Wanderings: Exploring Offbeat Places — Mostly — and the Unnoticed Dimensions of Common Ones
By Imtiaz Piracha
FAZLEESON’S
ISBN: 978-969-441-343-3
138pp. 

There are travellers who like to read up on the history and culture of a place before going there and there are also travellers like Imtiaz Piracha, who prefer to explore with all their senses, talk to the natives and only when a place and its people and culture seem interesting do they read up about it.

The way Piracha writes in Wanderings: Exploring Offbeat Places — Mostly — and the Unnoticed Dimensions of Common Ones, he takes you on the journey along with him. You are there with the frequent traveller suffering from transient disorientation syndrome, when he wakes up on mornings in different hotel rooms to check his desk clock for the time before wondering where he is.

To determine the name of the hotel he is staying in, he would look for the hotel stationery on the bedside table. The digital clock was his own. He had bought it to readily know the time, day and date, if not the country or the city he was in.

“Arriving in a new city, checking into a hotel and experiencing the disorientation of being oblivious about what was behind those walls, the surrounding streets and the buildings” was a fix he had got used to. At the first opportunity then, he would be out of the hotel to explore the neighbourhood and beyond, on foot, and as far as possible. Then the disorientation would evaporate and be replaced by an elation brought on by the new discoveries.

Piracha has been travelling all his life, for one reason or the other, and also for no particular reason at all. One reason was the opportunities brought to him while being involved in his grandfather’s air cargo agency, Gul Sons, and the other his years working with a US media organisation in Qatar. His own wanderlust also is a major contributing factor.

A slim compilation of fascinating accounts of travels inside and outside Pakistan makes the reader feel like the author’s constant companion

Most of his travels have been alone but, at eight years of age, he was living in Baghdad, Iraq, with his parents. His grandparents lived there, too, though in another part of the city and, on one occasion, he was headed there by bus with his unusually quiet parents. His favourite uncle, Ijaz, had died while on a road trip with his three friends, another Pakistani, an Iraqi and an American, in Konya, Turkiye. No one had survived the accident. His uncle had been only 25.

The best looking uncle in five, he was also the most cheerful and generous. His many interests, such as reading and music, also included making pen pals. When his grandfather returned from Turkiye after completing the formalities, he brought back with him some of his son’s belongings, which included an envelope containing a bunch of letters and black and white photographs of the uncle and a young woman taken around Istanbul.

The envelope, somehow, came into Piracha’s father’s possession. Several years later, after the family’s return to Pakistan, Piracha, then a high school student, stumbled on it in some papers and files during a house move. It helped him build a new connection with an uncle he had lost in his childhood.

The letters were written by his late uncle to a young woman, Semsa, in Istanbul. Their replies were missing. When his grandfather had gone to Turkiye to bury his son, he had also met the young woman, who then had returned those letters to him. The letters unfolded a relationship initiated as pen pals that turned into something far more serious. They were engaged to be married until the uncle called it off, as was apparent from one of the letters, a particularly heartbreaking one, because his mother was against the union.

The next four decades took Piracha all over the world, to dozens of countries, though never to Turkiye, until in 2005. In between visiting the tomb of the 13th century mystic poet Jalaluddin Rumi and seeing the whirling dervishes, he also tried tracing Semsa, which was not at all as simple as it sounds. When they were finally able to connect, it was after Piracha was back in Karachi — by fax and then a phone call, followed by emails.

Despite such a huge gap of time and space between them, Piracha and Semsa developed a strong affiliation. Semsa, a senior lady by this time, even visited Karachi on Piracha’s invitation and made a number of friends here, especially with journalists when she was at the Karachi Press Club during a programme held in honour of Mukhtaran Mai. She also befriended my younger sister, and later also sent her a friendship request on Facebook, which was happily reciprocated. Semsa passed away in 2015, which my sister learned about through this book, only after years of non activity on her Facebook page.

Apart from this personal journey of discovery, the author also takes you along on his trips to Spain, the UK, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, New Zealand, Italy, UAE, Syria and Jordan. With him in Madrid, Spain, you feel as disappointed and frustrated as him when his briefcase, carrying his work files, passport, money, credit cards and other valuables, including a new wrist watch and sunglasses, gets stolen.

Stopping taxis, boarding buses, trains and airplanes, gazing out of windows with him — be it from the big, air-conditioned, Blue Line bus moving through the interior of Sindh along the west side of the river Indus or from the second-class compartment of a train on a scenic journey across Switzerland — the reader feels like his close companion.

From Larkana enroute Mohenjodaro, you feel the road bumps with him. He is with you, showing you, lamenting over the dilapidated Keenjhar Lake Recreational Complex. Going into the past of Abbottabad, you are introduced to Major James Abbott, after whom the city is named. You are with him as he drives across Kohala Bridge over Jhelum River, to enter Azad Jammu & Kashmir, where the natural beauty compensates for the poor infrastructure.

Piracha had heard his father narrate his fine experiences from his frequent trips to East Pakistan, but had never visited there himself. Then, on a cold night at home in Karachi, in 1971, he had sobbed over the announcement of the ‘fall of Dacca [Dhaka].’ Some 40 years later, he also visits there. It is a different country now, but the bougainvillea and gulmohar trees, the undisciplined traffic, and the rickshaws in Dhaka remind Piracha of Rawalpindi, “with a dash of Multan.”

The book is an orderly compilation of published and unpublished pieces for various newspapers and periodicals, including Dawn and PIA’s in-flight magazine Humsafar. Not too voluminous, it sure takes you around the world and back in not more than 138 pages.

The reviewer is a business consultant. He can be reached at parabolicmirrorsontheroof@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 18th, 2025