KARACHI: A panel discussion on Karachi of yesteryear titled Safar Yaadon Ka … Karachi Ki Raahon Per organised by the Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu on Saturday afternoon could’ve been a more engaging one if the programme had a proper structure to it. Not that it wasn’t engaging enough. But since writer Zaheda Hina in her introductory speech had especially mentioned the name of novelist and short story writer Aamer Hussein, who’s in Pakistan for a brief visit, one would have liked Hussein to share his memories of the 1960s’ Karachi that he grew up in before leaving for England for good.

Sibtain Naqvi moderated the event. The first person that he requested to speak about Karachi was journalist Saeed Hasan Khan. Mr Khan said if we wanted Karachi to reclaim its lost glory then we needed to study the transformation that cities such as Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) and London went through. When Calcutta was made the capital of the country, a great many people from other parts of India came and settled there and changed its demographic complexion.

Aamer Hussein said he’d been coming to Karachi for the last 22 years. Now he saw the city as a mix of both old and new Karachi. In the 1960s, there were more sahulatein (facilities). He recalled the 1965 war when he would hide in air-raid shelters with other children. He called it frightening but at the same time maza bhi aata tha (enjoyed it too). Touching upon one of his stories about his mother’s singing, he termed Karachi of those days as liberal.

Shahbano Alvi was asked a question about the women of Karachi. She said in the ‘60s, women used to work consistently and were very efficient with their professional lives.

Zaheda Hina went as far back as 1857 when, during the war of independence, four Karachiites laid down their lives against the British. She could remember the name of only one of them: Ram Din Pandey.

Ms Hina pointed out that all communities in Karachi –– Parsis, Hindus, Muslims etc –– played their roles in gaining independence from the British (in 1947). Prior to 1970 the city was a peaceful one. The first major upheaval happened when Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah’s election was rigged (dhandli se haraya gaya) and Gohar Ayub took a procession into Lalukhet. All of us kept silent at the time. After that, the city became chaotic.

Writer Haseena Moin said she first came to Karachi when her father, who was in the military, was transferred to the city. She reminisced about how her family lived here, including in a hotel for a certain period, and afterwards an uncle of hers got them to live in a rented flat. In school, she was taught how to knit and sew. Those were the good days because she could freely roam around the streets of the city or hop on to trams without any fear. She told the moderator that the environment that viewers saw in her TV plays was the environment of her household.

Prof Sahar Ansari said in the last two decades certain areas of Karachi had turned into garbage dumps (katchra kundi), which wasn’t the case in the past. His family hailed from Aurangabad from where it shifted to Bombay (now Mumbai), where there used to be electric double-decker trams, and then relocated to Karachi in 1950.

In Karachi they first stayed at a house in Jacob Lines. In those days every morning Bundar Road (now M.A. Jinnah Road) was washed and cleaned with soap. The first Indo-Pak mushaira, he recounted, was held at a Habib Bank branch near the Quaid-i-Azam mausoleum. It was conducted by Shaukat Thanvi and Patras Bukhari presided. After sharing with the audience his memories, Prof Ansari remarked, “Everyone says ‘I own Karachi’, but nobody owns it.”

Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2018