Thread by @XilleIlahi

Now that most of you are safely asleep, I think it's a good time to drop the first chapter of a new story and then faux outrage tomorrow at the lack of retweets. Strap in, you're in for a ride.

Here's the first chapter of #TairveenGully

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Many Karachiites might not be able to recollect its exact location off hand, but the vast majority are familiar with the name of Fauji Qabristan, the military cemetery next to the much more well-known Gora Qabristan...

...at the foot of the Kala Pul, that, in the public consciousness at least, divides the city’s haves and have-nots. Among its more famous permanent residents is Governor General Sir Malik Ghulam Muhammad.

There are those who would say that apart from being buried in it since 1955, the only relevance the late Governor General has to the city is being the villain who paved the way for an enduring imbalance in civil military relations in the country –

the fallout of which has always had an impact on the relationship of the city with its parent country; and the somewhat outsized role chartered accountants have in Pakistan’s society.

They would not be entirely wrong.

However, a year or so before he died in 1954, he signed into action a law that led to the formation of the Karachi Cooperative Housing Societies Union, a union of 25 housing societies catering to the residential needs of the inflow of migrants from across the border.

One of these was Barabanki Town.

The original Barabanki across the border had acquired its name from the Awadhi term for the place – Baara Baankay – which could be loosely translated as 12 bullies, referring to the constant internecine bickering and clashes between the 12 main landlords of the district.

And while we may never know if this had an influence on the city planners of Karachi, the Barabanki Town masterplan was mapped into 12 neat streets with a small green belt at the end to serve as a buffer between the society and the railway track.

Karachi and its residents are known to believe in many things. The city is home to followers of every religion practiced in the country, not that that is a high bar.

There are also more than a fair share of conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, antivaxxers, race supremacists, homeopaths, and willing participants in every get rich quick scheme known to man.

Karachi and its residents believe in many things but they do not generally believe in masterplans. This is probably why the green belt at the end of Barabanki Town somehow transformed into a thirteenth street with a row of five houses.

The thirteenth street was the only one without an official name, perhaps because it wasn’t an official street or perhaps because none of the residents of the five houses had illustrious enough forbears...

...to inspire them to petition the KCHSU to name the modest strip of tarmac just about a 100 metres long after them.

Or perhaps because the street itself was unusually hard to access, with one end walled off as the backside of Shabbirabad and the other somewhat hidden behind the Gomti Masjid and Haidergarh Hall which served as a community center for the residents of Barabanki Town.

Or maybe there was actually an official name, but nobody remembered it. Be that as it may, the street was known simply as Thirteenth Street, or Tairveen Gully in the local parlance.

While Barabanki Town as a whole is not the most famous residential project in Karachi, or even in the KCHS Area, there had been times when its name featured in the press. Admittedly most of these were in obituaries and the occasional legal notice but it wasn’t entirely unknown.

The Gomti Masjid is a minor architectural landmark and during the late 90s and early 2000s was noticeable for the highly intellectual Friday sermons of its main preacher, Allama Sohail Attari,...

...who managed to fuse the works of western philosophers like Nietzsche with the teachings of Ahmed Raza and discuss them at length along with the low brow rulings on daily life that Friday sermons are usually expected to be about.

However, even that unique mix paled in comparison to the press attention that the original Barabanki’s most famous son, Bollywood actor Naseeruddin Shah, received when he inaugurated the Khumar Barabankvi Library at Haidergarh Hall during a visit to Karachi in 2003.

Since then though the attention had been scant. The months and years passed, Gomti Masjid got a milder, more run of the mill preacher; Haidergarh Hall continued to be more of a venue for Barabanki Town residents to have wedding receptions and Iftar parties in...

...and it became less reasonable to expect a taxi driver to know where you wanted to go if you merely named the locality without saying it was behind Shabbirabad.

Most of the original migrants from Barabanki migrated further to their final resting places and their heirs often sold the houses and moved to different parts of the city or even abroad as is the case of all people everywhere.

The community began to fill up with the usual suspects you’d expect to see in a KCHS neighborhood – Memons, Delhi Saudagaraan, Dawoodi Bohras whose houses in Shabbirabad were no longer enough to house the expanding families,...

...businessmen and builders, doctors and engineers, and all manner of respectable people.

The houses got renovated, often increasing the covered area and adding floors, population got a little denser, more children played cricket in the twelve streets and the ground of Haidergarh Hall,...

