Alizeh Kohari

Pakistani fishing communities struggle inside the nets of bonded labor

ALL NIGHT IT HAD RAINED: a furious, unseasonal rain from a wavering sky. God had lost all sense of proportion, the locals said, like a bus driver who crawls on a highway and flies over a speedbump riddled road. But the morning was clear, and the water in the river, swollen with run-off from the bordering mountains, swirled under the bridge and toward the silt ejector.

Here stood the fishermen, a dozen or so of them. Their shalwars, rolled up to their knees, ballooned on the surface of the water; their steel matkas gleamed in the sun. Nets emerged endlessly, like handkerchiefs from a magician’s breast pocket. Sloshing through the water, the fishermen stretched them taut across the channel. Then they waited. Hunting fish near the silt ejector, which flushes sediment back into the river, is against the law. But so are many other things.

From atop the bridge, a man watched the fishermen. Minutes passed. The men in the water stirred back to life. Men is a misnomer, really: many were little boys, helping their fathers and uncles and grandfathers. It was late April, nearly the end of the fishing season, and the river was mostly full of jhalli, a slender, inconsequential fish—small fry. Jhalli doesn’t fetch much in the market. The fish has too many bones: spiky ones that scratch the throat and feathery ones that tickle. Once dead, though, the creature is obliging. Its flesh flakes away easily from its spine and can be eaten with a smattering of salt. Upstream, in another language, jhalli means happy-go-lucky girl—unacquainted with the ways of the world, or perhaps just unbothered by them.

The jhalli in this river had likely already skirted death many times. Depending on where their journey began, they had survived the plunge from the spillway of Tarbela Dam, which stuns some fish and decapitates others; they had swerved past the moving gates of multiple barrages; they had dodged the jaws of bigger fish. The hulking Mujahid is a particularly pesky fellow-traveller. The story goes that it was introduced into local waters from China by Zia-ul-Haq in the eighties, who named it after his pet jihadi fighters in Afghanistan; the fish grows fat preying on native species—an allegory with the blunt force of a spillway plummet.

If a few jhalli managed to escape the meshy embrace of this first net, they would meet others up ahead. All along the Indus river—as it flowed south, swerved west and south again, a watery curlicue on the map of Pakistan—men and women were crouched on boats and banks, nets cast, waiting.

The fishermen by the silt ejector began plucking fish out of their nets. They tossed them into matkas or flung them onto rocks, where the fish flopped and flashed silver as life juddered out of them. The little boys kneeled into the water and felt along the edges of the channel with their hands, under stones and in crevices, to yank out any jhalli wedged there. More fish meant a little more money. Meanwhile, the man on the bridge kept watching. Some nets are less visible than others.

Read the rest of the story on The Baffler…

Climate change transforms a South Asian symbol

IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, in the Indian town of Deeg, in the desert state of Rajasthan, there was a palace garden where it rained all year round. Even on still, shimmeringly hot summer days, you could get caught in a downpour: the Jat rulers had installed copper pipes in the roof of the garden pavilion, which sprayed jets of water to mimic the monsoons. Copper balls clattered through those pipes, emulating the growl of distant thunder. If you were a young woman of the court, you could sit on a swing made of flowers and scented fibers, and as you swung toward the sky, the spray from the garden fountains would cool your face. On especially hot days, rainbows would glint in the distance. In Vedic philosophy, the rainbow is the bow of Indra, the god of rain, rivers, and war.

Lovely as it must have been, the setup feels a little bit like cheating. As centuries of poetry and painting will attest, you have to earn—yearn for—the Indian monsoon. In Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain, scholars Margrit Pernau, Imke Rajamani, and Katherine Butler Schofield collect essays on this sweeping genre. One of the earliest instances of monsoon literature is a poem called “The Cloud Messenger” by the fifth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. In it, a young exiled yakhsa, nature-spirit, appeals to a great, big elephant-shaped rain cloud, asking it to bring relief to his lonely wife. If that sounds like a euphemism, it probably is. In Sanskrit literature, the two rasas, essences, often associated with the monsoon are vipralambha shringara and sambhoga shringara: the erotic thwarted and the erotic fulfilled. Rain, the union of earth and sky, symbolized the latter; the yearning for rain the former. In eighteenth-century bhakti poetry, for instance, devotees sought to drench themselves, vicariously, in viraha, Radha’s longing for Krishna. (How does one translate viraha? It is, I suppose, the realization of love through separation.)

