The interminable wait between life and death at Gul Plaza in Karachi

It wasn’t so much about the announcement or the declaration of death, muttered Qaiser, but the hours, minutes and seconds between the knowing and the not knowing — the brief yet interminable time of feeling suspended. On Tuesday, the elderly, bespectacled man entered his fourth day of waiting outside what used to be Gul Plaza.

Patches of dust, soot and perspiration stained his white shalwar kameez. His eyes drifted everywhere all at once, always searching but never landing anywhere. Every time a reporter approached him for an interview, he traded it for information: “Here is my phone number, please share the list of the dead whenever you get it,” he requested, and then proceeded to narrate his story.

“My begum loved to shop, and she found the perfect partners in my daughter and bahu,” Qaiser recalled. On Saturday evening, the three women ventured to Gul Plaza — a paradise for shopaholics in Karachi — with a strict 10pm curfew. It was broken, and since then, Qaiser had remained encamped in front of the shopping centre.

As of Wednesday, dozens of people who were trapped inside the plaza when the fire erupted were still missing. So far, 71 bodies or their remains had been recovered.

Outside Gul Plaza — now just an empty shell — fire trucks and water tankers stood close by, sporadically spraying water to cool the thick smoke emanating from the building. At a short distance, Edhi and Chhipa ambulances lined the road, the drivers inside them taking turns to rest their backs. Near the rear end of the mall, which had since caved in, dumper trucks made hourly rounds to clear carcasses and debris.

On the main road facing the plaza, a crowd of spectators had converged on the footpath, watching intently; dozens of others stood on the rooftops of nearby buildings to get a better view. Camps had also been set up nearby, and the volunteers seated there were quick to distribute water bottles to firefighters, policemen and rescue officials.

Movement never eluded Gul Plaza — not in life, nor in death. But even as rescue work continued, the air hung heavy with the weight of the wait, suspended in anticipation like a defendant about to hear the verdict.

Waiting for help to arrive

For Muhammad Shujat, who worked at an electronics shop at the plaza, patience was running thin on the fourth day. “It is better to die once than to die 100 times each waiting minute,” his shrill cry echoed through the morning breeze. “It is agony.”

Like Qaiser, he hadn’t been home since late Saturday night. He recalled leaving his shop “fully intact” at 9:30pm — the shutters were locked and the day’s earnings secured. “Around 10:45pm, I started getting calls that a fire had erupted at Gul Plaza.”

The 40-year-old reached the plaza within 15 minutes from his residence in Orangi Town, otherwise a 45-minute drive, where he was welcomed by chaos, screams and tears — all of which had been playing inside his brain on loop.

“I tried to get into my shop, which faces the main road, and frantically tried to secure the merchandise, but the flames were huge, unforgiving. All I could do instead was watch my livelihood burn before me and wait … wait for fire tenders, for divine intervention, for a miracle.”

Help did come, but a little too late. The first tenders arrived at the site nearly two hours after the fire broke out, Shujat recalled, and within five minutes they ran out of water. “Once again, we were told to wait, this time for water tankers that were coming from Sohrab Goth and Nipa Chowrangi.”

But by the time they arrived, Shujat’s shop — which, according to him,........

© Dawn Prism