Photo courtesy Girls at Dhabas/Hadi Khatri
Wonder and curiosity were slowly chipping away at my fear of the city. Karachi felt less threatening, and it seemed that men weren’t always out to get me. So many turned out to be not so frightening after all. Like that one Bykea uncle who had a heart-to-heart with me about his daughter, a 10-year-old he hoped would grow up to be like me. Zakhmi Bhai, the rickshaw wala whose instant fondness for me made him pitch a crazy plan: we should drive halfway across Karachi to meet his friend Madhu, someone I was sure to love. There were trickier situations too, like the time two policemen found my brother and I smoking up, and after informing me that I was a disgrace to my gender, just before they were about to take us to the thana [police station], the policemen relented and let us go; they sympathised with my story of smoking up to recover from heartbreak, but encouraged me to try less addictive routes.
With all its clarities and absurdities, again and again I was reminded: the city could be my friend, I could trust my body in it. Of course, there was the occasional uncle in a landcruiser trying to pick me up for sex, the annoying passerby who whistled or threw laanat [curses], but I had the ammunition of multiple cities’ exposure of creepy men, and was familiar enough with Karachi to be unfazed by these encounters. Sometimes my mood dipped for a while after my comfort was breached, but other times I responded with unprecedented fire. One night, I was sitting at Burnes Road with two friends — boys — when I felt fingers caress the back of my neck. Quite calmly I turned around. A boy younger than me sheepishly said he had been getting an insect off my skin. How dare you touch me, I screamed at him, Get out of here. And just as calmly, I resumed my conversation with my friends. I am not sure who was more surprised, them or me.
Nothing compared to walking, of course. The city’s breath rising to meet mine with each step, the pleasure of placing one foot before another, unthinking, meditative. The trust that so long as I kept going, Karachi would keep expanding, opening up before me.
***By last year, I had become quite the awaragard [vagabond]. Venturing out in my shorts and dhotis, smoking up anywhere, feeling the male gaze bounce off me. Who said I couldn’t walk around Karachi wearing whatever I wanted? I was reading Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s seminal novel about the boy-girl who isn’t boy or girl, the first non-binary character I encountered in literature. Orlando’s trajectory in clothes reflected much of mine. Some days I dressed more masculine because I knew people would bother me less. My short hair and skinny physique helped. Other days I presented more feminine, striding down in my sleeveless top and jhumkas [earrings]. The city felt open for play, I could alter its pulse and discover new freedoms. I decided to buy a bicycle. How Karachi shifted with each vehicle. I hated cars, silencing everything and screening me off from the city. Motorbikes were electrifying, making me zoom past the city faster than I could comprehend anything. On a bicycle, I could slow down and move at my speed, noticing every taste and smell. Nothing compared to walking, of course. The city’s breath rising to meet mine with each step, the pleasure of placing one foot before another, unthinking, meditative. The trust that so long as I kept going, Karachi would keep expanding, opening up before me.
***The motorbike came out of nowhere. My boyfriend and I threw all our belongings on to the ground: bag, wallet, phone, the one litre Peshawari ice cream we had just bought. But the men had no interest in our possessions and one of them rushed towards me with a knife. My body tensed with the awareness of what was happening. He grabbed my wrist and pointed the blade at my boyfriend, asking him to stay put while he took me away. I had never seen such menace in another person’s eyes, never felt such disbelief. He called me randi [whore] and sister in the same breath, swore at my boyfriend, kicked him in the stomach, and said to me, come quietly or I’ll slice one of you.
I’m not sure how it happened but at some point, the man turned around to call his accomplice, and his grip loosened long enough for me to heave myself away. I broke free. Not sure if the two men would follow us, we ran for our lives.
***What I lost that night: two journals, one with my writing on Kathmandu, the city where I first discovered the joy and freedom of walking. My precious copy of Orlando. Letters from friends I carried close. My confidence and comfort when walking alone, my sense of safety in the city. My openness with strangers. My resilience against Karachi, which had taken so long to build up.
It is a stranger fear, the one that re-enters your body with a deeper intensity after you thought you had unlearned it, dismantled it. In the days after this incident, my body felt someone else’s, behaving in ways I could not predict. It was not under my control. The same body that had started wearing shorts in public spaces preferred to stay indoors mostly, and take a large chaadar if it had to go outside. The same body that loved evening walks, started locking all doors, double-checking keyholes, jolting with fright when the house made the smallest noise: just a mouse in the baseboard, just the cat about her business.
That bodies carry trauma I had always known, but that cities carry it too, I am learning the hard way. It has been a year since the assault, and I am still a long way from fully recovering. The hurdle isn’t so much my own body as the reminders outside. The other day I went to tree dhaba after a while and, even though I was walking with a friend, I found myself suddenly shrinking when a motorbike came too close, when we passed a street light that seemed, in that moment, too much like the one from that night. I walked in a contained panic, caught between freezing and flight. Even though I wanted to, I did not ask my friend to stop by the newspaper stand or browse second-hand clothes on the handcart. I wanted as quickly as possible to get to my safe spot under the tree. But even that was not the same. The leaves and the lights were useless, the smells and sounds eclipsed by my fear: I kept looking towards the street, the street I had always known to be so wide and welcoming but which now felt so dark and narrow, looming with a quiet that troubled me. I could not trust what it contained, what might spring out of it. I could not ease into my body. From the chai station Iqbal asked me, “It’s been a while, where have you been?” and I shrugged, unsure of what to say, how to name this growing fear which was, once again, of a piece with the city.
Sadia Khatri is a writer based in Karachi. She has worked as a journalist at Dawn and The Kathmandu Post, and as a reportage editor with Papercuts Magazine. She writes fiction and non-fiction, dealing with themes of gender, public spaces, visual culture, cities and poetry, and is currently writing her first book, a memoir on the life and work of the late Kashmiri-American poet, Agha Shahid Ali. She is also one of the founders of the feminist collective Girls at Dhabas
Header composed by Leea Contractor
Published in Dawn, EOS, January 5th, 2020