In a way, the euphemism makes scientific sense too. The monsoon, in its simplest definition, is a weather system of regularly reversing winds. But the earth needs to get really hot for these rain-carrying winds to sweep inland and let loose. There is an old story about the Mughal emperor Akbar, who asked his court musician Tansen to sing raga dipak, a melody associated with light. All the lamps in the courtyard lit up and Tansen’s body became so hot that he sat in a river to cool himself, but it didn’t help. Instead, the river began to boil. Someone had to sing raga megh, the monsoon melody, to summon the rains that would cool him.

For most of my life, I have lived in Karachi, a city by the sea where it typically rains only a few days each year. Perhaps it is only natural, then, that wherever I go, I carry this feeling—this monsoon feeling—of rain as culmination, as catharsis: even in London, where it is a quotidian, powdery affair, and Mexico City, where it is just as thunderous but far less fickle. I have never swung on a swing in a downpour—or yearned for a lost lover, for that matter—but the idea feels deeply familiar, preserved in some sort of communal imagination. The odd thing is that these associations persist even though, increasingly, when clouds break over dry, thirsty Karachi—home to twenty million people; where neighborhood women protest water shortages by organizing ijtimai badduas, collective cursing sessions; where 91 percent of all water is unfit to drink; where all water might run out by 2025—relief is rarely the overriding emotion. Now, almost always, what you feel is dread.

Read more at The Baffler…

On rekhti, a lost genre of Urdu poetry that centered the female experience — despite being written by men

OCT 2020: Before he was poisoned to death by members of his court in 1837, Nawab Nasiruddin Haider, the second king of Awadh, would occasionally dress up as a woman and pretend to give birth. The ‘baby’ was a doll studded with jewels: on the sixth day, both ‘mother’ and ‘child’ were given a ceremonial bath as part of the Hindu ritual of chhati; the following night, they would go out into the courtyard to see the stars, accompanied by the women of the court. One would hold the Qur’an over the mother’s — that is, the nawab’s — head, another a sword. Everyone would recite the fatiha. A week or so later, still dressed as a woman, the king would parade the city on a palanquin.

Lucknow in the 18th and 19th centuries was syncretic, gender-bending, and urbane. In a few decades, this would come crashing down — already, the British were circling nearer, pearl-clutching Victorian morality in tow. But for the moment, the Awadh court remained uniquely fluid. The nawabs, semi-autonomous rulers within the fragmented Mughal empire, didn’t merely lust after women: they admired and adored them, endowed them with political power, and reveled in a confidently feminine culture. In this world emerged rekhti — a form of poetry that centered women’s lives, even though primarily men wrote it.

Saadat Yar Khan, pen name Rangin, coined the term rekhti. Along with his friend and fellow poet Insha Allah Khan, pen name Insha, he would become one of its most prolific producers. Rangin lived, as his moniker suggests, a colorful life. He loved archery and horses but also felt no need to appear macho: according to his memoirs, he once pined for a courtesan for two straight years, burst into tears when he found her away from home, and despairingly scribbled a ghazal on her wall. At the time, both Urdu and Hindi, their paths yet to diverge, were known as rekhta (scattered, mixed); the poetry written in rekhta also came to be known by the same name.

Rekhti differed from mainstream rekhta poetry in two ways: its use of the female perspective and its disavowal of abstract, mystical themes. The standard ghazal usually has a male speaker pining for an unattainable beloved, modeled on the legendary Majnu, who died for love. Rekhti verses, however — despite often being authored by men — rarely concerned themselves with men, passing the Bechdel test with flying colors each time: if invoked, men were referred to as mardua, a dismissive diminutive of mard, man. The genre also had no patience for the melancholia and mysticism of unrequited love; when women in rekhti fell in love — with men or, more frequently, with women — they were determined to consummate it.

