There is a price to everything

This morning I drove past the do talwar and teen talwar roundabouts, landmarks in Karachi’s queen of the suburbs Clifton, and noticed the banners they were festooned with. The election is around the corner and banners and hoardings featuring the visages, constituency numbers, election symbols and (temporary?) political affiliations of the candidates are all over.

All the candidates are serious, unsmiling, constipated, as if the processing of the responsibilities they are courting is an almost unbearable strain. Why do it then? Wear socks and eat nuts in the safety of your home like most of the rest of us.

My primary objection to the banners — as a citizen of a developing nation I understand there is a price to everything and am perfectly willing to put up with a waste of cloth and colour — is that it seems nothing is sacred when it comes to where to hang your face. So Karachi, ordinarily a rather comely city, is suddenly rendered ugly through wanton application of billboards and banners.

The fact that Karachi is a rather comely city, in patches anyway, was re impressed upon me when it rained a couple of days ago. Everything was washed clean, the dust in the air beaten down so you could smell the trees and the flowers, and when the addicts and rag pickers disappeared from the pavements and corners in search of shelter I could imagine what this city could one day be like. Or what it might return to.

There are places in Karachi that have survived practically untouched since the seventies, because of the fact that they are populated by members of the ruling class that have protected them from the unchecked development that has defaced other parts of the city. Bath Island, where I lived for years till recently, is one such area. Until a few years ago, when construction of a few four/five story apartment blocks threatened the skyline, it was a neighbourhood of wide roads, old houses, tree tunnels.

Driving into Shifa hospital, a navy administered medical facility, is like entering a time warp. Sprawling, well laid out, with greenery and no building apart from the quarters taller than two stories, and the lack of traffic noise only adds to the sense of having stepped through a portal into another world. One of Karachi’s older hospitals, nearly everyone has a memory of Shifa.

An aunt, an uncle, a parent was admitted there. I once had an operation in Shifa, under local anaesthesia, to remove the growths that erupted on the backs of my ears when my mother forced me to have them pierced. I could not feel the growths being removed, but I could hear the scrape of the scalpel, and teenage me marvelled afterwards at the blood that had dripped onto the white shirt I had chosen to wear.

(shandanaminhas@yahoo.com)