God, I miss the shops.

I don’t miss the actual act of shopping itself: even though I spend a considerable amount of time looking at things online. The idea of amassing things for the sake of amassing things is wrong, as is that our clothes are made by underpaid, undervalued, nameless labour, and after I have spent hours on stitching a very small piece of fabric or making a few rows of knitting, I think of how this work is undervalued to a criminal, unimaginable extent.

One of the things I love about living in Karachi is that we all dress differently: there is a certain kind of effortlessness at play, even in those who are doing the most. The entire lacquered veneer is for night; by day, even the rich are in their pyjamas, bumping their carts at Agha’s, standing in line for halwa puri. While one trend can be more ubiquitous than others, what I enjoy – and deeply miss about the shops – is seeing what people wear: a mismatched dupatta, a perfectly wound hijab. I miss standing at a stall of hairbands and clips and watching what other people are buying. I miss the shop at Zainab Market where I buy exactly one Balochi mirrorwork kurta a year, which lasts me through six thousand washes and every season. I miss watching people play out their familial microaggressions in the denim store, where mothers and daughters argue over skinny jeans. I miss understanding what people are thinking and wearing and expressing. I miss seeing masks with the TikTok logo. I miss walking down the street, and seeing someone wearing a fluorescent kurta, and thinking about how Ranveer Singh’s flamboyance has filtered into the street or has the street’s flamboyance filtered to Ranveer Singh? I miss the weight and heft of fabrics. I miss being pushed into a crowd at Jama Market, being told to clutch my handbag to myself, the smell of banarsi fabric, the evergreen routine of bored children being pulled this way and that. I miss the jarring feeling of being back in a familiar place: most recently I felt this was being back in Qurtaba Market after years, of the warren of shops and trying to remember what it was like to be here, before, as a child. I miss being a voyeur: of people’s conversations and clothes, of looking at the choices they make: considerate, thoughtless, regretful, half-fulfilled, and hearing their thoughts: family arguments, gossip, secrets that can be said aloud in a crowded space.

Perhaps it’s because I feel utterly uninspired these days: nothing is interesting, not the half-written drafts, not the piles of transcriptions I should do to make future Saba’s life easier. I just want to observe again.