The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

If Pakistani cities were caricatures, most would be easy to draw. Lahore is corpulent and languid, stretched out in a shalwar kameez, twirling its moustache over a greasy breakfast. Islamabad cuts a more clipped figure, holding court in a gilded drawing room, proffering Scotch and political whispers. Peshawar wears a turban or a burka, scuttling among the stalls of an ancient bazaar. But Karachi is harder to sketch. It has too many faces: the shiny-shod businessman, rushing to the gym; the hardscrabble labourer who sends his wages to a distant village; the slinky young socialite, kicking off her heels as she bends over a line of cocaine. You can feel the difference as soon as you step off the plane. A breeze slings in off the Arabian Sea, tangy with a lick of salt. There is a palpable zing, a sense of scale and motion. People dress differently, jeans rather than shalwar kameez. The buildings are unlovely glass and concrete, no Mughal splendour here. Unruly buses lumber through seething streets filled with opportunity and peril. A newcomer to Karachi might make a million, or have his wallet stolen at gunpoint in traffic. ‘Lahore may be the heart of Pakistan,’ wrote the columnist Mosharraf Zaidi. ‘But Karachi is its wallet, its BlackBerry, its cologne. Karachi is its mojo.’