In Karachi, I stopped at red lights and Karachi found this unreasonable.

The horns would begin within seconds — long, aggrieved blasts from motorcycles and cars that could see the signal as plainly as I could. Around me, vehicles slid past the stop line and settled on to the zebra crossing, then into the intersection itself, packed together with nowhere to go, waiting for a green light they had already declined to honour.

Nobody looked embarrassed. The embarrassment, such as it was, belonged to me: the man obstructing traffic by obeying it.

I had come to the city midway through a 16-day road journey: Lahore to Rahim Yar Khan, on to Hyderabad and Karachi, before heading home along the Indus Highway.

A long drive is a peculiar instrument. It shows you a country at ground level, without the anaesthetic of airports and hotel lobbies. You stop reading the place through headlines and begin reading it through its roads, shopfronts, pavements and walls. Mile after mile, one question kept returning: how people behave in the spaces they hold in common. Nowhere did that question press harder than in Karachi.

What connects impatient car horns at a red light, a gleaming signboard on a grimy building and open sewage beside the beach is a single missing conviction: that the city belongs to the people in it

What connects impatient car horns at a red light, a gleaming signboard on a grimy building and open sewage beside the beach is a single missing conviction: that the city belongs to the people in it

The city must first be given its due. Karachi is furiously alive. It works the way a great port city works: goods move, markets churn, restaurants fill, towers rise, and millions of people get up every morning and go out to earn. Its commercial vitality has no rival in Pakistan; its coastline, food, layered architecture and diversity would be the envy of the region. Nothing that follows is written by someone immune to any of this.

But somewhere........

© Dawn (Magazines)