Read the complete story at The Juggernaut

The swashbuckling life and legacy of a Pakistani-American gay icon

JUNE 2020: Hasan Mujtaba met Iftikhar Nasim a week after moving to the United States. An award-winning journalist back in Karachi, Mujtaba had been hounded out of Pakistan for his reporting on taboo subjects: on bonded labor, on private jails, on activists disappearing into thin air. Nasim was a well-known community figure in the diaspora by this time: his Urdu poetry collection, Narmaan, had been published to infamy and acclaim in 1994, and he’d been inducted into the prestigious Chicago LGBTQ Hall of Fame in 1996. In fact, Mujtaba had reviewed Narmaan for Newsline, the Karachi-based magazine where he’d worked. It was the first English-language review within Pakistan of a book that, by then, people were circulating underground.

Mujtaba knew Nasim was gay — after all, he’d read Narmaan and found it “stunningly beautiful” — but, in retrospect, he wasn’t sure what he was expecting from the meeting in 1999. Back home, the perception of homosexual life was one of repressed sexuality — of fear, guilt, and paranoia. Narmaan, too, dealt with these themes: My friends have left me on the road to puberty // They have ventured ahead // I wait alone for the person // Who belongs to my tribe // Who will bear the call of my body // Walk the secret path of my soul. But the man who opened the door, laden in jewelry, expansive and outrageously funny — this was not a man at all afraid.

Even now, years later, people recall Nasim with titters of nervous delight. This is the story you hear most often: he was a luxury car salesman at a local dealership and once sold a Mercedes to Oprah. She asked him how big the engine was; he retorted: “Why? Are you going to sleep with it?” Another time, he wangled a rare meeting with the famously reserved Qurratulain Hyder, the most celebrated living Urdu writer at the time. He entered her house, said adaab, kissed her hand, and presented her with lipstick. “I use the same shade, Ainee aapa,” he said, earnestly, and she was immediately smitten. He wore a black bowler hat around town, fancy embroidered jeans, and gorgeous fur coats. He wasn’t particularly rich, but as a person who knew him noted, he performed his class: it was important to him, as a self-made immigrant from Pakistan, to embody glamour, to solicit aspiration.

“I would rather be looked over,” he quipped, “than overlooked.”

Mujtaba remembers that first evening, on the 40th floor of a skyscraper overlooking the twinkling Chicago lakefront, Nasim standing on the balcony, surveying the expanse like Jay Gatsby, bantering like Oscar Wilde, and looking very much like Bappi Lahiri. Mujtaba, only a week old in the U.S., felt his head spin. But he also felt deeply glad, in the knowledge that this life, this openness, was possible. A decade later, when he would publish his poetry collection in exile, its queer elements would be directly inspired by Nasim.

“You know, I remember the first thing he said to me that evening,” Mujtaba told me. “He said: ‘If you’re going to keep your ass and your mouth closed even here, well, then there’s no point coming to America.’”

Read the complete story at The Juggernaut

Pakistan attempts to stifle a protest movement among its Pashtun population

Harpers, July 2018

Land and longing in the Cholistan Desert

APRIL 2015: Six-and-a-half million acres of sprawling desert, nine men to each square kilometre of sand — yet on that morning, Cholistan seemed very much like a small town. From the settlements near the crumbling fort to the canal-straddled fields miles away, everyone brought up the wedding in the desert, talking about it with the casual familiarity of next-door neighbours.

"Those women there, they wear too much make-up," said Hafeeza, wrinkling her nose and lowering her voice, as if they really were next door. She lived in the desert too, but her own house, next to Derawar Fort and near a road, seemed to make her regard herself as separate from the nomads deeper inside, where the metalled road faded into the white flatness, dahar, of the desert. "And such glittery clothes…!"

Further away, on land made arable by a trickle of irrigation water and a cocktail of fertilisers and pesticides, Rasheeda's eyes lit up. That was a family wedding, she said; most of her relatives lived there, in the deep desert. Many years ago, a plot of land had been allotted to her father-in-law; in order to cultivate it, she lived here now with a few of her sons and her daughter and her daughter's daughter, a sombre-eyed girl of eight. Some weeks ago, this granddaughter had also very nearly been married off, in a tricky case of watta-satta – a form of bride exchange – averted at the very last minute.

