Rising tide and meals with Sharafat and PILER colleagues

Saturday 11 December
I come to Riaz's on Friday night and in the morning we go to the impressive, nineteenth century, red sand stone Mohatta Palace - not huge - where there is a new exhibition of modern art called ‘The Rising Tide’. We are twenty minutes early to get into the exhibition, so off somewhere for a cup of tea. We are in Old Clifton, perhaps the poshest part of the city, near the sea. But behind the large expensive sea front buildings, are poor side streets where amidst everything, a tea house is not too hard to find. As we sit, Riaz points out a drug addict shuffling past, bedraggled and ill. There are now 600,000 according to Al Jazeera, ever since the Afghan War in the 1980s brought heroin and Kalashnikovs to the city; this is the first time I’ve knowingly seen one. Going back to the car, Riaz stops to talk to a man waiting in a car opposite who’s staring at us. He’s worried for my safety in such a dangerous place. I tell him I’m very well looked after and thank him for his concern. He’s a doctor working in this area, a former katchi abadi, an illegal slum which at some point ten or twenty years ago was recognised by the city. People started investing and now it’s a mix of good, bad and awful buildings. Very mixed, every ethnicity, it’s full of traders, next to Riaz’s car, there’s a small wagon loaded with cooking oil, a favourite for hoarding as prices are going up all the time.

Into the palace and at first I’m put off by the ‘Pseuds Corner’ language of the introduction but I now think that that was just to keep the sponsors happy. It’s quite the most subversive exhibition I've seen. Subtle, so as not to provoke the military or the Islamists, but anti military, anti mullah, anti bank and anti big business. Paintings, sculpture etc, all of a very high standard. One picture above, a couple more at http://picasaweb.google.com/geoff.brown/TheRisingTide#

Then to lunch with Sharafat, Karamat's younger brother. On the way we pass the Three Swords monument out up by Bhutto with the slogans Unity, Faith and Discipline". The islamist dictator Zia ul Haq who overthrows Bhutto and executes him, adorns the swords with praise and glory to Allah. Now Zardari has covered up Zia’s additions with giant ajraks, the Sindhi national shawl, now looking weather worn. Lunch is dominated by his five year old granddaughter, Shakina, an assertive young woman speaking excellent English.

The day ends with a meal back in Clifton with a group of PILER staff. On the way there, Shuja explains the flood relief work he and PILER colleagues have been doing for the last few months. Much of it has been supporting the people in the camps on the outskirts of Karachi with crises such as a young woman in the final stages of pregnancy urgently needing four pints of a rare blood group. Against the odds, they finally were able to get it, mother and child are both now OK. There will be a huge battle if the government falls and the city bureaucrats get a free hand to evict the 10,000 living in the Labour Colony across the road from PILER.