DURING the train journey to Karachi, which lasted a day and a night, I had fond dreams of the city. I had been there once before Partition and admired it for its wide roads and superb sanitation. Chandni Chowk, the pride of old Delhi, might have been little more than a side street of Karachi`s spacious boulevard, the Bunder Road, which went all the way to Kemari, the port district of the city. Karachi was ours, the capital of our beloved Pakistan, and my home since the arrival of my family to settle there permanently.

The train arrived at the city station, our second-class compartment choked with the dust blown into it during the long journey through the desert of the southern Punjab and northern Sindh. Intent on giving my family a surprise, I had chosen not to inform anybody about my arrival.

A swarm of railway coolies surrounded my compartment and I hailed one to carry my luggage. The coolie took my ticket and surrendered it to the ticket-checker at the out gate. When I asked the coolie to call for a tonga, he said, `There are no tongas in Karachi, saab, only ghora garies. `He called for a buggy to come alongside. `Where do you wish to go, saab?` `Rattan Talao, flat number...,` I replied. The coolie settled the fare for me and loaded the baggage.

He salaamed me and I gave him a rupee without asking `how much?` He salaamed me once again and also prayed for my long life, happiness, and prosperity. It was not difficult to see from his language and behaviour that he was alone, and like me, from across the border. I got into the victoria, and settled comfortably into a well-upholstered seat.

The journey homeward from the railway station was exciting for all the new places, people, and things that I was seeing. A cool breeze blew in my face, unlike Lahore`s hot summer wind. After about a 15-20 minute ride, we entered a street off the main Frere Road. The coachman pulled up the reins to slow down. `Here we are, saab.
This is Rattan Talao. Now where exactly is your apartment?` he asked. I told the number, which he repeated uncertainly and then asked for more directions — much to my own embarrassment.

As I was looking around for someone to help me, I saw an old neighbour from our mohallah in Delhi. He was carrying a shopping hamper, just as in Delhi when going to the bazaar to buy fresh meat and vegetables. We recognised and greeted each other enthusiastically and I jumped out of the victoria to embrace him. We both mumbled a few words about each other`s welfare. `Is this your first time in Karachi? In that case, if you`re looking for your house, it`s right there,` he said pointing to the penthouse of an apartment building with red tiles on top. `Your family is right at the top, on the sixth floor... well, my dear friend, welcome to Karachi. Hope to see you again.`

`Thank God, saab,` the victoriawalla said, `for Karachi is quite like a jungle; if you ever miss the right place once, you may never find it again. I paid him off, apparently to his satisfaction. He parked his carriage in a corner and offered to help me carry my luggage. `It`s quite a climb, saab. The top floor is always the best, airy and free from street noises, but it`s a hard climb all the way up. Well, never mind. You`re a young man and I`m not too old either. We can manage it quite well between us.`

We were soon at the sixth floor to find two flats facing each other without name or address plate. I asked the coachman to dump the stuff, thanked him for his help, gave him a tip, and let him go. In the meantime, to my huge relief and joy, I had heard the voice of either my mother or sister from one of the flats. I knocked at the door.

`Who?` came from inside. `Hu, hu, ho-hum, khee-ki, khee-ki...`, I answered, mimicking the mysterious caller outside our house in Delhi whom my mother believed was a ghost. The `ghost` would come to our doorway on the long, cold winter nights, call out `Apa, aiye Apa.` (sister, oh sister) and when mother asked, `Who?` he would respond with his weird laugh, and disappeared.

`Array, it is none but my own Abdul Rahman,` mother yelled as she flung the door open. And there I was, to the huge surprise and joy of everyone — mother, my maternal aunt, my eldest and youngest sisters, and our maid, Hajra ki Maa, who had been with us in Delhi since God knows when. It was a happy and emotional family reunion, made many times more intense by my unexpected arrival.

