Unmaking

On disasters

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I find myself drawn, nearly always, to horrible things. I’ve spent a lot of my short life battling this proclivity, to no avail. I study history, I’m drawn to stories of collective violence and genocide. After college, I found myself doing investigations on torture and intimidations. Now, again, I’m studying disasters in the city I grew up in. This is all exacerbated by the fact that I’m really a very sensitive person. It all upsets me, all of the time. And yet I can’t look away, a paradox that I’ve wondered about for years. It’s not even that it’s some morbid fascination— I just really, really want to understand why bad things happen, because I don’t get it. The rest of my family, as long as I can remember, have held an acceptance for the horrors of the world and, indeed, Karachi that I don’t share.

I’m presently in the early stages of my summer field research— studying urban flooding in Karachi— and using everyone I talk to as a sounding board about it. I’m probably kind of unbearable to be around, but I’ve wanted to be where I am for so many years that I can’t bring myself to stop. Yesterday, I was talking to my dad about the Malir Expressway project. A lot of local activists and indigenous Karachiites are resisting the development of this highway because it would be built in and over the Malir River, which is an already fragile ecosystem due to rapid land reclamation and aggressive mangrove deforestation. The expressway, which seems like it will succeed over resistance efforts, will devastate the ecosystem to the point, possibly, of no return. And while I’m kind of rambling about this, my father says: “You know, I’ve never bothered keeping up with all this because I’ve sort of felt like everything is fucked and I’d better focus on myself, but I’m trying to care because you do.”

Karachiites, like most Pakistanis and most denizens of the Global South, exist in such a state of enforced precarity that it’s difficult to feel like you have the time to focus on larger issues. If, like my grandparents, you managed to claw your way up the ladder enough to protect yourself with wealth, you might be forgiven for thinking that that’s the only thing that matters.

The view from my bedroom.

And here’s the point in this essay at which I admit to having misled the reader: obviously, there is no paradox. While this realization only came to me this week, it seems to have been apparent to many people all along— I am interested in awful, awful things because I care, a lot, about beauty.

Disasters are human-made. There’s a crow nest in the tree across my bedroom window. I’ve been worrying about it for days, knowing this weekend would witness the first spell of monsoon rains. The humidity broke last night, finally, after days of unbearable humidity. The force of the rain caused every skylight (there are seven) in our house to leak, and the strength of the wind shook my french windows. This morning, the baby crows are hopping up to receive food from their mother, unharmed by the downpour.

I’m reminded, by looking out, that these disasters are not unprecedented. The monsoon comes every year. They are, certainly, more unpredictable and sometimes more severe now than they used to be— the global rise in temperatures has affected the global wind patterns that cause them. But, in most cases, the problem is not with the rains, but with the roads.

A Dawn newspaper about urban flooding in Karachi from August 2000.

The water doesn’t drain. The Karachi municipal authorities roam the city with de-watering pumps to clear the rainwater. And this all seems so ridiculous to me. The parks don’t flood. Our garden doesn’t flood. Even the sports stadiums and fields don’t flood. Because the water drains into the dirt. It’s only the roads, the roads that have been built impeding a nullah (drainage canal) from emptying into the Malir River, the weird underpasses that allegedly improve traffic, the commercial area mazes with no green.

Sometimes, nothing can be done. There are amounts of rain that cannot be planned around, that cannot be mitigated. But I wonder at the entrenchment of precarity that disasters create. The way Karachi’s flooding makes people want to buckle down and focus on themselves so they can move to a better elevated neighborhood, or buy an SUV.

The slow erosion of sensitivity and a shared humanity that is forced upon people via inconvenience after inconvenience. Disasters are the interaction of natural (often expected) hazards with vulnerable populations, and the making of vulnerable populations has never been accidental. I guess its to this making that I find myself drawn, as unbearable as it often feels. Because, as Ursula Le Guin would say, anything made by man can be unmade by man.