News travels fast in the narrow lanes of Lyari. Usually, it is news of a football match, a poetry recital, or the passing of an elder. Recently, however, the talk of the town has been the release of the trailer for Dhurandhar, a big-budget Bollywood spectacle starring Ranveer Singh. The film, we are told, is a spy thriller set against the backdrop of the Lyari gang wars. Reportedly, because they could not film here, the producers constructed an elaborate set in India-recreating our Cheel Chowk, our chaotic skyline, and our weathered streets.

Watching the promotional material, one feels a familiar, weary sense of déjà vu. Once again, Lyari has been reduced to a gritty aesthetic, a convenient stage for bullets and bloodshed. To the filmmakers in Mumbai, and indeed to many content creators in Pakistan, Lyari is not a home; it is a genre. It is the “Wild West” of Karachi, a place where the only story worth telling is one of violence.

As someone whose family has represented this constituency in parliament for nearly a century, I view this not just as an artistic failure but as an erasure of history. My ancestors did not........

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