...more drivers and watchmen sat on the street corners, more fruit and vegetable pushcarts passed through, and Barabanki Town looked as much like its surrounding areas as it always had.

All except the Tairveen Gully.

The ownership of the five houses on that street never changed hands from the families of the original residents. It remained a somewhat secret, silent oasis in the midst of the relative hubbub of thriving streets.

The families living in the houses on Tairveen Gully didn’t change the structure of the houses though times had dictated the installation of grillwork where there previously had been none...

... and the obvious cosmetic updating by coats of paint and the occasional new wood frames on the windows.

The trees on Tairveen Gully grew taller than the ones on neighboring streets, further isolating the lane from public consciousness, and more birds seemed to nest in them – the resultant bird droppings making them unattractive options for serving as shade trees.

Not many of the newer residents of Barabanki Town were even aware of the existence of the street and since the people from the five houses didn’t seem to mingle with others much,...

...the gradual erasure of Tairveen Gully would have probably continued unabated until they were wiped entirely from public memory.

Probably.

But something happened in the summer of 2020. And the press descended on Tairveen Gully like vultures. Beat reporters and stringers and photographers, the bigger media channels with their news vans and cameras, the smaller ones with whatever they could muster.

The chai wala with the stall next to the Haidergarh Hall had the best month of business in his life as Barabanki Town featured on prime time talk shows and front-page pieces across the country.

Candlelight vigils were held by segments of liberal society, clerics railed loud and long from pulpits, political rallies from opposition party types were incomplete...

...without criticism of the government for bringing the matter to a conclusion and parents across Karachi insisted on their children coming home earlier at night.

Every civilian law enforcement agency had spokesmen giving daily updates and the rumor mills worked overtime to cater to the WhatsApp uncles and Facebook aunties and TikTok kids who had to weigh in with an opinion on what had happened on the thirteenth street of Barabanki Town.

A street is not just a street. It is the buildings it serves, the people who walk or ride or drive on it, the vehicles that park on it, the hawkers who pass through it with their pushcarts and cycles and motorbikes,...

...the temporary qanaats and shamianas that host milads, majaalis, weddings and funerals on it, the silent pads of the neighborhood cats, the scraped knees of the little girl who fell from her bike on it, the boys who played cricket on it,...

...the curses of the angry neighbors who quarreled on it, the glances lovers exchanged on it, the stubbed cigarettes, the fallen leaves, the dust, the dirt and the puddles.

A street is not just a street. It is the sum total of everything that has ever happened on it.

And so it is with Tairveen Gully, the unofficial afterthought in Barabanki Town, Karachi.

***to be continued***

If this is easier for you to read as a single post, you can do so here:

patreon.com/posts/61551034

Ehtisham Ahmed Laliwala had what he described as “swag”. He was 6 feet tall, well-built and had a glorious head of hair. The mane was most of his claim to fame. Shoulder length, keratin straightened, thick, luxuriant and glistening,...

...it had helped him amass over 800,000 followers on the social media app, TikTok, where he was known by his moniker of Shami Dada and had several viral videos of himself walking in slow motion with hip hop music playing in the background.

At the age of 26, Shami was a little old by Karachi standards to still be chasing an undergrad degree but a valid counterpoint to that was that he was paying for it from his own income as a model, influencer, and fabric trader and it was nobody’s business how much time he took.

Indeed, the undergrad degree was in fashion design, so he liked to tell his father that it was actually good for the business that he was taking so long in completing it as there was so much more he could learn while still at school.

The elder Laliwala, a successful civil engineer, wasn’t really moved by this argument but an aversion to discord within his walls and the fact that Shami wasn’t much of a burden on his finances anymore – even if he was an embarrassment in his social circle – kept him silent.

Rakhshanda, his wife, was a lot prouder of her son and though her conservative upbringing often left her scandalized at the choice of lyrics Shami selected for his videos, she maintained two accounts on TikTok just to “like” everything he posted.

Shami would have easily been identified by all residents of the locality if he was walking to his home at 126 Barabanki Town by virtue of his hair alone, but as someone who drove a lovingly refurbished red Jeep Willy there was no chance of mistaking him for someone else.

It was normally parked outside the house in the seventh street of Barabanki Town, Sharae Maulvi Abdul
Bari Nadvi; partially because Shami liked as many people to see it as was possible and partially because the driveway could accommodate only his father’s Honda Civic.

The Jeep was well known not only in Barabanki Town but also at the Iqra University campus where he studied and the Gulf Market Shopping Centre at Teen Talwar where Shami’s outlet was.

