Karachi but Haunted- Writing Pakistan is Hard

Episode 15 was made in a rushed panic. I had a big presentation that week, and so I was behind. I was upset that I was always running on limited time- I have a super demanding full time job that I want a promotion at, I have to work out, I have to cook/clean/do groceries, I need to socialize, I have to make time for other hobbies (like this blog and standup comedy!) and passion projects, and I also have to draw/write/plan this comic. It's a lot.

So I thought, well if I had a lot of free time, would I be able to tell the perfect story?

And the answer, somehow, is no. Because I forgot about another limit- the intellectual limit.

Writing is hard, period. Writing good dialogue, balancing emotion/humor, creating good stakes, good character arcs, good plot convergences... that stuff is rough. It depends on if I have the brains to be able to do that. I don't know if I do, but I'm trying my best.

But even harder than that to me, the hardest, toughest thing is writing Pakistan in a way that's honest. Because that requires me to fully understand a very complicated country.

You see, when I was a child, all my characters were written into fantasy worlds. I never wrote Pakistani characters. And that was because as a kid, I wanted to draw whatever I wanted, and I couldn't do that in a Pakistani story:

I couldn't draw a superhero because superhero clothes would be too tight.

I couldn't draw pink hair because Pakistanis just had black hair.

I couldn't draw weird eye colors because all our eyes were black- and no foreigners ever came to Pakistan.

I couldn't draw the girls and boys hanging out because our culture wouldn't allow that. I didn't even know what boys were like because I was in girls' schools till I was 16.

I couldn't girls doing things or going out, because I couldn't do those things. I could barely leave the house.

Now let's say I ignored all the social limits and drew a bunch of teenage characters with pink hair and miniskirts hanging out in Pakistan. Would they ignore things like terrorism, water shortages, hartaals? Would they all speak English? Would they ignore poverty? Would they ignore theocracy? Would they be practicing Muslims like I was back then, in which case, how could I make the girls and boys hang out and wear miniskirts (or any fashion but shalwar kameez and jeans/sleeved shirts)? Maybe burger gen z kids are changing things? In which case would I only write about the elite?

The cultural context of Karachi in the 90's to early 2010s was a violent time. There was a lot of political unrest and bomb threats, and enough casual crime that you wouldn't have your phone out in a car (cell phones were new too). I had a curfew til Maghrib until I was 25 years old.

If I wanted to make art from Pakistan, it felt like I had to IGNORE everything about life in Pakistan. As a kid, if you wanted to be a writer, you could only write something escapist that wasn't set in Pakistan... because what 14 year old can write about the political nuances of the taliban or class conflict or dictatorships? Even if I wanted to write high school romcoms, where would I plug in my own experiences about random strikes calling school off?

I remember when I was applying to colleges abroad, none of our interviewers were coming to Pakistan unless they were alumni who already lived here. We had to go to Dubai for our Cambridge University college interview for example. I remember we were mildly annoyed our A level exams weren't canceled when there were full-blown hartaals and bus burnings happening, somewhere around 2009.

You know all those jokes parents make about climbing mountains and swimming through rivers to go to school? Well I think my generation sort of REALLY had to do that stuff. And it didn't seem like too big a deal mostly... But nobody wants to experience all that difficult emotionally exhausting violence, and then also write about it. You want to get away from it.

And on top of that, let's consider the culture of Pakistan. Pakistan isn't really that great at relaying its art history to kids. I didn't know shit about who the Mughal Era architects or court painters were. I can't find anything written down about our literature, myths and history. (The only thing was people: sometimes old men in the mountains told me stories, some Urdu teachers told me their favorite fantasy stories and poems, some distant aunt would tell me about the jinns.) Who were the masters for things like truck art, what is its history, why don't they make any money? What happened to the people who used to hand-paint 30 foot cinema posters? Anything that is not Islam-related sometimes feels undocumented. Maybe I didn't go looking hard enough... but where is all this hidden? All I know of is Islam and Partition and the British Raj.

So... with these caveats, how could I write Pakistan? All these limits on my daily life, my political understanding, my knowledge, my freedom, my gender?

That's how I arrived at Karachi but Haunted all these years later. Finally, it hit me. I truly felt like a creative genius when I finished writing out the full story. The supernatural are in a hidden world and have a buffer from interacting with the politics etc. Sabeen and Laila are undead... and all the Undead are humans brought back because they died unjustly, which gives me room to explore how Pakistan can kill you. And I still get to tell a fantasy story, with all kinds of wild characters, a story of my own that isn't just explaining and processing Pakistan over and over, but one that is fully mine, although still stemming from everything I have experienced as a Pakistani. And best of all... since Sabeen and Laila are undead/zombies... they can go anywhere in the streets and do anything. They are no longer bound by the rules they would have had if they were real living women.

There are still difficulties of course. Even now, as I write the next episode of Karachi but Haunted, I struggle when I think of the recent Peshawar bomb blast. It makes me want to stop writing because I think "what's the use of art? 88 people are dead." I always struggled with this feeling in Pakistan, that what could you do with art when people were starving and dying?

But I know the beneficial function art has for me and I want to share it with you. It lets me reflect things, document things, escape from things. It helps me LIVE in something else. And I really want to give that experience to anyone who reads the things I make... to be in their own familiar world, in a familiar story, that bursts with imagination and isn't purely about figuring out the problems of Pakistan. Because in real life, we have enough problems. Sometimes we want to think of something else. Sometimes we want magic. And believe me, you have to go looking, REALLY looking, but Pakistan has and will always have a little ember of magic.