I stood at the ship's railing and
watched the Pakistani fishing fleet head out into a
slightly-post-apocalyptic dawn. These guys were slackers. Most of
the boats I'd seen the night before, their masts sprouting up from
the water between one jut of land that was Karachi, Pakistan, and
another jut of land that was Karachi, Pakistan, were long gone. But
here were a couple of stragglers, their engines put-putting in the
otherwise silent morning, net cranes poised like the legs of those
Jesus bugs that skip lightly across ponds in Missouri summers. (a
note here: “Jesus bugs” are what the folk down at the local pub
call ‘em. I have no idea their actual taxonomy: water flitters?
Puddle jumpers -- wait, that's a small plane. Nope, no idea).
The dawn was post apocalyptic because
there was a haze of pollution rolling in across Karachi harbor,
turning the sunlight into something hazy, solemn, and slightly
carnivorous. The pollution smelled distinctly of outhouses and
sewage. The smell was impressive enough that I wrote a haiku about
it (my students and I had recently been embroiled in the poetry
section of our literature book. Okay, okay, I was embroiled. My
students mostly napped). The haiku is called, cleverly, “Pakistani
Morning”:
“Smog drifts in at dawn / Smelling
of sulfur and poo / Cloaking the long day.”
That's high-quality literature, there.
Pulitzer, I'm on my way!
Even without the, er, rich olfactory
pleasures of the Pakistani smog, the visit had been a bit of a
disappointment. For a variety of reasons, my companions and I were
effectively trapped on the ship, with a bit of leg-stretching room
down on the pier and in a merchant's tent-bazaar nestled in among a
stack of cargo containers not far away.
Some of us played football on the
pier, and some of us spent too much money in the bazaar. But it was
football played beneath a thin, dry mist of coal dust blowing in from
across the river; and money spent haggling half-heartedly for
“bargains” that we knew we could probably get cheaper online.
Well, maybe that last wasn’t entirely true:
“How much for these DVDs with, what,
a half dozen movies on 'em?”
“Ten dollar ... each.”
“Um, they're obviously pirate
copies.”
“Okay, how much you want to give?”
“How 'bout five bucks for this
handful here?”
“Okay.”
Still, I chafed at my metaphorical
bit, wanting to go into town, where I could pick up a game of street
soccer with some local yutes (I'm not sure why I would think that
“youths” would be pronounced Brooklyn-style in the local dialect,
but there you have it). I wanted to haggle prices over glasses of
tepid apple tea and bat the flies away with a colorful Pakistani
scarf. I wanted to be surrounded by the bustle and the noise and
crowds and the dirt and the heat of a Karachi marketplace: see the
sights, hear the sounds, smell the smells.
But there had been trouble in the
north. At least that was what CNN was saying. Danger was
everywhere. Blast it all: danger everywhere and I couldn't enjoy any
of it, unless you counted the carcinogens.
Well, at least there were the smells.
There were flies, too: narrow, sleek beasties that could zip in, land
on the chicken I was having for lunch, and then zip off again, almost
before I could worry about what sort of rare diseases they might be
hauling along in their carry-ons.
Despite all this, Pakistan had its
moments. At night, the smog drifted off to parts unknown (possibly
L.A.), lights sparked up all along the shore, and tugboats hooted at
one another with deep bass notes as they shuffled the last of the big
cargo ships around.
I wrote a haiku about that, too. It's
called, cleverly, “Karachi Harbor at Night”:
“Thin light on black water / casts
long shadows past low ships / while moonlit gulls glide.” Have my
secretary put that call from the Pulitzer committee right through.
Then in the morning quietness there
were those fishing boats sailing smoothly and leisurely downriver
toward their fishing grounds, hard lines softened by the
post-apocalyptic sunlight.
Right before the smell blew back in.
* * *
The author hopes that his lifespan was
not noticeably shortened by spending several days breathing coal dust
and whatever the heck was the source of that horrendous stench.
[Below: As close as the author got to a Pakistani Marketplace.
