Read Your Way Through Karachi
To know Karachi is to surrender to its motion, a metropolis that expands, contracts, and reinvents itself each day. Here, photographer Umer Sheikh shares the books that chart its many lives.
Read Your Way Around South Asia is a series exploring South Asian cities through books (inspired by the NYTimes’ series ‘Read Your Way Around The World’).
Read Your Way Through Karachi
Karachi is a cosmopolis in the truest sense. One of its great paradoxes is that the city belongs to everybody and to nobody. In Karachi, everyone comes from somewhere else, carrying a piece of their origins with them. It’s a sea of lives where languages collide like waves until they merge with the tide.
The city’s spontaneity is not just in its rhythm but in its very origins. Unlike Delhi or Lahore, Karachi’s history can be traced back only two or three centuries. Most great cities have their chroniclers—Cairo has Naguib Mahfouz, London has Dickens, Dublin has Joyce. Karachi, somehow, remains unclaimed.
Yet perhaps that is its essence. Its allure lies not in its past, but in its people—in its restless diversity and sprawling geography. Always bursting at the seams, Karachi seems to multiply ceaselessly, never slowing, never still. As Kamila Shamsie writes in Kartography, “All around us, Karachi kept moving.”
In Karachi, you’re always inside a story. In this sea of eighteen million lives, everyone has one to tell. Every day, the city’s streets turn into a vast theatre, with only a brief interlude at that fleeting hour when night and day melt into each other. Across this boundless sprawl, where borders blur and beginnings are hard to find, Karachi’s poetry and prose are written by its resilient, steadfast dwellers.
What should I read before I go?
Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti drags you headfirst into Karachi’s underbelly with dark humour and biting satire. The novel follows Alice Bhatti, a Catholic nurse, through grimy hospital wards, police stations, and the city’s endless commotion. Hanif exposes the class hierarchies, violence, misogyny, and absurdities that give Karachi its jagged personality. His Karachi is gritty, menacing, and painfully real, a pantomime of humour, cruelty, faith, and futility, all colliding in uneasy harmony.
Meanwhile, Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography offers a far more intimate portrayal of Karachi—of the private lives of those who, despite the city’s turmoil, still choose to call it home. Shamsie’s Karachi is steeped in nostalgia; it’s a story of growing up in the city, of finding love and friendship amid the chaos. Through her lyrical prose, she captures the ruptures in her characters’ lives and the scars they share with the city itself. It is a story of loss, belonging, and the impossibility of ever fully mapping Karachi.
In his debut novel The Scatter Here Is Too Great, Bilal Tanweer maps the city through the many voices that give Karachi its identity. The novel unfolds in the aftermath of a bomb explosion, following the intertwined lives of strangers bound by tragedy. It reflects on the invisible threads that connect us in a city of millions, urging the reader to wonder: are those around us ever truly strangers? Amid the disorder, Tanweer finds moments of tenderness and tension that hold the city—and its people—together. His Karachi is written by those who live it, who insist on carrying on despite the chaos, confusion, and contradictions.
One line from the novel lingers:
“We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.”
― Bilal Tanweer
Other books that capture the city’s essence, idiosyncrasies, and absurdities include Love in Chakiwara and Other Misadventures by M. Khalid Akhtar, Little America and The Year of the Sound and Heat by Zain Saeed, and Karachi, You’re Killing Me! by Saba Imtiaz. Karachi also reappears as a setting in Kamila Shamsie’s novel Broken Verses.
What should I read to discover the Karachi of yesteryear?
The existence of what we now know as Karachi can be traced as far back as 326 BCE, when Alexander’s fleet is believed to have landed on its shores to escape a storm. Although Karachi’s documented history is relatively young, its story stretches far deeper into time.
Karachi Before the British Conquest by Arif Hasan takes readers through the city’s early existence before it was annexed by the British around 1840. Hasan sheds light on Karachi’s coastline, its shrines, and its early settlements, offering a glimpse of a modest coastal town on the cusp of becoming one of the world’s great cities. It’s an accessible yet invaluable read for anyone curious about Karachi’s origins.
