On shutter-down days, the city holds its breath

Anyone who grew up in Karachi in the nineties knows the sound of a whole street pulling its shutters down at once.

It starts with one shop. Someone hears something on the radio, or gets a phone call, or simply sees a motorbike going too fast in the wrong direction, and pulls his shutter down halfway. Then the next one does it. Within three minutes the whole of Bohri Bazaar is a corridor of rolled steel, and the sound, a long rattling roar travelling down the street, is one of the most specific sounds of my childhood.

My mother ran a tailoring business from our flat for twenty years, and shutter-down days, hartals, strikes, were her calendar's natural disasters. A wedding order due on Thursday and a strike called for Wednesday meant three of us at the dining table finishing the hems by hand. I learned to sew a blind stitch before I learned long division.

The strange holiday

Children loved strike days, of course. No school, no tuition, cricket in the empty street with a taped tennis ball. Adults hated them in a way we could not yet understand: the lost wages, the closed pharmacies, the fear that this one would be longer than the last. I remember my father on the phone with his brother in Nazimabad, asking about the road, and the particular way he put the receiver down afterwards.

What I did not understand until much later was how much of Karachi's ordinary life was organised around the possibility of the street closing. People kept a week of flour in the house. Shopkeepers kept their best stock at home. Families chose schools by how many neighbourhoods the van crossed. We were a city of contingency plans, and nobody talked about it, because talking about it would have made it real.

Writing what nobody says

My second book, A City Kept in Paper, has an essay about those days, and it was the hardest thing in the collection to write. Not because the memories were painful, though some were, but because the most important thing about them was what people did not say. How do you write a silence that a whole city agreed to keep?

What worked, in the end, was writing only the objects. The bag of flour. The half-finished wedding sharara on the table. The cricket ball with the tape coming off. If you describe the things people prepared, readers will understand exactly what they were afraid of. That is a lesson I now teach in the second week of every workshop: emotion lives in objects, not in adjectives.

The shutters still come down sometimes. Less often, and for different reasons. When I hear that sound now I am fourteen again, holding a needle, waiting for my mother to tell me whether the hem is straight.