A House in Karachi

Abstract

A House in Karachi Rafia Zakaria (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution It sits on a hill—a fact that does not, in most places, distinguish a house as anything beyond ordinary. But it does in Karachi, which is in large part a flat city, squat and sprawling and a bit surly on the edge of the Indian Ocean. There are so few hills here that a house on a hill can only been found in two or three locales. But this is a special house for more than just the gradient of its setting—it is the home of my grandparents, the site of more laughter and the cause of more tears than any other my life. When the house was built, two similar but not identical others were built on either side, the homes of two of my grandfather's brothers. Three out of seven sons of my great grandparents, all living on the same street, the same hill. To get to the house, one has to ascend a steep driveway, a feat as odd for drivers in this flat city as encountering a snowstorm in the desert. When my mother drove, she relished the moment and our gasping delight. Would we make it? Would the car slip back, the blunder of a lower gear? We always got to the top, and from the head of the driveway we raced through the back entrance and past the large wooden cage [End Page 111] of parakeets and up the kitchen stairs and into the arms of an aunt and then another aunt and then my grandmother. Up we climbed, to lunch, which we ate early and they ate late, or to tea, which my grandmother sweetened with generous teaspoons of condensed milk. If we were good, and sometimes even if we weren't, we got to lick the spoons. The house was midcentury modern with three floors and wraparound decks. It was very nearly palatial, an adjective that was apt for unusual reasons. My grandmother had, quite literally, grown up in a palace. It was a palace in exile, but still … a palace. Her parents had been part of the retinue of the Aga Khan, the last of the Iranian Qajar dynasty, which had to flee Iran for Bombay in the 1920s when she was a child. In a story that was top-secret, and which I only pieced together many years later, she had eloped to marry my grandfather, an ordinary man from an equally ordinary straitlaced and middle-class Indian Muslim family. Before this house, my grandparents had lived in many others, all of them cramped or in distant suburbs, or old and crumbling, or all of the above. This house was the fulfillment of a young bridegroom's promise, the return to his bride of the life she had left for him. On either side lived her brothers-in-law, men who had for a very long time refused to accept her into the family, now unable to turn their faces away from the woman they had blamed for "stealing" their brother. The bond between my grandparents, their love marriage, would set the course for the marriages of all their daughters and at least one of their granddaughters, me. Because my mother had run off, the shadow of moral laxity—of headstrong independence, of an errant nature—hung over the house. My own story would be a bit different, but its opening scenes would also play out in the house on the hill. Behind and to the side of the house was a terraced garden, which began with a plush lawn bordered by rose and jasmine bushes. The blooms, whose heady scent punctuates my earliest memories, were resplendent, two or even three shades in a single flower's petals, pink and yellow and cream and burgundy. If you climbed up the stone steps hewn in the hillside you came to a vegetable garden: rows of the hottest peppers, okra, and the curry leaves whose fronds we picked and whose strong and spicy smells emanated from nearly everything my grandmother cooked. The higher terraces beyond were off-limits to us, unless an adult accompanied us...