For further reading, Yasmin Lari’s The Dual City: Karachi During the Raj and Alexander Baillie’s Kurrachee: Past, Present, and Future offer rich perspectives on the city’s evolution—capturing Karachi’s transformation from a small port into a complex, ever-expanding metropolis.
A broader, more contemporary lens can be found in Anatol Lieven’s Pakistan: A Hard Country, a widely read and engaging nonfiction book that explores the political, social, and ethnic forces that shape modern Pakistan. While not exclusively about Karachi, its insights illuminate many of the dynamics that defined—and continue to define—the city’s growth.
Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies and Scandal by Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan revisits one of Karachi’s most sensational true crime stories, the mysterious 1970 death of poet-bureaucrat Mustafa Zaidi, whose body was found beside that of socialite Shahnaz Gul, unconscious but alive. What begins as a murder investigation soon unravels into an exploration of Karachi’s high society and elite circles, exposing the glamour, deceit, and intrigue that defined them. Though the city itself isn’t the book’s central subject, Karachi lingers in every chapter—its pulse felt in the background of the investigation, as much a character as any of the people involved.
Which books will take me farther afield?
To go beyond Karachi, to step outside the city’s boundaries while still tracing the edges of its influence, you’ll want books that widen the map.
Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing carries you from Karachi’s textile mills to the vast, desolate beauty of Balochistan, revealing how global politics, local insurgencies, and personal histories entangle lives across Pakistan’s fractured landscapes.
Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon transports you to the tribal belt along the Afghan–Pakistan border, tracing nomadic communities whose stories are shaped by harsh terrain, unwritten codes, and a world steadily vanishing. Though far from Karachi’s sea winds, the book illuminates the rural–urban tensions that ripple all the way to the city.
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders expands the view even further, sketching Pakistan through its farms, drawing rooms, kitchens, and power corridors. Each interconnected story reveals a different facet of class, ambition, and desire, forces that echo in Karachi’s own restless churn.
For a sweeping historical journey, Manan Ahmad Asif’s The Loss of Hindustan reclaims the idea of “Hindustan” as a shared civilizational space—one whose memory lingers across South Asia’s cities, Karachi included. It’s a reminder that the city’s story doesn’t begin or end at the water’s edge.
And in A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif takes you into the theatre of national politics, an orbit whose shocks and aftershocks always reach Karachi—through a darkly comic retelling of General Zia-ul-Haq’s final days. It is Pakistan writ large: absurd, tragic, and endlessly entangled.
These books extend the journey, out of the city’s clamour, across deserts and borders, into pasts and futures that help make sense of Karachi’s own restless sprawl.
What should I Bring with me
Look at the City from Here: Karachi Writings, edited by Asif Farrukhi, is perhaps the finest anthology of writing on Karachi. Bringing together voices across genres, generations, and languages, the collection, shaped through what Farrukhi describes as a long and painstaking process, creates a vivid portrait of the city in all its contradictions. Within its pages, readers encounter Faiz Ahmed Faiz, V.S. Naipaul, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, Qurratulain Hyder, and T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia). From Taufiq Rafat’s poems about Karachi to excerpts from Seth Naomal Hotchand’s memoirs and Shaukat Siddiqui’s depictions of the city’s nocturnal depths, the anthology is a treasure trove of Karachi writing. As Farrukhi notes, “This selection is a personal attempt to locate some answers in writings from the city.”
Umer Sheikh’s Karachi Reading List
Love in Chakiwara and Other Misadventures — M. Khalid Akhtar
Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies and Scandal — Saba Imtiaz & Tooba Masood-Khan
I’ve included this post in my Book Lovin’ Days site. I hope you don’t mind.
Umer! Always such a joy to get your recommendations ❤️ Loved reading this!