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‘There are very few Sheedi in the police force,’ Habib says when I ask if he feels safe in his posting. ‘People don’t like to be confronted by us in positions of authority. Where did they come from? Who are they? They don’t see us as being part of their communities.’ In 2009, Habib was part of a police team that arrested a member of the powerful Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), a
quasi-ethnofascist
political party known for its militant tactics, catering to the
muhajir
, Urdu speakers who migrated from India during partition. ‘They gave a press conference against me afterwards,’ Habib says. Only he was mentioned in the MQM’s media attack – not other members of the squad who carried out the arrest. ‘I’m a local, I’m not corrupt, I know the people I serve,’ he says. ‘Maybe that’s what made me threatening.’

Maulabux’s two other friends are Ghulam Hussain, a heavy-set professor, and Sabir, a banker turned sociologist. Professor Hussain is the eldest of the four men; he wears a crisply starched shalwar kameez and carries a set of pens in his breast pocket. ‘One fellow in our community, his son – born in 1986 – had an FIR [police First Information Report] cut against him for dacoit activities when he was three years old. In 1989.’

‘Let me tell you a story,’ Maulabux begins. ‘A friend studying at Karachi University was asked by some classmates how on earth he had made it into the university, coming as he did from Lyari and being a
blackie
. And he replied, “First I got off my slave ship, then I got on a camel, then I came to the big city …” and they believed him! It’s like people who stop us on the roads in Lyari and ask how to get to Lyari. “You’re here,” I tell them and they don’t believe me because we’re standing on wide roads, people are out shopping, there are grocers selling fruit on the streets. They expect only horror from us.’

Maulabux is a born storyteller; he laughs and jokes his way through the most disturbing tales, even when he speaks of racism and a policy of exclusion that confines us to a private garden on a day when we ought to be on the streets enjoying a festival.

‘People see us, black with
ghungaroo baal
, curly corkscrew hair, and they hear we are from places like Lyari or Mangho Pir – out of eighteen districts in this city we are only in four! It’s not like we’ve overrun the place – and they feel like a
zulm
, an injury, has been done to them, like they’re insulted by us.’

One of the Prophet Muhammad’s earliest companions was a freed slave named Bilal, afforded the respectful honorific
Hazrat
on his death. Professor Hussain sees this religious heritage as a duty upon Muslims to ignore caste, creed and race. ‘In front of Allah,’ he intones, ‘we all say the same
kalma
, the same prayers – there’s no difference between dark or light, rich or poor.’

‘There is no room for us to progress,’ Maulabux continues, changing tack. ‘Maybe we get postings here and there, but that’s just for show. Where is the way up? People say, “Oh, these
kalas
, they’re everywhere in sports – in boxing, in football.” Yes, we are!
Lekin, jidd-o-jehad hai
. But it’s a struggle. Pakistan has only ever won one gold medal in anything’ – at this everyone laughs; knowing nothing of our sporting history, I’m impressed we have any medals at all – ‘in boxing. And it was a Sheedi who won it. But people still pretend we don’t exist. Watch people’s eyes when they think you’re an African foreigner in their country. Their eyes widen. You can see the yellows, the pinks and the white corners of their eyes.’

Habib interjects, ‘You know, in Sheedi communities you see the young idolizing Muhammad Ali, the Brazilian football team, the West Indies cricket team. These are our role models.’ ‘Bob Marley too,’ adds Maulabux nodding seriously. ‘Oh, and we were very, very upset when Michael Jackson died.’ Professor Hussain solemnly bows his head as he remembers the king of pop, a reference that is pointedly ignored by the others.

They tell me that the only time there was hope among the Sheedi was in the 1970s. Lyari, the largest of the four Sheedi districts, was spruced up. Hospitals, schools, sports stadiums were built and scholarships encouraged. ‘All our local heroes made their names then,’ Maulabux says. ‘Abbass, a famous traditional dancer, Asghar Baloch, a sports champ, the poet Noon Meem Danish [whose first name translates simply into the letters N and M], Malang Charlie and Zahoor Azad, two other great dancers. Azad didn’t think he’d ever get out of Karachi and see Mirpur Khas, let alone the rest of the world. He was sent to the United States on cultural tours.’

But all that changed. In 1977, General Zia ul-Haq overthrew the democratically elected government and ruled for the next ten years with an authoritarian Islamist creed, one that didn’t look kindly upon male dancers, or dancers of any sort. Karachi’s Sheedi community was at the forefront of resistance to the dictator and paid for their protests and campaigns with jail sentences and public torture. Hundreds were arrested, Maulabux and his comrades included, for defying martial law regulations and censorship, and speaking and acting against the government, whether by supporting lawyers’ movements, political rallies or student uprisings. Maulabux tells me how he and several other men put up posters of Nelson Mandela, at the height of South Africa’s apartheid, in Karachi’s central Regal
chowk
, or roundabout. ‘People here were shocked that this man of colour was fighting the whites in South Africa, they had no idea it was possible. Imagine, forgetting so quickly the lessons of partition …’

What about Obama? I ask Maulabux. Will his posters be put up on roundabouts? He looks sideways at me, a tug forming at the corner of his lips. ‘That’s politics. He’s American, they’re killing our people. White, black, it makes no difference in the White House.’

