SmokeLong Quarterly

Your story is set in Karachi, which is also where you are from. What do you want people who have never been there to know about the city?

You will never figure it out. Some days the city will make sense, other days you’ll have your head in your hands, wondering how you fit into it. It’s a changeling that contains the entropy of over twenty million people, each of them pouring love into the belly of chaos. Everyday life is textured by a thousand things: the smell of seawater mingling with petrol, the neon shimmer of late-night chai dhabas, the sudden generosity of strangers, the city’s hands breaking and mending you a thousand times over. You can only love it once you accept that it isn’t something you can define.

We also have great food.

You are also a poet. Why did you choose narrative flash for this piece?

Poetry can be an elusive medium, I have trouble with its beautiful slipperiness. I wanted to hold both imagery and narrative in a more concentrated structure, and I wanted the piece to be driven forward by the story. I find that narrative flash’s brevity helps me with specificity, while poetry can often spiral into a larger, more uncontained thing. Poetry often reminds me of Karachi.

How did the concept for this story form?

I was reading about Karachi nightlife in the seventies, an old world full of ceaseless music, where you could dance to let loose without worrying about the consequences. That world felt so tactile and open compared to the Karachi I grew up in, where the permission to dance is a well-kept secret. I was thinking about what it means to chase that feeling anyway, to want freedom with such desperation that it inoculates a wilderness inside you. The lies we tell, the rituals of escape, the urge to share in some collective, escapist experience. The story grew out of that gap between inherited myth and lived reality. I still think about the fierce, luminous selves we become when we hunt for scraps of a vanished world.