There were warm embraces, much rambling, and unrestrained talk about how, where. And what everybody had been up to. `Thank God. we are all well and safe here. But there is hardly a day when I don`t dream of the old house. If I only had a pair of wings, I would fly back to Delhi,` mother said all in one breath. My aunt sighed and

said, `We all will one day, Insha Allah.`

I came to love Karachi for its vast urban landscape with such rich and colourful vistas, and for the cool sea breeze that blew all the time. In the next two or three days, I met practically all my friends from Delhi either by the wayside or by arrangement. Nearly all those I met seemed to be doing well, some in their own businesses, some as government employees, and others as gentlemen of leisure in occupation of evacuee houses and shops.

One Tullan, a karkhanadar from the seedy backyard of our mohallah, Kupoanwallan (maker of skin oil-jars) had Karachi`s only open-air cinema, the Mayfair on Victoria Road, allotted to him and was said to be flourishing.
When I first saw him he was sitting cross-legged on a bench outside the Mayfair with a cigarette in his cupped hands, inhaling deeply and releasing clouds of smoke from nose and mouth. I recognised him the moment I saw him. `Assalam Alaikum, Bhai Tullan,` I greeted him. He responded with a grin, `You mean Sheikh Muhammad Taqi, proprietor of the cinema.` `I am really sorry Sheikh Sahib, really sorry,` I replied. `That`s all right. It`s all by God`s infinite mercy and kindness.`

In due course, I found that Bhai Tullan was not the only person `risen from the dead`. There were many others — Hanif, the mohallah hajjam (barber), was now Sayed Muhammad Hanif; Chamma, the son of Shamman halwai, renamed himself Sheikh Muhammad Ishaque and owned a pastry shop on Bums Road. Insha-ur-Rahman, a compounder at Dr Hashmi`s clinic, was now a doctor in his own right; the wasiqua nwais (property deeds draftsman) a lawyer or a legal advisor, and so on.

There were several others, essentially good and well-to-do people, who had fallen on lean days. Idrees, the son of the pesh imam of our mohallah`s main mosque, had become a procurer, reputedly of his own sisters and nieces; one of my own seniors at school and college stood around the Paradise Cinema begging; while a respectable Sheikh Sahib, again from our mohallah, had become a raving lunatic.

Fate has whimsical ways of punishing and patronising people. Much to my utter shock and horror, I found Sadiq Ali, the film star and a favourite of Sohrab Modi, seated outside a paan shop in front of the Capitol Cinema blankly staring at the passers-by. From Pukar onwards, Sadiq Ali was cast in a supporting role in almost all of Modi`s movies. He was loved and admired for his role in Phir Milenge his last film, as the violin-playing, hero. Now he looked pitifully sick and dumb-struck, like one paralysed. He had indeed been paralysed, and was living in a jhuggi off the charity of friends.

On the whole Karachi might have been a leaf from Delhi or Lucknow the same language, the same dress, and the same paan chewing good Samaritans. However, I hardly saw anyone spitting paan on the roads ide. They would either sit and swallow it slowly or look for an open drain or a rubbish dump in which to spit the juice. While the elderly still dressed in their well-worn sherwanis (actually wearing them out), the younger lot had switched over to

shirt-and-trousers.

The elegant Elphinstone Street, popularly called Elfi and a paragon of quasi-colonial architecture, was the city`s most popular rendezvous. A leisurely walk up and down Elfi was the best way to come across old friends and acquaintances, greeting them with `Adaab, adaab arz.` I suppose there were more `Adaab greetings than `Assalam Alaikums`, the style adopted through the later stages of the Pakistan movement in Delhi.

After several months up in the `wild` north, I loved Karachi almost a rebirth of Delhi, only better, if only for the many old friends that I met in so limited an area. Between the Bunder Road and Marriot Road shopping areas and Saddar, one would find almost everyone one might have known or cared for. The men from Delhi and UP had turned the city into a replica of their native Delhi and Lucknow.

Unlike Peshawar and other cities in the Frontier, where one could tell a Pathan a mile away from his dress and distinct ethnic features, in Karachi one could hardly tell a Sindhi from a UP-Dehliwalla. First of all there were not that many Sindhis in the hub of the city`s fashionable areas, and secondly, dressed as they would be in western style fashion like the rest, it would be hard to tell them apart in a crowd.

