The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

That era drew to a close after 1977, with the ban on alcohol and the start of General Zia’s Islamising drive, which injected Karachi’s middle classes with a cloying piety. Among the witnesses to this change was a twenty-year-old American college student named Barack Obama, who visited the city with a college friend in 1981. In any case, fond memories of Karachi’s glamorous past are tinted in rose: even in its heyday, the good life was accessible only to a minority of Pakistanis, and it ignored the ethnic and social tensions that would explode with such destructive force decades later. Like resilience, nostalgia was a psychological crutch for Karachiites struggling with the present. Even so, Karachi remains a cosmopolitan ideal for many Pakistanis. Professionals and women thrive here in a manner that is difficult, or impossible, in other parts of the country. Gay couples discreetly cohabit. A working woman can rent an apartment on her own without, as happens in other cities, being accused of prostitution by a suspicious landlord. At weddings, women wear belly-baring saris, a form of dress shunned in other parts of Pakistan for its associations with the culture of Hindu-dominated India.