Bina Shaw
>We deal in darkness every day
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Short Story writer Bina Shaw offers a lyrical essay on the intersections of political and electrical power in Pakistan @ Granta.
It isn’t so bad in December, January, February, when cool air and mild sunshine lulled the city into good cheer. Winter in Karachi has the same effect that summer has in Europe, luring people out of their houses to enjoy the beautiful weather; a rainstorm can send them out into the streets, faces upturned to the water and wind. We are not afraid to come out of our houses at midday; whole families zigzag across the city on motorbikes, dressed in leather jackets, woolen shawls, and even the odd snowsuit worn by a toddler held tightly in his mother’s arms. At night a snappy breeze drops the temperature down even further, as the poor light smoky wood fires in the lanes of their slums and the more affluent pull out creaky heaters and don warm socks and vests to guard against winter coughs and colds.
In January, if the lights go out while you are in a store, you can bear with the suspension of the credit card machine, the dim sunlight filtering through the windows. You and the shopkeeper exchange quick smiles, a shorthand comment: Phir se bijli gai (the electricity has gone again). At home, you can’t watch television or use the Internet, because even if you had electricity, the cable operators and Internet providers don’t, so you miss out on your entertainment – but that too can be borne easily enough. The power cuts themselves are infrequent and short, anyway, and you have developed a slight case of amnesia; forgetting last year’s nightmares enables you to survive another year in this city.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )But come June, when the lights go out three or four times a day, in temperatures of anywhere from 35 to 42 °C, it’s impossible to imagine or forget your way out of this cruelty. And it’s not just the heat – it’s the humidity, that succubus that pushes the heat index up by ten degrees, makes the roads shimmer with sultry mirages and dehydrates labourers so fast that they collapse and die of heatstroke within hours. Children faint while at school; hospitals are unable to operate incubators and other vital equipment; water pumps stop working. Students can’t study for their exams, factory outputs fall by twenty, thirty, fifty per cent. The city has been crippled like this every day for the last four years, and all signs point to even worse conditions in the future, with Karachi’s population expanding faster than the city’s grid has the capacity to bear.
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