I was ten when my grandfather died. In Pakistani culture, mourning is a collective endeavour – people pay their respects in person, and bring food for the bereaved. I remember a few disorienting days off school, sitting in my grandparents’ flat in west London as it steadily filled with people, some I recognised and some I didn’t. People spilled out of the living room and into the corridors. They crowded around the kitchen table – heaving with casserole dishes and Tupperware – and leaned against the counters. There were prayers, tears, even laughter as people shared stories about my grandfather. At one point, a cousin dragged me into one of the bedrooms, declaring that we needed some peace. We sat together and relished the almost-silence. But it was cathartic too. And at the centre of it all was my grandmother, tears running down her face for days, but still taking strength from the people around her. She was always in her element surrounded by people.
A decade later, in my early twenties, I started spending time in Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan and my grandfather’s home town. My grandmother moved there from Indore after getting married in 1948; it was a year after Partition, and she passionately took to her new home and new identity as a Pakistani. I’d grown up hearing her stories about Karachi, the cosmopolitan, seaside heart of the new nation. But the city I saw in 2011 – during my first visit since childhood – had radically changed since my grandparents left for London in the 1970s. It was in the middle of an extraordinary outbreak of violence, with ethnic conflict, gang war and terrorism spinning out of control. I was there primarily as a journalist, but also because I wanted to understand more about this place that had featured so heavily in the tapestry of my childhood.
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