Habib, the police officer, isn’t bothered about Obama or Mandela or about the state that consigns the Sheedi to the periphery, simultaneously fighting them through police violence and ignoring them by depriving them of a stake in their country. ‘At the end of the day,’ he says, ‘we Sheedi are a community. If one person is in trouble, he has twenty people around him. That’s what we are, what we do. We take care of each other.’

Sarfraz Manzoor

 

H
er name was Bo and she was the first girl I ever loved. I was ten years old, a shy skinny brown boy with a mop of black curls, and Bo wasn’t just out of my league – she had descended from another universe. Bo was tall and beautiful, with sparkling white teeth and golden hair that swung in braids when she ran. I loved her but knew she would never be mine. She did not live in Luton, for a start, she was somewhat older than me, she was married and – the highest hurdle – she was white. Even at the age of ten I knew that while I could possibly have persuaded her to leave her husband, swap Los Angeles for Luton and consider being with a younger man, I could not make Bo brown. The futility of my adoration did nothing to dampen my feelings. ‘I love you, Bo,’ I would whisper as I gently caressed her photograph. The boys at school all loved Bo too, but I was the only one who took the trouble to write to her. One afternoon I strode into my local library and pulled out an edition of
Who’s Who
from which I located a Los Angeles address. That evening, while my family was downstairs watching television, I composed my first-ever love letter. ‘Dear Bo,’ I wrote, ‘I am writing to you because we both have something in common: I am ten years old, and you were in a film called
10
.’ There was no response. I was hurt at first, but I persuaded myself that it was for the best. We had always been doomed, Bo and I.

I was the son of working-class Pakistani parents, and they assumed I would have an arranged marriage with a fellow Pakistani Muslim. To them, white people were to be tolerated – but socializing was discouraged and forming relationships with white girls was unthinkable. I suspect my parents knew the scale of the challenge. Their favoured tactic to encourage me to stay away from the Caucasian menace was to relate stories, supposedly drawn from real life, which featured Pakistanis they had known who had drifted into relationships with white girls. The location of the stories could vary but the narrative was suspiciously similar in every tale. The story would begin with a gullible Pakistani boy who thought he knew better than his parents. This brazen lad would somehow be introduced to a white girl. In my parents’ retelling of these stories, the girls never had names and they seemed more like villains in a Grimm fairy tale than recognizable human beings. This nameless white girl would lure the poor Pakistani boy with her base charms until the fellow was helplessly under her spell. She would then proceed to fall pregnant, or bleed him dry of his money, or introduce him to hard drugs. ‘And do you know what happened after that?’ my mother would ask, her voice trembling and her eyes widening at the horror she was set to reveal. I would shake my head nervously, suspecting that whatever she was about to relate was unlikely to involve a happy and successful marriage. Sure enough, my mother would explain how the foolish Pakistani son had ended up becoming a heroin addict, or had been forced to sell several of his internal organs to repay his girlfriend’s debts, or had moved to Hitchin and become a taxi driver. These stories all finished with the same tragic coda. ‘And, you know, his parents …’ my mother would whisper darkly, her eyes reddening, ‘… they never speak about him – he is dead to them.’ I was raised on these miserable parables and so learned early on the barely veiled moral: if you find a white girl, you will lose your parents.

The consequence of my parents’ warnings was that I radiated extreme unease whenever I was around the white girls at my school, even as I was helplessly drawn towards them. The first was Julie. She wasn’t in my class and I was too shy to talk to her, so I simply tried to be around her as much as possible. A bit player in someone else’s romantic comedy. At home I would idle away hours in happy daydreams about Julie, but even then she was not my girlfriend; she would be my neighbour or my adopted sister. I imagined that Julie’s parents would end up buying the house next door to us or that they would be tragically killed and that my father would somehow adopt Julie so that she would be my sort of sister.

I was already a teenager around this time and lurking in the distance, like a shark’s fin slicing through the ocean’s surface, was the threat of an arranged marriage. Both my older brother and sister had married in Pakistan and it was thought inevitable that I would be married off to a Pakistani girl, someone with whom I shared a common religion, ethnic origin and possibly some of the same family members. Before this day came my parents believed it was their responsibility to ensure I was safely protected from temptation. My father discharged this responsibility admirably by driving his family around in a sunflower-yellow Vauxhall Viva while encouraging me to retain the soft fuzz above my upper lip at a time when everyone else had started shaving. I remained single throughout my time at home.

I finally left home at the age of eighteen to study at Manchester University. In my first week I attended the Freshers’ Fair, where I was given a welcome pack. I opened it later that afternoon when I was back in my room and inspected its contents. There was a guide to the various societies that were available to join, a handy map with all the university buildings and some other sheets of paper. I reached deeper into the pack to make sure I had not missed anything and found myself holding what looked like a soft lozenge. I looked closer and realized that it was not a sweet – it was a condom. I had heard of such things but never held one. It seemed an act of malicious cruelty to include the condoms – it turned out there were three – in the welcome pack. ‘Dear God, please let me get a chance to use them,’ I muttered as I unpeeled it and noted that it looked like a deflated balloon.