"There was henna on her hands," Rasheeda said grimly, drawing the little girl close.

Read the complete story at Herald.

Photo by Fahad Naveed

The politics of water in Pakistan

JAN 2014: When the water first came, panic rippled through the valley.

Up until then, most of the villagers had refused to leave. In a jirga held in one village, the elders had all lined up and one by one, with a Quran held over each of their heads, had solemnly sworn that they would stay.

Helicopters had hovered over the villagers' homes, dropping down flyers that urged them to evacuate, and despairing officials visited the valley, issuing exhortations first and ultimatums later. Many of the villagers didn't think there would be any water, though. Rumour had it that what the government really wanted to do was raze down their homes and set up a string of factories instead.

So, when water started swirling across their fields and crops and into their homes, the panicked villagers found themselves faced with a choice that could only be described as Hobsonian — that is, no choice at all. Some grabbed whatever was in sight and ran towards the mountains. Others clambered on to trees and waited, watching their belongings float by: Cooking utensils and crockery; bedclothes and a bridal trousseau. Roofs fell down – it had started to rain – and as the water on the ground surged, they watched their goats and cows float away. Some were stung by snakes — the water brought with it snakes, they said, snakes that writhed like "ropes".

The villagers left eventually. Some made their way to townships that had been set up for them; others went to lay claim to land that they had been promised in Sindh and Punjab, entering, more often than not, abrasive legal battles with provincial governments and qabza groups. Meanwhile, water continued to fill up their valley.

Read the complete story at Herald.

Photos by Kohi Marri

An antique car exhibit in Karachi spotlights an underappreciated historical figure

NOV 2017: One day in the early 1990s, Mohsin Ikram coaxed the watchman at Mohatta Palace—the former residence of Fatima Jinnah, the youngest sister and closest confidante of Muhammad Ali Jinnah—to let him in. The palace is one of the most striking buildings in Karachi, with turrets and domes made of pink and yellow stone, but it lay empty and abandoned at the time. Fatima’s clothes, Ikram said, were still hanging in a bedroom cupboard, and some of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s were in a suitcase nearby. The watchman told him he could take as many pieces of clothing as he wished, as long as he paid him 100 Pakistani rupees per item.

But Ikram had come to see the cars: a 1966 Mercedes, parked in the shade of a tree and, inside a padlocked garage—the watchman claimed he had never seen it open, but was soon persuaded to break the lock—a 1955 Cadillac convertible. “It looked as if all it needed was a good wash and a full tank,” Ikram said of the Cadillac, when he met me in his Karachi home in late August.

In 1995, the government of Sindh purchased Mohatta Palace and, by 1999, turned it into a museum; the cars were hauled to the Sindh archives nearby. They were not cared for well there. Ikram, a 53-year-old automobile enthusiast who has restored about 100 antique cars, watched in dismay as they rusted in the sea air, and wheel caps and other parts disappeared. He said he even wrote letters to the government, offering to restore the cars for free.

Read the complete story at Caravan.

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Why has blasphemy become such a deadly issue in Pakistan?

JUL 2016: Even though the rally had ended late, even though the night sky over Gangapur was turning translucent, Falak Sher’s wife insisted we stop by her house for kheer. There was no electricity all across the village, so she stumbled about in the dark, rattling pots and pans, intent upon hospitality. Outside, the lanes hummed with festive chatter: the village – birthplace of Sir Ganga Ram, the father of modern Lahore – had been looking forward to this rally for months now: a celebration of the glory of Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him) and an assertion of the finality of his prophethood. Sher, who worked as a police constable in Lahore, had asked for leave weeks in advance for the rally but the Zimbabwean cricket team happened to be in town, the first international team to tour Pakistan since the attack on Sri Lankan cricketers six years ago, and all vacation had been suspended for the police force. Sher paid no heed and came home anyway. He had never missed a khatm-e-nabuwwat rally in his village, said his wife.

