KARACHI: I have fallen in love with Karachi’s vehicular traffic. I know it sounds absurd, quite Kafkasque, but that’s the way it is. Actually, not many Karachiites realise that they’ve fallen head over heels in love with traffic. It’s a situation which requires a great deal of self-discovery.
When you are in love with a girl, and it’s not being manifested in an apparent manner, you don’t have the foggiest idea as to what’s causing a commotion within you. You tend to do things that are not characteristic of you. For example, you are not into mushy kind of music, but for some odd reason you start listening to lovey-dovey songs; you are not a poetry aficionado, but you begin reciting couplets or uttering lines that you don’t have the faintest notion about, and at places like the bus stop or in an elevator, scaring the daylights out of those who happen to be near you at that time ê beauty truth, truth beauty, that’s all you know, that’s all you need to know êExcuse me, do you want something? No, I was talking to myself, sorry.
That’s exactly how you feel when you’re stuck in traffic. I have recently discovered why people look at me strangely when I start humming Kajra Re Kajra Re Terey Kaarey Kaarey Naina while straddling my motorbike, enjoying the vehicular clog on I.I. Chundrigar Road or Sharea Faisal every evening. They look at me as if I’m moonstruck. Well, perhaps I am. I think I don’t want the jam to end. After all, being on the road is the only time when you’re not mingling with the people you know. And as someone famous said, Hell is other people, that’s the time when you are not with other people. You go home and meet the same old people, you go to office, you meet the same old people, you socialise and by and large meet the same old people. When is the time to be yourself? When you’re in stuck in traffic! And that’s what makes you love it.
The fun (read: love) increases when you’re caught in a jam on a famous road like M.A Jinnah Road. While there, you can count how many visiting cards you have in your wallet, you can have a look at whose name is missing from your mobile’s phone book, you can delete certain names from the phone book, you can stare at the sky and wonder what aliens must be doing at this point in time, you can inhale smog and experiment if it can really hurt your lungs or it’s all drivel ê to cut a long story short, you never want the traffic to move, you want to be with it, you want to surrender your soul to it ê if that’s not love, then I don’t know what is.
But then, when you’re in love with somebody or something, you have to love whatever is associated with it. So I love torrential rains, I love exhibitions, I love under-constructed flyover bridges, I love potholes, I love traffic police, I love government officials, I love official protocols, and I love the people who start a punch-up in the middle of the road just because somebody overtook them from the wrong side. That’s how overwhelming the power of love is.