It wasn’t just a vehicle after all. Shami made a statement in everything he did whether it was dressing up, or driving, or playing cricket or flirting with the ladies.

Everything had to be flamboyant and eye catching as if the primary purpose of performing an act was not the act itself but how it would be perceived by an impartial observer.

It followed naturally, perhaps, that a billboard in the Sindhi Muslim area had been adorned with a panaflex poster reading “You are only Shami Dada’s, Kiran” for the past 18 days. Not many people could point out who Kiran was but the Shami Dada bit on the hoarding was easy enough

And if there were still any doubt, a video of Shami in his red Jeep parked under the sign had gone viral a couple of days ago. He had dubbed it with an old Bollywood song that echoed the sentiment of the poster to a character named Kiran.

And it was this video that had made the elder Laliwala feel that enough was enough. A friend of his had forwarded it to him on WhatsApp that afternoon and he had headed home furious at having been shamed by his son’s antics.

Ahmed Laliwala was from what is normally called a “decent family” in Karachi and the public display of loutishness from his son was not something he would tolerate.

As the hours passed and Shami didn’t come home or answer his or Rakhshanda’s calls, Ahmed felt his blood pressure rising and his wife feared that he would have a stroke if her son didn’t return home soon.

She slipped into the bedroom for a minute to send a voice note to Shami, imploring him to return home at once. But Shami did not respond.

By 11:00 pm she was more worried about him not answering the texts and calls than she was about what her husband would do to him when he came home. By 12:30 she was calling his friends to ask if they knew where he was.

At 2:30 am both Ahmed and her were worried enough to drive out to the shopping centre and university campus to look for him.

At 4:30 Ahmed Laliwala woke up his best friend from his college days, a Colonel in the Army Engineering Corp, and with a shaking, tearful voice told him that his only son was missing.

Colonel Faraz Naqvi tried to placate his friend on the phone at first but then realized this was not something that would settle so easily.

He got into his car and drove from his home in Askari 4 to the Laliwala residence in Barabanki Town, muttering to himself about how parents should know when to leave an adult son to his own devices. His mood changed though when he reached.

Rakhshanda and Ahmed Laliwala were standing at the gate, waiting for some news of their son. Rakshanda was weeping profusely, and the Colonel could see that his usually stoic friend was also wracked with worry.

Colonel Naqvi took them both inside and made them sit down. He tried to tell them that young men do these things and that anything short of a day or two of being late wasn’t anything to be concerned about.

When Ahmed told him about the billboard, he got even more convinced that the case was probably a simple one of the son sleeping at a friend’s place until his father’s wrath died down. But as a lifelong friend of the family, he knew Shami as well as anyone else.

And a thought kept nagging him that even if Shami was going to pull a disappearing act, he wasn’t the type to let his mother worry. He quietly texted a colleague in the Military Police to pull a few strings and attempt to triangulate Shami’s phone.

As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary.

At 6:15 the Colonel stepped out to smoke a cigarette while the Laliwalas took a minute to have their medication and offer prayers.

It was then that one of the security guards from the street behind came up to him and said the red Jeep had been seen parked near the entrance of the Tairveen Gully behind Haidergarh Hall...

....and added, rather cryptically, that it would be best if the Colonel came to take a look before telling the parents. There was blood on the road.

Ehtisham Ahmed Laliwala was like a nephew to the Colonel, if not a son. He didn’t wait and jogged to the Jeep with the guard to see a small crowd of watchmen and drivers and newspaper delivery men...

...gathering around what looked like an unscathed vehicle neatly parked under one of the trees. And then he saw the blood. Faraz Naqvi was a military man. Blood didn’t faze him. As he stepped closer through the crowd...

he registered that the blood trail looked like something bleeding heavily had been dragged toward the Jeep, not the other way round. This was a positive in his mind. It meant that it wasn’t a case of an injured Shami crawling out of the car.

But then he looked towards the doorless Jeep. Slumped against the wheel was the body of a very dead Shami. Faraz Naqvi was a military man, but he needed to take a breath and steady himself.

Not only was his nephew dead but his legs were missing, only the upper half of his body balanced on the driver’s seat, propped up only by the steering wheel.

Colonel Naqvi stepped back and waved the crowd back. With a shaking hand he pulled his phone from his pocket and placed a call to the police. Then, on slow unsteady steps, he headed towards the Laliwala residence to shatter his best friend’s heart.

***to be continued***