“Hello, is that Madeeha?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m at the railway station.”
“Who? What?!” I thought to myself. It was 8am, on a Sunday. I struggled to find my bearings and a reply.
And then it hit me: CouchSurfing Ambassador Ciro Rendes was to arrive in Karachi that morning. Paranoia kicked in.
“Where are you standing?”
“Near the main entrance.”
“Stay there, I’ll be there in 10 minutes.”
Rendes, originally from Lisbon, Portugal, is part of the CourchSurfing network of passionate travellers that seeks to build meaningful connections between globetrotters and local hosts. In its essence, CouchSurfing allows travellers to take a trip abroad on a budget, and experience authentic colours and flavours of the people they encounter on their journeys. Guests and hosts meet online, at the CouchSurfing portal. As a guest, you have to be on your best behaviour and as a host you have to make sure your guest is comfortable. Rendes was arriving to taste a slice of Pakistan; he was to stay with me.
My guest did not speak a word of Urdu, of course, nor was he carrying a mobile phone with a functioning Pakistani number. I was concerned for his safety, and rushed to the Cantt Railway Station.
But at the station, Rendes was nowhere to be found. I looked everywhere for him — inside the gates of the station, at the various teahouses and hotels to see if I could spot him sitting there, and I saw nothing. Afraid of asking people around me lest that bring too much attention to the fact that there was a foreigner lurking around, I eventually decided to call the last number I had spoken to him on.
At the office of the payphone service, I asked a smiling young man if a person who didn’t look like he was from “around here” had dropped by. The man excitedly responded, “You mean the boy with the really big bag?!” opening his arms wide to show exactly how ‘big’.
I couldn’t help but feel amused; backpackers, and the baggage they carry, aren’t a regular sight here. He told me that my guest was sitting next to the model train inside the station. Sure enough, I found Rendes there. On our way to the car, I noticed that most of the people in the area were smiling at us — they had known of his presence all along!
But Rendes was safe. He went to sleep on my ‘couch.’
***
Gizem*, a high-strung 47-year-old Turkish math teacher-turned-backpacker, was already in Karachi when I was introduced to her. She had travelled overland all the way from Antalya, Turkey to Karachi, Pakistan and planned to head to Lahore and subsequently to India. Barely fluent in English, communicating with Gizem involved a spontaneous potpourri of several languages as well as a lot of hand gestures and actions.
But Gizem was terribly clueless about the lands that she was traversing: having travelled from Zahedan, Iran to Quetta, Pakistan on a bus, she did not understand why Iranian authorities chose to delay the bus by three days, why there was a perpetual sense of foreboding in the air while travelling through the province, or why her hosts in Quetta asked her to stay mostly indoors.
All of that made sense when Gizem woke up the first morning on my couch. Adamant that she would travel by herself and refusing any help whatsoever, Gizem came up to me with a dingy old, yellowed guidebook in her hands. “No one seems to know where the Presidential Palace is!” she announced with great frustration, as she showed me a chapter of her travel guide titled ‘Sights to See in Karachi’.
Presidential Palace?
I took the book from her and saw that it had been published in the 1960s. And then I calmly told her that in 1969 the capital of Pakistan had been shifted from Karachi to Islamabad, and in 1970 the federal government had moved there. At that moment, it dawned upon me that Gizem was travelling through The Hippie Trail of the 1970s!
And yet, Gizem was one strong woman. During her stay in Karachi, she beat up a taxi driver for attempting to molest her, took a rickshaw all the way to Hawks Bay and even bought her own ticket to Lahore from the railway station.
Of course, she always had a couch to surf on in Karachi. She was always welcome at my house.
***
The most apt description of Way C., a Brazilian of Taiwanese descent, is that of a “trouble magnet.” Everywhere he went in Karachi, he was greeted by danger — Way C. had arrived in Karachi with hopes of having an “exciting time”, and that is precisely what he got.
We were en route to some salt works, driving merrily on Mauripur Road, when out of the blue, a group of women descended on the cars on the roads, slapping them and asking drivers to move out of the way. Within minutes, an entire neighbourhood from Lyari was out on the main road, with men, women and children carrying whatever they could and running for it.
Turns out, there was an operation taking place in that particular neighbourhood. Between the law enforcement agencies and the people they were after, common citizens did not feel safe. We managed to find a way through the fisheries and drove straight out into Clifton, where we stopped to catch our breaths, have some juice and process what just happened.
By the time Way C. went to sleep, he had already jotted down his exciting experience of the day. By the time he’d leave Karachi, he had many more entries to make in his journal. CouchSurfing had introduced him to the “real” Pakistan.