led through the front gate by my family’s cook, who lived in a small servant’s quarter at the rear of the house next to the kennel of two guard dogs.
The men entered through a side door into the kitchen, went directly to the bedrooms where my three young female cousins slept, woke them, ordered them not to make a sound, and took them at gunpoint into their parents’ room until they all stood a few feet from the king-size bed. My uncle, startled out of his sleep, lunged for the pistol he kept stowed in the bedside table. Fortunately, he was knocked unconscious by the butt of an intruder’s gun before he could reach his own. After plundering the house, the thieves (and the cook) took off, laden with more cash and jewellery than they had presumably hoped for. Like many upper middle class Pakistani families, they kept large amounts of their wealth at home, fearing that in an emergency their savings might disappear from local banks.
