arachi is, in Safdar’s eyes, his city. Having lived in different parts of Karachi, and experiencing going back and forth to a hospital due to having a brother who suffers from polio, the Karachi that emerges from Safdar’s perspective is very unusual than someone who never ventures out beyond certain parts of the city. But it was only after he started working for the Edhi foundation, and took on the job of being one of its ambulance drivers that he realized the sprawling nature of Karachi and his “limited geography”. It was not just about driving an injured patient to the hospital. The arduous task often required going into areas where you could almost smell violence in the air, and picking up mangled carcasses instead of alive people in need of an ambulance. But the helplessness he felt and the frenzy that became a characteristic once he joined Edhi is a good way to rope in a reader and paint one view of the true nature of Karachi, both literally and metaphorically.

A non-fictional effort, published by Granta, Samira has spoken to a group of unconnected individuals - who bring the book alive. And her writing puts us in the middle of these stories. The prose is so strong that reading each chapter feels like being there, during each narrative and each story.

The chapters as a collective allow Karachi to emerge as its own character, which is beautiful and brutal, violent and silent, and not a city that can be dismissed.

The colonial architecture is as present as are the areas that are controlled by the dangerous land mafia with no end in sight.

Before each chapter begins with an individualistic story, Karachi Vice offers a timeline of major events, the political groups that are particularly significant in the larger political realm and a map. Before the first chapter, these additions help in providing a national context as well as the importance of the port city.

If the first chapter is about Safdar, other chapters showcase the stories of many other voices that give Karachi this unfathomable character.

Safdar’s Karachi story is a refreshing narrative. He isn’t the only one. Another perspective introduced – among others - is the story of a crime reporter, Zille, with more than a decade in the field. As we learn about Zille’s experience set in the city by the sea, it’s a whole other ballgame. It quickly becomes clear that the journalist, as Shackle points out, was following the truth but he had learned to “self-censor, to hedge around the subject, to avoid mentioning a specific party. And off screen, where risk lurked at every corner.”

He, notes Karachi Vice, cared a great deal about contacts. And knew who were some of the power players and well acquainted with words such as encounter, an extra judicial killing.

One chapter is dedicated to Lyari, where its history is put in context to a point that you begin to understand why its reputation and reality is so interwoven and why when the word Lyari comes up, many of us immediately think of gangster space.

To give the various other characters away would be tragic for Karachi Vice is a study in human intent, the fragility of life in the city as well as people who do their best and give us hope that there will be a morning where we will not read about crime figures in Karachi daily and those who want to change the narrative.

Karachi, the city by the sea, is a subject that some of the best authors in and of the country have used as a backdrop and is an idea we wholeheartedly approve of.

Other Karachi-based titles to look out for…

Although this can be a pretty lengthy list, we’re shortlisting down to just four books, set against the port city. They collectively offer a comprehensive look at the maximum city in the context of pop and social culture, intellectual work, under the categories of both fiction and non-fiction.

Omar Shahid Hamid has set several books in Karachi including his debut, The Prisoner. You will either have a good time reading his book or not, but if you do enjoy this debut, follow up on his other Karachi-centered books. Each gets better than the next.

Kamila Shamsie’s debut book, In the city by the sea, as the name suggest is the Karachi-centric story about an 11-year-old boy, Hasan and how everything in his life changes after one ill-fated morning. The fact that the protagonist is an 11-year-old gives this Kamila Shamsie debut a very intriguing narrative.

Looking for intellectual, historical perspective on Karachi? You don’t need to look beyond Laurent Gayer’s Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City. Much denser than the aforementioned, it is brusque and a comprehensive meditation on the sprawling city including power structure, intense violence, the role of post-migration from India on the city and a great deal more.

For a lighter, social and pop culture woven book, told through the eyes of a young female journalist, as she navigates her way through the world of journalism and the country that is on extreme spectrums, opt for Saba Imtiaz’s Karachi, You’re Killing Me. Set against Karachi, the book is not contrived as it comes close to a changing time in the field of journalism as well as the city.