The Delhiites and UPites flooding the city were divided into three broad categories; the first was the `Elfi set`, mostly occupants (allottees) of posh apartments like Fort Mansion, Ilaco House, etc, around the Saddar area and of the spacious bungalows around E.I. Lines, Soldier Bazaar, the Garden Area, Jamshed Road, Aamil Colony, etc; the second set were occupants of flats on Frere and Burns Road, Rattan Talao, Bunder Road, etc; and at the bottom were those still looking for a shelter, living in makeshift thatched huts.

Those in the first category treated the city more or less as their baap dada ki jagir (ancestral pro-
perty) looking down upon the locals (Sindhis) as second-class citizens. With the Punjabis, however, they intermingled like milk and honey, mostly because of the shared snobbish attitude towards Sindhis.

The flatwallas of Burns Road (pronounced `Buns` by the Urdu-speaking refugees) and Frere (Fria) Road had created a little Delhi and Lucknow of their own. In just a matter of months, hotels and restaurants sprang up specialising in Delhi nihari, gola (threaded) seekh kebab, shahi haleem, Lucknow balai, reshmi kebab and a large variety of breads from chapatti and roghni nan to parathas, taftaans, sheermals, and baqar
khanis.

A Karachiite Hindu returning to his native city would have hardly recognised it — before Partition, Parsis and Sindhi Hindus had dominated the landscape and native Sindhi Muslims, emigre traders, and entrepreneurs from Bombay and Delhi formed just a handful of the local population.

Amongst the locals, the tough, curly-haired, Mekranis dominated the tinsel and red-light districts of the city. Some of

them also plied victorias as a family profession. The Delhi-UP elite of the city kept a distance from the Mekranis and their abominable distorted Urdu poured forth like hot oil into the ears of the Delhi-Lucknow ahle zaban. Standing out among the Mekrani`s conversation were two expressions, `aane dos` (let it come) and `jaane dos` (Let it go); these had a certain irresistible appeal, and would soon become a part of the local jargon of the UP-Dehliwalla.

Karachi excelled Lahore in the number and quality of hotels, restaurants, nightbars, and cinemas. The Palace Hotel, the quintessence of colonial architecture, the Central, the North-Western and the Palm Grove, to name just a few (the Metropole and the Beach Luxury were still under construction), were some of the city`s best hotels. Paradise, Palace, Regal, Capitol, and Nishat cinema houses were known for their style and for screening the choicest

Hollywood and Indian films.

Amongst the restaurants, Cafe Grande, Frederick`s Cafeteria along Preedy Street, Firdous, and the India (later Eastern and Zelin`s) Coffee House occupied pride of place. The Victoria Cafe, an excellent eatery owned by one of my own friends from Delhi, also turned into a popular spot for its excellent `home-cooked vintage Delhi dishes.

Mushtaq Ahmad, the owner-manager, thought of the ingenious method of reducing full plates to half plates and serving them as full plates at half price to add to the variety of the fare at no extra cost.

Situated at the intersection of Victoria Road and Preedy Street, the Coffee House was, of course, the hub of the city`s intellectuals, students, politicians, and gentlemen-at large, all coffee-lovers. One could sit there over a cup of coffee for hours without any objection from the staff. It was there that the UP-Dehliwalla and the Sindhis mixed freely and interacted.

My Sindhi friends were quite peeved and disquieted over the superior airs the Delhi-UPwallas were in the habit of

assuming. `They would do well to realise that they are refugees after all and can never be superior to the true sons of the soil — the real, vintage Sindhis,` my Sindhi friends would complain.

The peremptory and unceremonious dismissal of the Sindh premier M.A. Khuro by the Governor (the Quaid-i-Azam), the merger of Karachi into the federal territory, and the refugee `invasion` of the city were some of the matters highly resented by the Sindhis. For them, Pakistan was little more than a Punjabi-refugee dominion with all others — Balochis, Bengalis, Sindhis, and Pathans — reduced to the status of second-class citizens. The Sindhis seemed quite uninterested in the Kashmir issue — one of my close Sindhi friends would often taunt me as a `boot-licker` of the Punjabis, (the word `chamcha` had not come into usage yet).

