I often wonder, can you fall in love with a city the way you fall in love with a person? Because I think I have. Exploring a city’s lanes and secluded corners, like you would of a lover as you would lay with them, on sunny afternoons, etching new words upon their skin with your fingers. You would stare your lover, noticing all their quirks and building fantasies around them. Imaging the winters and the summers, and the autumns, while lying down next to them upon the grass during spring. You would talk to it, like you tell all your secrets to your lover and designate a few hours just to them, as if they belong to no one except you. You feel an inexplicable safety in knowing that this is the only city that would hold you and your secrets safe in its soul and would never reveal them to anyone, thus forging a bond that could never be breached by anyone else no matter what.
I struggle every time I plan to write about Karachi. It is so oxymoronic, so juxtaposing; like it infuriates and amazes at the same time. It continues to blow my mind with its mesmerising sights. I cannot help but stand on different vantage points and just continue gracing my eyes with its architectural excellence realizing how this structure along with the others around, have seen several instances of love, hate, naivety, success and failure between people of all ages. Its streets always lead me to a world crazier than the one I have come from, and one can never know what adventure awaits them in the moments to come. You just carelessly walk along the streets knowing that there is a world stranger than the one outside it – a world where anything can happen and that anything has the capacity of increasing the value of your life exponentially.
Out of all the metaphors I could use on you, I choose a tortured one. I want to call you a neglected mother, who openheartedly welcomes her children regardless of who they are as people or what they do. Every day you have millions of people coming in to you, learning how to survive and getting a bit closer to their dreams while growing up a little in the process. Some mover further away, some choose to stay, but you stand where you are – welcoming everyone with open arms even though the space keeps getting smaller and your buses may accommodate three passengers per seat. Karachi, I hate to admit but you are on the verge of dying, but there is value in your dying breath. The recording of each breath is worthy and hopeful and not opportunistic at all. I surely know that you will rise against all your challenges and will dance to the beat of your own drum because that is how it has always been, mad and crazy. And for someone like me, yours is the only understandable madness. The only chaos I can love unfathomably.