Gul Plaza only announced its importance after it was gone.

As I’m writing this, I realise that the lamp on my bedside table is from there. So is the wall clock ticking opposite me, the plant sitting just within my line of sight, the bedsheet folded at the foot of my bed, and the ceramic tray holding loose change on my desk. I hadn’t noticed how much of my living space traces back to that same address in Karachi’s historic centre — until it burned.

Each object carries its own small origin story: a practical purchase the first time we moved houses, an impulsive buy after a long walk through crowded aisles, or something my mother spotted on her trips there, sent to me on WhatsApp, and I approved from afar. At the time, none of it felt consequential. These were low-stakes decisions made between bargaining and staircases, between “let’s check one more shop” and “we’ll just take this one.”

Everything we ever bought from Gul Plaza (and there is a lot) will eventually break, fade, or quietly disappear into storage. Objects generally meet that fate. But what will inevitably remain is the memory of where they came from. The phase of life they belonged to. The small rituals of choosing and bringing things home.

When the fire tore through the plaza over the weekend, it unleashed destruction on a scale few of us have seen. Lives were lost. Livelihoods were erased. And with them, a shared archive of memories: wedding shopping trips, childhood errands, first-home splurges, birthday gift sprees.

This isn’t just one person’s story. It is the case for most Karachiites, across class and generation, for whom Gul Plaza simply existed in the background as they put together their homes and lives, one item (sometimes remarkable, sometimes gloriously ordinary) at a time.

This piece is an attempt to map that collective meaning, now rendered painfully visible in its absence.

“It was the first place one would go to when they needed to prepare for moving into a new house, getting married or having a child,” said Sana Chaudhry, summing up what countless others echoed in different ways.

“It was the place I bought a wedding gift for one of my closest friends, where I bought a high chair for my nephew and where my sister and I shopped prior to her wedding all those years ago,” she added.

Wedding shopping, particularly, was inseparable from Gul Plaza. Taniya Awan recalled how when she was getting married, her parents went there for her jahez which included kitchenware, blankets, bedsheets, and home appliances. Years later, she returned not for herself, but for her son, Azhaan.

“When Azhaan turned five, he wanted a bicycle so I bought him one from........

© Dawn Prism