Karachi Lockdown: Day 10

Every day at 5 pm, there is a siren. A cop car passes through the neighborhood, blaring its siren, assumedly to remind people that it is time to close up shop and go home. The vegetable shop on the corner begins to pack up. The empty roads are swept. Some people disappear. Those who cannot disappear don’t: the children dragging sacks through the streets, sifting through the garbage in this neighborhood: cartons of milk, vegetable peels, empty crisps packets. The birds are getting braver: the kites sweep down, the pigeons come in clusters, the crows, for once, seem outnumbered. The cats wander around, perhaps dazed that there are no angry people chasing them away. One died last week. It was hit by a car: perhaps it was lulled into a false sense of security, having spent the morning on the roads. Perhaps some asshole just drove at full speed, confident that there would be empty streets ahead, unthinking of a cat who’d been playing on the road just moments ago.

The other day I saw a cop trying to disperse people who had gathered around a car where people were distributing a few bags of flour. He took out a lathi, though this being the bougie neighborhood that it is, he didn’t wield it, just waving it around as if it was a magic wand, that people would be terrified enough to leave at the mere sight of it. No one would, so he had to push the person doing the distribution back into the car, and tell them to organise their food drive at home.

There are barely any sounds at all after 5 pm. A car, a few motorcycles, the odd rickshaw. Someone’s car alarm. Another day passes. It is discomforting. It feels like 1995 sometimes: watching the city from the rusty grilles of our old apartment, waiting for the city to reopen. But there are no negotiations to be had, no strikes, no us v/s them v/s them. It’s just waiting.