It was the 26th of May, the death anniversary of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadi faith, which considers itself a sect of Islam. This was no coincidence, for everyone at the rally agreed that Ahmadis, whom they disparagingly referred to as Qadianis, were fifth columnists, aasteen kay saanp, and that the death of their founding father was something to celebrate. Indeed, the showpiece of the rally was a nephew of the current Ahmadi leader, Mirza Masroor Ahmed, a large moon-faced man who had recently split ranks with his uncle and converted to Sunni Islam. All of Gangapur, a part of the central Punjab district of Faisalabad, seemed to roar when he came on stage to speak. When he paused, loudspeakers blasted the rally’s signature soundtrack, a rousing refrain of ghustakh-e-Muhammad teri ab khair nahin hai, khair nahin, khair nahin, khair nahin hai (O blasphemer of Muhammad, you are done for now).

From the edge of a neighbour’s rooftop, where the women of the village had gathered to watch the proceedings, Sher’s wife sang along, not caring that she did not know all the words. Back at her house, she fussed over the chief guest’s wife, pressing a second serving of kheer into her hands, ensuring it had enough pistachios and, by way of small talk, directing her attention towards the top right corner of the room where rainwater had seeped through the wall, leaving a large damp mark amid curlicues of peeling paint. If you looked at it closely, said Sher’s wife, wiggling her torch in that direction, if you tilted your head a certain way, the mark resembled the name of Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him). She paused, then clambered on top of a trunk and brought down a small pink frame. Inside was a piece of old roti, its overcooked centre similar in shape to the mark on the wall. “Subhanallah,” murmured the chief guest’s wife admiringly. Her host beamed, luminous with pride.

Typi non habent claritatem insitam; est usus legentis in iis qui facit eorum claritatem. Investigationes demonstraverunt lectores legere me lius quod ii legunt saepius. Claritas est etiam processus dynamicus, qui sequitur mutationem consuetudium lectorum.

Mirum est notare quam littera gothica, quam nunc putamus parum claram, anteposuerit litterarum formas humanitatis per seacula quarta decima et quinta decima. Eodem modo typi, qui nunc nobis videntur parum clari, fiant sollemnes in futurum.

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Manzil unhey milee jo shareek-e-safar na thay 

(Those who reached the destination were not even part of the original journey). – Mohsin Bhopali, Urdu poet

Many years ago, a community crossed a hastily drawn border and learnt to call a new country home. The community was the chief proponent of the idea of that country, and so, although its numbers were relatively few, it formed a large part of the country’s ruling elite. Whether it considered itself a community at the time, in the strictest sense of the word, is unclear: millions of people migrated at Partition, but the term ‘Mohajir’ now has a very specific meaning. What we do know is this: Within the span of a generation, the community credited as the chief architect of the nation became its most vocal ‘victim’.

Many reasons are given for the subsequent mobilisation of the Urdu-speaking community and the rise of the Mohajir Quami Movement (MQM): it was predicated on a demand for greater jobs in the state apparatus, including the civil bureaucracy and the military; it was an organic awakening of identity consciousness; it was an inevitable outcome of Pakistan’s unstable politics, driven in some part by the fact that the political elite comprised refugees.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that the pendulum swung the other way, perhaps too far the other way, and the Mohajirs – specifically the migrants from Muslim minority states and provinces in India – emerged as a ‘fifth nationality’ in Pakistan. Suddenly it was August 8, 1986, and Nishtar Park was a blur of bodies in thrall to the voice of a single man: Altaf Hussain. Later, the crowds swelled even further and Hussain, still a young man in his thirties, demonstrated just what he could do.

Main teen tak ginoon ga (I will count up to three), he roared at a rally held under the shadow of Quaid-e-Azam’s mausoleum in 1989. Uss ke baad aap sab bilkul khamosh ho jaayengey (After that everyone of you will become silent).

A quarter of a century later, and now from thousands of miles away, Hussain can still make Karachi fall silent whenever he wants.

Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior II is retiring, but Rainbow Warrior III will soon take its place. How did the protest ship anchor itself in the public imagination - and can it continue to do so in future?

AUG 2011: It has foiled and frustrated the efforts of governments, it has brought big business to its knees. For more than 30 years, the most enduring image of environmental activism has been a little ship on a roiling sea, the distinctive white dove on its hull dipping in and out of the waves.

"It's a small boat, a little untidy," said the Dalai Lama, when he visited the Rainbow Warrior in 1992.

