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BEING back in Karachi full time means, among other things, a backlog. Of errands, of repairs, of things you tell yourself you’ll get to. Saturday was the day we got to them. First stop: a watchmaker.
His is not a shop in the modern sense; more of a man and his instruments and a particular kind of knowledge that doesn’t transfer easily. I had an old clock. He seemed to be among the last of a generation who still knows what to do with one. Everything has gone digital, and with it, the people who understood the analogue. I didn’t linger on that thought then. I do now.
The second stop was Botal Gali, in the heart of Saddar. My friend OH needed jars — the right kind, in larger numbers — for a pickle he is working on. We could have ordered online. We didn’t, and I’m glad. Minus the heat, minus the litter and filth we navigated like an obstacle course, being there was worth it.
The gali is more perfume than bottles now, or at least that’s how I remember it. My memory isn’t reliable on the timeline, only on the feeling: I came here with my mother. She had opinions about glass over plastic so our fridge was a skyline of repurposed bottles I will not name, but you can probably guess. You’d think we were aficionados of banned substances from around the world. We were not. We were just people who knew a good bottle when we saw one.
If a jam jar can bring us to Saddar, imagine what a restored city could do.
It’s no surprise that I walked away with three glass bottles I didn’t strictly need along with a plan to return.
What made the stop especially worthwhile was the man we met inside the shop — the founder’s son was there that day even though his own son now runs it. He guided us a little, with the ease of someone who has nothing to prove. It felt good to talk to an elder. To receive advice, even about jars. There’s a texture to that kind of exchange that no website offers.
After that, we drove to a mechanic, a far less poetic errand. OH was trying to orient us on MA Jinnah Road, placing it in relation to a workshop I’m hosting at a restored library. And somewhere in the particular stillness that traffic jams impose, I stopped scrolling and started looking at the buildings.
The old ones. The ones that are still there, barely. Karachi must have been something to look at once. I have only ever known it as a concrete accumulation: eyesore stacked upon eyesore, with no apparent thought given to parking or pedestrians. I understand that cities expand. Populations grow, space is finite, and trade-offs are inevitable. But there is a difference between expansion and erasure, and we seem to have chosen the latter as policy, or perhaps as default. The urban equivalent of throwing dice and seeing where they land.
What lands, always, is at the cost of heritage. Of what the city was before it became what it is. Of what we might have kept if keeping had felt like an option.
I turned to OH, who has an economist’s way of thinking I find useful because I don’t. Wouldn’t restoring these buildings make business sense, I asked. Wouldn’t a city that is beautiful, not curated, not sanitised, but actually cared for, bring people in? Wouldn’t that be worth something?
If a jam jar can bring us to Saddar, imagine what a restored city could do.
I want to be careful here. I don’t mean restoration in the way we attempted it at Empress Market — that particular exercise in aesthetics destroyed the livelihoods of the people who inhabited it. That is not restoration. That is re-placement with better lighting. There is surely a just version of this. There must be a way to care for what we have without making the people with-in it pay the price of someone else’s vision of what the city should look like.
Karachi still has the watchmaker, the elder in Botal Gali. The bones of buildings that remember an older city. Public and private ventures together have restored parts of this city, proof that the will and the model both exist. The question is whether anyone in charge thinks these pockets are worth keeping, worth the slow, unglamorous work of preservation rather than the faster, more profitable logic of demolition and replacement.
I am not opposed to development. But development that strips a city of its identity, its continuity, its memory, is not progress. That is just change. And change without intention is only ever loss dressed up as something else.
What do we want to forget when we tear these buildings down? What are we in such a hurry to replace? Who are we becoming instead?
The writer is a former journalism instructor.
X: @LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, May 31st, 2026
