What the sea breeze owed my father

In Karachi we do not talk about the weather. We talk about whether the sea breeze has come, and what it means when it has not.

Every evening of my childhood, at around half past five, my father would stand at the window of our flat in Clifton Block 2 and say, "Aa gayi." It has come. He meant the sea breeze, which in Karachi arrives in the late afternoon from the south-west, smelling of salt and diesel and sometimes of the fish harbour, and turns a forty-degree day into something you can live through.

He was a clerk at the port for thirty-four years. He knew the sea the way you know a colleague you have never liked but have learned to depend on. The breeze was the sea keeping its side of an agreement. When it did not come, which happened a handful of times every summer, he would be restless and short with all of us, as if someone had failed to turn up to a meeting.

The days it does not come

Karachi people will tell you that the breeze stops before a cyclone, or before a heatwave, or before something bad happens in the city. In June 2015, the week the heat killed more than a thousand people, the breeze stopped for five days. I was living in my parents' flat again that summer, writing at the dining table because it was nearest the window. I remember the stillness of the air more than the heat, and my father going to the window every half hour and saying nothing at all.

I have tried to write that week many times. The facts are easy to find. What is hard to write is the specific quiet of a city waiting for a wind, because quiet is not something Karachi does. The rickshaws were quiet. The crows were quiet. Even the neighbours' television seemed turned down.

My father died two years later, in the winter, which I was grateful for. He would not have liked to go on a day without the breeze.

Writing the weather as a character

Students in my workshops often ask how to make a setting feel real. My answer is to stop describing what a place looks like and start describing what it does to the people in it every day. In Karachi that is the breeze. In Lahore it might be the fog, in Quetta the cold. The weather is not a backdrop. It is the thing your characters complain about, wait for and organise their lives around, and if you write it that way, readers will feel the place in their skin.

These days I stand at my own window at half past five. My daughter, who is eleven, has started saying it before I do. Aa gayi. She has no idea where she learned it.