More French Beach

Somehow in the years that I haven't spent in Karachi, I've forgotten just how awful camels smell. My dad always shakes his head and says "Badly designed animals."




Some more pictures of French Beach-
I'm kinda in love with pebbles, so be glad I haven't posted more of those.

Tribal Truck Art

Found on a street in Old Clifton with a sign that proclaimed Tribal Truck Art.
I have no idea what it means, or where it's from-
But it was love at first sight

Mohatta Palace

When I first started taking pictures, someone told me that if didn't like the way light moved, how it transformed an object, photography was not for me.
That advice has remained with me for years and years.
Lighting and I are not friends- we fight a lot.
But at Mohatta Palace today, the sun sat low and in the west, and I found that shadows and geometric angles can make or break a photographic experience.



The History of the Mohatta Palace:
The summer home of Shivratan Mohatta, the palace was built in the late 1920s in the Rajasthan style from the Mogul era. After Mohatta was forced to leave Karachi (political upheaval made a Hindu's stay in Pakistan close to impossible) the palace became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After a while, it was given to Fatima Jinnah, the sister of Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan) where it became the hub for her campaign for presidency. After her death, Shireen bai, her sister moved into the grounds for many years.



Today, the palace has been converted into a museum that currently holds an exhibition called "Tales of the Tiles," which showcases the history of decorative ceramics in the region of Pakistan

I'd been hounding both of my parents to take my to the palace from the first time I glimpsed it out of a car window, driving past Do Talwar (Two Swords).

Rusted metal, rotting wood- offset by the shadows and lines of the window sills were absolutely beautiful. I was instantly in love- floral motifs, balustrades, spandrels and exquisite railings aside, there's something majestic about the palace.


I made both Ammar and Abajaan insane with my incessant need to shift my camera and stop every two seconds. After the eighth or ninth window sill, even Mom was irritated-





Behind the palace, we discovered an assorted collection of "English Statues." Queen Victoria stood tall and pale in her alabaster form.
I learned from one of the men working at the building that after Shireen Bai's death, the palace was left to rot. It was only after Benazir Bhutto's government assigned Rs. 70 million to the Culture Department that the palace was converted into a museum. Apparently the building had to be sandblasted to its orignal color as layers of soil and grime had accumulated over the decades. The frescoes on the ceilings had to be repainted by hand, and the roof, doors and windows had to be carefully conserved.

Linens and Things

Pick one, any one.

On Beauty and Being Just

When the sun's high in the sky, and you can feel the heat bead on your upper lip, I've found that the kind of restlessness that seeps into me can only be solved by reading.
Usually, I grab a lawn chair, sit in the garden by the rock-wall and curl up and read. One end of my dupatta curled in my hand, wiping the sweat from my forehead.
My courtship of book stores in Karachi has been similar to that of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw-
I walked out of my first bookstore with Wally Lamb's This Much I Know is True and On Beauty.
It's been a while since I really fell headlong in love with a book like this one. Zadie Smith has always been able to astound me with the way she develops her characters- each and everyone as real and solid as I imagine real people.
This book however, was the kind of book that stays with you days after reading it.
She writes so beautifully- each and every word carefully chewed, tasted and deliberated before being put on paper.

The book is her homage to Howard's End by E.M. Forster- but it's so lyrically rich, that I'd never compare her to him. Her title and her story are influenced by Elaine Scarry's essay "On Beauty and Being Just." The Belsey children and Victoria (Vee) Kipps, are as real as if they were walking off the page and into my life. I can imagine each and every nook and cranny of the small college town she describes, and the esoteric conversation that occurs within the academia circles makes me relive those conversations that happened in Karen Osborne's Intro to Creative Writing class.

There are very few books I'd recommend to everyone that I know, and this is definitely one of them. Hand in hand with Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, Khaled Hosseini's Kite Runner, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, On Beauty's climbed to the top of my list of books you have to read before you die.

"Will I be on television?"

I made friends with this man:


I had wrapped my dupatta around my waist nervously and was standing on the balls of my feet before I found the courage to look him in the eye and asked "can I take your picture?"

I've found that often behind the lens of my camera I feel intrusive. I don't know quite how to balance looking spoiled, with an expensive camera hanging around my neck, with seeming genuinely interesting.

He was holding a piece of sand paper and an indiscernible piece of wood. There was a pause. I definitely wasn't loud enough. I asked again. He nodded silently, slowly.

I began taking pictures.
That shutter click that my Nikon makes was for one full second the only sound in my ear.



He sat on a stool positioned beside his cart. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. And realized that both of his eyebrows were raised. He was staring at me while I figured out composition. The next three pictures were blurry.


