“Your last wish
Cannot be a wish for wishes
Though some ocean creatures
Do swallow other fishes.”
From The Ghazals of Golmal
by Bachchoo

Karachi smells like Mumbai, a rich spectrum of sewage and garbage with only the pungent ingredient of drying Bombay Duck missing. There are the gulls and crows over the mangrove bays and inlets, with the same allure and cacophony of retiring birds over the coconut palms at sunset. The slums have more breeze block and fewer TV satellite aerials above their roofs and, though I was driving past and can’t be statistically accurate, fewer packs of stray dogs with their heads down in dumps infected with plastic-bag boils.
The highrises are not as prominent, and there are gun emplacements, anti-suicide bomber vehicle barriers, tall, presumably bomb-deviating walls, barbed wire and guards with machine guns all over the place, as though there were a thousand American embassies in the city. Otherwise, just as Dhaka is Kolkata with beards, Karachi could be Mumbai without the constant nouveau riche and wanting-to-be-nouveau-riche buzz.
I am in the city for the Karachi Literature Festival to read my translations of Rumi and to be questioned about all the rest of my writing.
The festival is thronged, the volume and enthusiasm of the crowd paralleling India’s own Jaipur bash, despite the fact that there is no Salman Rushdie presence threatened and Barkha Dutt and her insights are a winning draw with no need for the “Wow! Awesome!” homilies of Oprah Winfrey.
The tub-thumping presence of George Galloway, MP for Bradford West in Yorkshire-via-Mirpur, is the main attraction. The festival has given him a platform with no attempt to balance his popular rhetoric with counter-arguments which occur to me as he speaks. He is a draw and a charismatic speaker. Asking for a critique of Mr Galloway would be like presenting Stevie Wonder and putting Joe Bloggs who can’t sing in the same gig. The Karachi crowd would have treated him as the Romans treated Christians facing lions — the gleeful sacrifice of the monotheistic kafir.
Mr Galloway is an acknowledged partisan. He loves democracy, supported Saddam Hussein, calls for war-crime trials of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, denounces drone strikes, wants Kashmir to be “free”, declares that Britain is, unlike Pakistan, corrupt and that Afghanistan is the West’s Frankenstein. His positions are easily grasped and the Pakistani audience grasped them. He condemned America for killing Muslims but stayed away from any stricture on Muslims killing Muslims.
There are thoughtful and thought-provoking political sessions which make me assess the literary sessions as supporting acts. There were no literary disagreements, no critical dismissals and no Prophets of the Word and Idiom pronounced — all three of which sub-continental writing desperately needs. Instead, there were sessions of self-praise and a conclave of self-satisfaction.
The political debates were more lively. Victoria Schofield, speaking about her book on Kashmir, was far from rabble-rousing or partisan. She questioned the fact and future of a unitary Kashmir with eminent common sense.
The session on dynastic succession — Bhuttos, Gandhis, Bushes, Clintons, Assads, Kim Il etceteras — and Tom, Dick and Harry Xedong in China was lively if slanted towards an apology for immature democracies. I had been told by dear Pakistani friends to keep my views on Pakistan to myself.
The people I met, some of who may be labelled “feudals”, some “intellectuals” and some from the gated-mansion class, lamented in severe terms the straits and fate to which the nation has been brought. They are strident in their condemnations and their expressions of despair and disillusion, reflected in the opinions of journalists and columnists. Rather than evidence of a democratic freedom of speech their outspokenness is a symptom of the weakness of a state that has to tolerate it — it can do no other.
Some surprisingly wished the nation well by wishing it not to exist! I glimpsed the depth of complaint about the Army, civil corruption and the state of the nation and gathered that the origins of the malaise were attributed to its birth.
On the second day of the festival we participants were at a party on the lawns of the British deputy high commissioner when the news came through that 80 Shia Hazaras had been killed by a bomb in an ethnic-cleansing episode in Balochistan. There were concerned murmurs about trouble in Karachi as a result and we were hustled to our coaches and hotels.
The fest continued the next day as scheduled. Mr Galloway spoke again and was applauded and presented a shawl. And then Karachi was hit by the repercussive political fallout. Roads were blocked by protesters who demanded that the state and the Army bring the murderers to justice and protect the Shia population of the country after this umpteenth attack. They alleged that no terrorist had been apprehended for what they called the genocide of Muslims by Muslims.
One of the hotel’s drivers reported getting away with his life when a mob carrying clubs pulled drivers out of cars they had randomly stopped and assaulted them. Eight people were killed in the 24 hours that followed and a 4x4 taking festival delegates to the airport was set alight on its way back to the hotel.
It wasn’t quite like getting away from the 2013 Damascus literary celebration of freedom festival or the Mogadishu think tank for the future of civilisation, but it took me three hours to get to the airport as the roads were closed and the driver found alternative, circuitous and what he assured me were “dangerous” routes. Were they? Or was he angling for a substantial tip for heroism — a quality necessary for survival, he assured me.