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I RECENTLY made a short trip to the UAE and the glittering city of Dubai, which I enjoy visiting, and I always have a pleasant time when I go there. But every time I return, and I’m back on the rundown streets of Karachi that smell of so many different energies and emotions — ambition, frustration want, struggle, greed, despair, joie de vivre — I’m reminded that while Dubai may glitter, Karachi is gold.
One day I travelled by taxi with my family in Jumeirah, the beachside neighbourhood filled with resorts and private medical centres.
Our taxi driver was a sweet lad from India, with a calm demeanour and a ready smile. Within a few moments of conversation, he asked my father if we were from Karachi.
When my father replied in the affirmative, the taxi driver nodded knowingly. “The moment I heard you speak, I thought, you are from Karachi, but you are either Gujrati, or you have been living out of Pakistan for many years.”
“But we’re Sindhi,” said my father, and we all laughed.
The taxi driver chuckled, and told us that although he was from Gujrat, he too was Sindhi, eliciting happy gasps from all of us. Switching from Hindi to Sindhi, he told us — his name was Pardeep — how his Hindu family had emigrated from Sindh to Gujrat at the time of Partition.
They lived in Baroda, the only Sindhi family in the entire neighbourhood. He said apologetically that his Sindhi was unpractised, although he spoke it with his mom (he used the English word) and grandmother.
He proceeded to tell us about his family, the brothers who emigrated, the distant cousin who had stayed behind, the ones who started their own businesses and were ‘set’, versus the ones who only got jobs and so never ‘settled’ properly. And he told us with pride how his mother could read and write Sindhi, but that few of them now spoke it in their family.
His own Sindhi was strongly Gujrati-accented, and I loved hearing the lilt and sway in his words as we drove through the butter-smooth streets of Jumeirah.
My father asked him where in Sindh his family had come from. Pardeep named a village in Sindh that none of us had heard of — Saiyal, or something to that effect. Many of his people came from around Sukkur as well. He told us his surname and my father told him there were many Sindhi Hindus with that name.
Pardeep asked us if we wanted to hear some Sindhi music and put on a tape of Sindhi bhajans.
The dulcet tones of a woman singing the songs of religious praise to Krishna and Ram surrounded us and we sighed to hear something so familiar and exotic at the same time.
Pardeep explained how as part of their worship, they listened to the songs first thing each morning. He then announced that he was ‘full veg’, having given up eating even fish when he became the devotee of a certain guru. Milk was allowed, eggs not, as that was considered killing a chick.
Pardeep told us more about his family, who were jagirdars, and had so much land that they used to make rounds of their lands on horseback that lasted all day long.
It was the unburdening of family folklore that he’d carried around for years until he could relate it to someone who would truly understand the time and place when it had been reality, not myth.
My father said that he too was a zamindar, and related a little more of the way of life in rural Sindh today, tales about the farms and crops and the people.
Pardeep drank it all in, thirsty for the knowledge of this homeland he’d heard of but never seen with his own eyes. It’s like that with all the Sindhi Hindus we’ve ever met, who express everything from curiosity to wistfulness to regret to hope that they might one day be reunited with the beloved land they were forced to leave behind.
Pardeep said, “I have never been to Sindh but listening to you talk, now I want to visit.” We encouraged him to come, as Sindhis always do when they meet each other anywhere in the world — the timeless ritual of hospitality made even more poignant by the fact that our would-be guest felt like long-lost family.
We reached our destination, and alighted from the taxi. We said goodbye to Pardeep. And all I could think was how when people from Pakistan and India meet each other, it’s like looking in a mirror and being surprised at seeing yourself in its reflection.
The writer is an author.
