Karachi, or the intimacy of a city that never chose me
I think of Karachi the way you think of a room you once slept in but never really lived inside. The ceiling fan keeps spinning in memory. The heat hums. The streets feel known in the body but not in the timeline. I was born there, which sounds decisive, but it is not.
Birth is an event. Belonging is a repetition. Karachi gave me the first and withheld the second.
When I return to it in my head, the city feels split. Half recognition, half estrangement. I know its chaos without knowing its rituals. I understand its noise without understanding how people learn to survive inside it. The familiarity comes from blood, not habit. The alienness comes from distance, from growing up elsewhere, from learning the world through other cities that worked a little better or at least pretended to.
Violence collapses the abstraction.
Losing my uncle there to sectarian violence made the city real in a way geography never could. Karachi stopped being a backdrop and became a force, something that takes as much as it gives. It is a place of extraordinary possibility, ambition, density, intelligence, hustle. And yet the systems that should hold all of that together never quite jibe.
Corruption, fear, inertia, and exhaustion sit where institutions should be. The city keeps generating energy, and something keeps siphoning it off.
That is the contradiction that never resolves. Karachi is always almost something. Almost fixed. Almost stable. Almost livable in the way its people deserve. It promises constantly, loudly, seductively. Then it breaks those promises without apology, as if disappointment is just another cost of living.
Loving it feels naive. Abandoning it feels disloyal. Holding both feelings at once becomes the only honest position.
So Karachi becomes less a place and more a truth I carry. Some things shape you without ever becoming yours. Some places cannot be repaired, only witnessed. I do not expect it to keep its promise anymore. I only notice how much it still tries, and how much that effort, unfinished and unresolved, still explains something about me.