Karachi was a truly cosmopolitan city, unlike Peshawar and Lahore, yet even there a palpable sentiment existed against the Punjabi-refugee combine (gath-jaur) and my Sindhi friends would be brutally frank about it. `The Punjabis,` they would lament, `have usurped all our best barrage lands while you makkars
(termites) have occupied Karachi together with your Punjabi masters. Tell us, how long would it take a makkar to eat a whole maund of wood?`

That was with reference to the riddle which ran thus Ek man ka lakkar, uspe betha makkar, ratti, ratti roz khai, to kitne din main khai ga? (How long would it take for a termite perched on a maund of wood, eating it up gram by
gram every day, to eat the whole pile?)

The riddle was used as a sort of a mathematical conversion table to familiarise young beginners with units of weights and measures comprising rattis, mashas, tolas, chitanks, seers, and maunds (8 rattis to a masha, 12 mashas to a tola, 5 tolas to a chitank, 16 chitanks to a seer and 40 seers to a maund).

`But that would be in the case of a tiny insect. In the case of something as big as a man, the years would automatically be reduced to months, and months to weeks and days. With so many man-sized ants like you, it would only be a matter of a few years before the woodpile of Sindh was completely eaten away.` Even if only by way of a joke, it would still carry the Sindhi ire against the refugees.

From the very first day, settled in Karachi, the UP-Dehliwallas especially the lawyers and political activists, came to regard themselves as the true heirs to the `throne` of Pakistan. They thought of themselves as the only legitimate successors to the Quaid and Liaquat — especially the latter. The typical `Aligarh types` would boast endlessly of their role in the Pakistan Movement and proclaim themselves the architects of Pakistan.

They seemed to entertain little or no doubt that, as the only true Pakistanis and ones who were above all parochialism, they and they alone, would turn Pakistan into a `bulwark of Islam` and a model for the rest of the ummah to emulate.

Having known the Punjab rather well and actually lived in the Frontier, I found their political naivety utterly

ridiculous. Most of them had hardly ever gone beyond Hyderabad, another mohajir stronghold in the province, and had little feel for, or knowledge of, which way the wind was blowing at the provincial level. `Pakistan` might have started as an abstraction, but the five provinces had emerged as a hard, historical reality soon after Independence. They were not merely administrative divisions, but solid ethnic, cultural, and linguistic entities with deep roots in an ancient past.

To the handful of refugee sceptics — a few intellectuals, professionals, civil servants, and tradesmen — Pakistan, in real terms, would be little more than a one-honeymoon. For them, it would and must come to an end because it was a hurriedly-cobbled conglomerate of five disparate and divergent provinces, each with its own distinct ethnicity, language, and culture, which made it more a Tower of Babel than a cradle of Pakistani nationalism.

The UP-Dehli mohajir mindset had drawn its strength and bearings from lands that were the hub of the pre-partition language, culture, and politics of Muslim India, but which were now not part of Pakistan. They seemed still to be living in their pre-partition fools` paradise. `Muslim India` was no more than a semantic concoction to enthuse the people by its alluring sound; to the leaders, it came in handy as a poetic expression to be bandied about without being explained.

The geographical bounds of `Muslim India` had Delhi and Lucknow as its epicentres and the rest of the Urdu-speaking areas like Bihar and Hyderabad (Deccan) as its colonies. The Muslim-majority areas of North-western and eastern India were bundled into Muslim India as a temporising political ploy; the disparate ethnic stock of those areas accepted it for much the same reason.

I left Karachi with a heavy heart after a three-week stay that ended on a highly emotional note. My mother, sisters, aunt, and the rest of the family bade me a tearful farewell. Mother, quite adept at memorising verses, recited the following verse in a tear voice

Jao sidharo meri jan

(Farewell, my dear)

Tumpe khuda ki hu aman

(May Allah protect you)

Bichre hoi milangay phir

(We might meet again)

Qismat ne gar miladiya

(Fate willing)

I too felt like crying but fought back my tears. It was the first time since Delhi, over a year ago, that I had experienced an emotional leave-taking like that. Karachi was no Delhi; it was not, as it were, the `bone yard of our ancestors`, yet as home to family and friends, it was a second Delhi.