Poem: The City by the Sea

This poem is about Karachi, the city where I was born and raised, and where I have lived my entire life. This is probably the most honest piece I could have written about this city. I still don't feel like I have done justice to it. 

Since this poem is meant to be spoken word (ie. it is written more for the ears than for the eyes), I am thinking of making it into a video with my own voice-over so people can listen to it the way I want them to hear it. Not sure if I will ever get around to doing it, though, so here's the poem anyway.

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The City by the Sea

This is the city by the sea, the port city, the sea city. The sea is what it is famous and most known for. The sea is what people from all over the country come here to see.

But the sea, like all precious things this city has to offer, is tucked away at its southern tip, on the other side of the bridge that divides, a luxury for the privileged. But when you see things more closely, more clearly, you see that the sea is everywhere. True; there is a city by the sea, but then the city itself is also the sea,

when the weather is hot and humid, and when it does not rain for months on end, drops of sweat break outside the confines of body and spread out onto skin like the waves of the sea, sweat glistening on foreheads like seawater in sunshine

on days when the government has better things to do than cleaning up dirt, there is a sea of garbage heaped up on the roadsides, swarms of flies being the fish that inhabit this sea

when there are too many people and homes too few to house them, or work too important for one to stay home, people gush out onto the streets like the tide coming in

there is always a sea of people whenever and wherever you step outside: a sea of people in the supermarket, a sea of cars on Shahrah-e-Faisal, a sea of kids in the parks and on the roads, a sea of people in the hospital, people doing their Eid shopping, people eating chicken biryani on plastic chairs on the footpaths

Yes, this is a city by the sea, the sea city, the city of seas. And like the sea, this city is vast and seemingly endless, it goes on for miles, as far as the eye can see: you know not where it begins and where it ends. And like the sea, this city contains more than what is visible from the surface. You can not judge its insides by what washes up on the shore. 

Like the waters of the sea, this city, too, is made up of layers of varying depths, layers similar to the ones in its dhaabey waley parathay, except these layers are all distinct, each unlike the other. Yes, this city is stratified, it is divided. Here there are the poor and the rich, the middle class and the underclass, the Clifton waley and the Lyari waley. Here live the Sindhis and the Balochis, the Pashtos and the Pathans and the Bengalis, the Dilli waley, Lucknow waley and Mumbai waley. Here we have people in all shades of brown: the pale brown and the tan brown and the dark brown.

Here there are people as many as and as different as there are fish in the sea.