I have a new story out at Roads & Kingdoms today about Karachi, development, the saga of Empress Market’s destruction, and the stripping away of everything that made the city what it was. I reported this story with the support of the IWMF’s Kim Wall Memorial Fund, and Alexa van Sickle edited it at R&K. I spent a lot of time doing archival research for the story, and went through a lot of crime reporting over the decades, starting from the 1950s, to see how food and crime had been interlinked in the city. Read it here.

But returning to a Karachi of the past, or to an era when Empress Market was first built, isn’t returning to some idyllic time. By the 1950s, crime had begun to filter into the city’s coffee shops and cafes. Food rationing was in place, which only ended in 1960 in West Pakistan, now current-day Pakistan. There was blood, literally, on the kitchen floor. A “cold-blooded murder” took place in April 1950, when a 28-year-old butler named, inexplicably, “Chicken Sanders,” was stabbed to death in a room at Frederick’s Cafeteria. The archives of Dawn, one of Pakistan’s oldest newspapers, are full of these stories: In 1952, a butcher stabbed a restaurant owner in Lea Market over non-payment for a cup of tea—except he had the wrong butcher. There was a brawl over not being served alcohol, or a fight breaking out over the “construction of a tea stall.” A water shortage in Karachi resulted in a murder: “The two accused stabbed a man when he refused to leave a public water tap by the side of a road.”