Wanderlust (14 page)

I saw Karachi from cars: congen cars, the Marines' car, the cars of new friends and friends of friends. The Mitsubishi Pajero was king;
every well-to-do city resident seemed to have one. A boxy, highriding four-wheel drive, it made its occupants feel safe. The only place I traveled on foot was to the consulate general most mornings. It took me fifteen minutes on foot in the searing heat, across the manicured expanse of Jinnah Park. I saw the bloodred stains that spatter Karachi sidewalks, the juice spat out by betel nut users after a chew. Usually a few men started following me when I entered the park, and usually they provided a running commentary on my appearance, my availability for marriage, my interest in fucking, my Americanness, and whatever else was on their mind. They stayed far enough away that I could think of myself as a wild animal, and of them as incompetent hunters, not likely to really get a shot. I'd been prepared for this by Egypt, I reminded myself. I knew how to brace for impact, to let just enough in and shut the rest out. I was callused but knew how to feel in control.

Sometimes, when either the heat or the audience seemed like too much to bear at 8:30 AM, I just took the consulate general's shuttle van.

One way it was different from Egypt, and from the other Arab places I'd been, was in the absence of women in the streets. Instead of women in varying degrees of head scarves and veils, here there was simply lacuna. In upscale neighborhoods like Clifton Beach, families strolled together along the boardwalk in the evenings. But in most neighborhoods, the crowds were 80, even 90 percent male. I saw only the richest and the poorest women. The wealthy, educated ones—these were the ones I met—lived busy social and professional lives behind the walls of their homes and businesses, behind the tinted windows of their cars and their bodyguards' guns. The second group appeared like shadows at car windows: a figure in a full burka the color of the road, holding out a withered hand to beg. A young
woman with a too-old face, thrusting out a bundle of rags that may or may not have contained a baby.

Importuners at the window were a feature of car-bound life. There were hawkers selling cigarettes, newspapers, and strings of jasmine blossoms, and there were beggars. Paul, one of the Marine guards, had this trick he showed me one night on an outing to Snoopy's, a Clifton Beach ice cream parlor that the Marines had nicknamed Snoop Dog. Paul pretended not to see the beggar as the man approached and pressed his face and hands to the window—and then,
wham,
Paul turned and slammed his hand against the glass. The beggar jumped back in terror; I gasped, and the Pakistani driver didn't react. My first instinct was to laugh, because Paul's move broke the tension, turned the ever-present encroachment into a joke. Then I felt appalled at myself for laughing. I wasn't supposed to be like this; I didn't want to treat people like things. But I was now complicit in terrorizing a beggar.

On my first weekend Jane invited me to the Karachi Yacht Club with her friend Zeba, a Karachi native. En route we wanted gum, cigarettes, and bottled water. We pulled over in front of a cluster of stalls, and dusty urchins immediately swarmed the car; with calm authority Zeba rolled down her window, handed coins to one of them, and asked him to fetch what we needed and keep the change. That was how things worked.

A creaking wooden motorboat carried us across the slick brown-gray water from a parking lot to the club, which occupied all of a small rocky island. Here the black birds of prey circled in even greater numbers, feeding on the detritus of the vast port.

In their island isolation, yacht club members could behave
more or less as they pleased. Some of the men and women lolled in shorts or bathing suits. Jane introduced me to Kamran, the twenty-one-year-old son of a Pakistani father and a German mother, who had a dark tan on sharp cheekbones, gold-flecked brown hair, and green eyes. A heart-shaped tattoo with the word
Becca
adorned his left bicep. “I was in Boston for three years,” was the first thing he said to me. His last name was Qureishi, indicating the tribe of the Prophet; for all I knew he could have been a direct descendant. But everything about him, down to his fashionable surf shorts, suggested a desire to be something else. He had probably been “Cam” or “Cameron” in Boston, eliminating the foreign sound. He would quip to his friends in Urdu, but had committed to American-inflected English as his linguistic home base. His looks worked in his favor; he was handsome by any cultural standard and ethnically unrecognizable. But America, it seemed, had fallen apart from him. Becca had been a forbidden Puerto Rican girlfriend who had moved into the apartment his parents financed. (Her parents hadn't been any happier than his.) He'd played to excess and flunked out of Boston University. Between the girlfriend and the grades, his parents had yanked him home, and only now was he realizing the extent of his mistake. His friends would be going back to their overseas schools in the fall, while he would be staying in Karachi. He spoke vaguely of going to Germany at some point. He was doing a lot of sailing.