"But it is a very powerful symbol and the spirit on board made my spirit stronger too."

In 1977, when the UK Ministry of Agriculture retired an old fisheries research boat, it sold it off to Greenpeace. Rusty old Sir William Hardy acquired a coat of colourful paint and a new identity, and began life as a protest ship. Soon, it became a campaigning icon.

"In the beginning, it was the romance of the story," says Kevin DeLuca, author of Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism, "a few individuals battling the evil empire of the Soviet Union, a primary propagator of whaling."

The ship delivered activists to far-flung regions where they chained themselves to harpoons, and positioned rubber rafts between whalers and whales.

They blocked the waste discharge pipes of factories and flung green paint on the coats of baby harp seals, rendering them commercially worthless.

Often, there was no immediate result - factory smoke swirled freely, seal pups continued to be killed - but the world began watching, simultaneously outraged and enthralled.

On the morning of May 13, 2015, some 45 minutes after gunmen had attacked a bus carrying the members of Ismaili Shia community at Safoora Goth, Saad Aziz descended the stairs into the living room of his home in Karachi’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal area. It was quarter past ten in the morning and he had just woken up, his family says. News channels were flashing the aftermath of the massacre; at one point, overwhelmed by the relentless portrayal of gore, his mother asked for the television to be switched off. “Who are Ismailis?” she remembers Aziz asking — he was perhaps more familiar with the term Aga Khani, explains his father.

Seven days later, on May 20, 2015, spurred by a tip-off, a police contingent left the Crime Investigation Department headquarters in Civil Lines for Gulshan-e-Maymar at 15 minutes past midnight. The area had been under surveillance since the massacre at Safoora Goth and on that day, police had been told, the mastermind of the attack, one Tahir Minas alias Saeen, was going to pass through there. So, the contingent waited. At six in the morning, a silver Alto car carrying four passengers neared a Hascol petrol station. A motorcycle preceded the car. Another trailed it.

Peering at the car, the informant confirmed the driver’s identity. As the police moved to capture Minhas, firing erupted from the vehicle. Then, someone inside the car threw a hand grenade at the police van, bursting its two tyres. Gunfire by the police, the first information report (FIR) of the incident insists, was purely retaliatory, aiming at the tyres of the car. The police brought it to a halt by managing to burst its tyres. In the back seat, clasping Kalashnikovs, were Azhar Ishrat and Hafiz Nasir. On the passenger seat, next to Minhas, carrying a loaded 9mm pistol in his right hand, two magazines hidden in the belt of his shalwar and a hand grenade stuffed in the pocket of his kameez, sat Aziz.

The old thakur looks wilted and weary but as soon as he spies the camera, he straightens up, straight as an arrow. He reties his turban and adjusts his shirt; he spits twice, once on the flat of each palm, then rubs them both together and styles his moustache. The men around him collapse into laughter. “That’s right,” they cheer. “Give them the old Rajput glare!”

He freezes into a pose of mock seriousness. Behind him, in the near distance, the tops of village huts – choras as they are called – are visible, a lone peacock flitting from one to the other. The choras look ruffled, rendered unkempt by recent rains. Last year, residents say, the entire village had been washed away — they point to the mounds in the distance where they sat with their belongings for over two months, just waiting. Unlike last year’s deluge, this year, the rainfall has been just right in terms of quantity — but it came too late: just two weeks before the skies clouded over, drought was declared in the desert. Even now, although it is more green than brown, district Tharparkar is “drought-ridden” in the official lexicon of the Sindh government.

This settlement of thakurs, upper-caste Hindus, overlooks the road that links Mithi with Islamkot, a straight and narrow path that undulates over the rocky desert terrain of Thar. Little stone blocks with numbers painted on them dot the road: they tell you that the (in)famous Thar coal deposits are now 15 kilometres away, now 14, now 10; the airport, though still under construction, is even closer. The villagers, however, do not really care about the coal, at least not now, and they care even less about flying. Theirs is a more basic concern: water. They are not quite sure what to make of the rains this year, except that it means that their livestock won’t starve and that they will not, therefore, have to migrate to other areas of Sindh to support themselves. The thakurs are polite people: even as they relate their troubles, they insist that you drink some tea.