His craftsmanship was impeccable. Think film. One shot to get it right. Can't waste it. The blurry pictures stopped. He kept sanding the piece of wood in his hand. I took pictures of the stools.



Of the pots.



I dropped my camera to hang around my neck, then re-wrapped my dupatta around my neck so it was hidden from view.
And then he finally spoke.
"Will I be on television?"

This odd thing hangs from our stairwell. I'm kind of in love with it. I stare at it every time I go upstairs or downstairs.
You'd think after four and a half weeks here, I'd be less amused. Not so much.

Textile City

One of the things about Karachi that I find most striking is the range of textiles available. From what everyone's wearing on their cotton Shalwar Kameez, to what's hanging in the malls and bazaar, the variety of cloth here is astounding.

When you go to buy cloth, they're usually stored in sets of three complementing designs. One's for the shalwar, the ballooning, clown pant like part of the traditional Pakistani's outfit. The legs are wide at the top, and narrow at the bottom. Most often, these are a solid color.
One's for the Kameez, the long tunic top worn over the shalwar. These are usually in some sort of pattern, a burst of colors.
The last part is the dupatta, a long piece of fabric work around the neck and/or over the head. This usually matches the shalwar and kameez by bringing together both patterns.

My camera and I have fallen in love with the swaying, swishing colors of cloth in the bazaars.



I found these dupattas hanging in a bazaar. I found their detail gorgeous.



Almost all of the people passing by this stall stopped to look at them. The little tassel things hanging on the ends aren't something found often.



On most days, I see so many colors, I can't figure out where I should focus.

Street Food

Sometimes the link between smell, taste and memory amaze me. There would be nights in Cypress, in South Hadley, where I would wake confused. The taste of chaat masala, of red chili pepper still on my mind, on my tongue.
Missing the abundance of street food in Karachi had almost become a fact of life. Then I came back.

Here guys on little carts sell all kinds of delicacies: Assorted fruit, spiced and cut; sweet potatoes, roasted on coal and then sprinkled with salt and red chili powder; lemonade, squeezed fresh and spiced with rocksalt and chaat masala; chickpeas roasted in a wok filled with salt and pepper; and of course corn.

There are basically two ways to eat corn off a street vendor. The first is to eat the corn on the cob, roasted and sprinkled with lemon juice and red chili pepper.

The second, and my personal favorite is to buy little bags of the kernels which are roasted in a mixture of salt and pepper until crisp. Then the "bhuttawalla" (guy who sells street corn) squeezes lemon, salt, and red chili powder on it. Finally, he opens a small bag made of old newspaper, pours an adequate amount of "makai" (the corn kernels) into the bag, and hand it to you.

Livin' La Vida Loca

One of my personal goals for this summer was to share Karachi via color and light to everyone who may want to witness it the way I am. I look at things in a wave of familiarity and newness, and I wanted to artistically document each and every thing I saw.
Finding the courage to take out my camera in a country plagued with theft and fear has been hard.

Today, in a burst of boredom, I took my camera and decided to do two things with it.
(1) Play with light and focus in ways I never would have been able to on a film camera and (2) Take pictures of the things in my grandparents house that make me feel like I really am living at home.


This bell is located inside the birdcage of our beloved parrot Kasuku. It's one of the few toys inside his cage that he actually bothers to play with. It's his way of warning us that he's in a bad mood, that there's a cat near his cage, or even that he really would like some ice.



This candle sits on the t.v. stand in the downstairs lounge. My aunt and grandmother have such an artistic flair for the little things that make a house a home.




This assortment of blown glass candy seriously confused me the first day I was here. My stomach still suffering from jet lag, I found the candy in a random 3 a.m. burst of hunger. I was somewhat disappointed, to say the least, to find that they were inedible.





The napkin holder. In true Pakistani fashion, people eat with their hands. Because of this, perhaps, most dining areas have a sink placed outside so that washing prior to and after meals is much easier. This napkin holder, hung right beside the sink is subject to various kinds of abuse as every member in the household tugs and crinkles the napkin hanging on it.




Everywhere in Karachi dust lurks. It's on your book after an hour of leaving it abandoned on the side of the coffee table. It's inside your coffee mug in the morning when you retrieve it from the cabinet. It's also melted to these candles, which I found rather amusing, and kind of beautiful as well.



Lighting fixtures in my grandparent's house are as varied as the room they're inside. This one matches the gorgeous chandelier inside our formal sitting room, also known as a parlour. When I was a small child, the parlour was totally off limits. The sparkle and glamor of the parlour has not been lost in the years in which the parlour is no longer off limits.




This wall ornament, I find absolutely hideous. No joke. Whoever decided placing a Japanese themed anything in a house oscillating between both the rich colors of Pakistan and the details of an East African heritage was a good idea, was seriously deranged in my opinion.