Kamran invited me to race with him that afternoon. As the regatta got under way, we cruised away from the KYC in a 420, a two-person sailboat. Kamran manned the tiller while I followed his directions. We tacked back and forth between anchored container ships, sometimes coming so close that I could almost touch the steel side. The ships were hundreds of meters long and towered over us like apartment blocks; when we came that close in our tiny vessel it
was like approaching a man-made planet, nerve-racking and thrilling. Kamran explained that whenever one of them started pumping water out of a stern hatch, it was readying to heave itself into the shipping channel and make its sluggish way out to sea; in other words, we should get out of the way. Karachi had once been a fishing village called Kolachi-jo-Kun, which was hard to picture now that it was one of the biggest ports in Asia.

Afterward we sat drinking lemonade with his friends, young Pakistanis home from university in England or America. These kids who slipped naturally into the middle class when they were overseas, walking to campus or staying in dorms, lived in fortified mansions here at home, where they were waited on by servants. For me it was the reverse: In a poor country, it was so easy for a middle-class American or Canadian—or citizen of any Western nation—to fall in with the rich. From the canon to pop culture, we shared a language. We shared a sense of entitlement so ingrained that we couldn't have told you it was there. We shared ideas about individual autonomy and girls' being allowed to wear miniskirts. Here, as in Egypt, I found the high protective walls an affront at first, but whenever mental exhaustion took over, I was relieved to retreat behind them. Here, as in Egypt, being so welcomed by the rich kids gave me an inflated sense of myself, as though I were wealthy too. But then again, by global standards, I was.

Jane dealt with American citizens imprisoned in Karachi. She couldn't get them out of jail—they had, as a rule, broken the law, often in relation to drugs—but she visited them, relayed messages to their families, and tried to make sure they had competent lawyers.

Jane's colleague David was fresh from Yale and freshly married
to Nirit. He and his wife both had brown hair and pale skin, and when Nirit wore her glasses, they could have passed for sister and brother. He was a New Yorker, and Nirit was an Israeli-born American. When David was assigned to Pakistan for his first tour, and they applied for Nirit's diplomatic passport, it arrived showing Iceland, alphabetically just one country away, as her place of birth. Nirit, who was studying for a master's degree in conflict resolution, had just returned to Karachi for her summer break. David worked in the trenches—issuing visas, that is, or, far more often, declining to issue them. That snaking line that formed every morning outside the consulate general reached its conclusion at David's window.

Stephen worked in the political section with me, but his job was harder to ascertain. He was tall and twenty-seven, with wavy brown hair, and his office door—complete with nameplate and title—was directly across the section's foyer from mine. I watched his morning routine from my desk. He would pick up his newspaper from in front of his door, throw it into his office, close the door, and leave again. He spent his days beyond a different door, one with a coded lock, with the techies who handled secure communications. Stephen would reappear only at lunchtime in the cafeteria, where he was friendly and laid-back. One day I asked him, while sitting around a table with a group, “How come you're never in your office?” He didn't answer. I asked again, but then Jane turned to me and asked me how my cheeseburger was.

The next day Stephen came to my office and handed me a
Dilbert
cartoon he'd cut out of the newspaper. Catbert was working on a top-secret project, and said to Dilbert, in the last frame: “Just move along now. There's nothing to see here.” Later Stephen told me that when he scored a coup at work, he went home and poured himself a scotch, alone.

David and Nirit invited me out several times with their friend Ahmed, an entrepreneur and sports car aficionado who had lived in California. Ahmed told us about a business idea he had had: Car jackings were an ongoing problem in Karachi. Typically masked gunmen would force the driver out of his car and take off with the vehicle. With an ineffective police force and plenty of potential culprits, victims were never likely to see their car again.

On a trip to California, Ahmed discovered the LoJack: It was a device you attached to the underside of your car that sent out a radio signal, making it possible to pinpoint the car's location if it went missing. Perfect, thought Ahmed. Surely every car owner in Karachi would want one of these. He contacted the manufacturer in California and retailers in Pakistan, calculated his potential profit, and made plans to import a first shipment.

Somewhere along the way, though, as Ahmed was extolling the LoJack to his contacts in Karachi, a more experienced businessman took him aside. And Ahmed realized that he dare not import the LoJack if he wanted to continue to live in this town. The missing cars would be found, all right—in the driveways of government ministers. No one needed that kind of trouble. Ahmed abandoned his plans.

 

 

A local Christian activist had been trying to get the political officers' attention, and so Kevin passed him down the ranks to me. I called Mr. Masih, who had a list of places he wanted to take me. After my first few weeks on the job, it began to dawn on me that I had a luxurious freedom: Within certain restrictions, like staying in or near Karachi, I was free to make an appointment and go off and ask
people about what it was they did. I began to stretch my legs. This hardly seemed like work, but more like an extension of traveling. Usually I booked a congen car and driver, but sometimes I just took a taxi, or had the source pick me up himself. People, I realized, were eager to talk to me. However tiny and powerless I was in reality, I was seen as the ear of the U.S. government.