Stories of Karachi’s Taxi Drivers from 1993 to 2000
Zaffar Junejo
[Author’s Note: I joined a non-government organization in mid-1993. In those days, we were frequent travelers to other Asian countries, and during that period I maintained a diary. I once showed the notes to Muhammad Ibrahim Joyo — the legendary scholar, translator, and intellectual giant of the Sindhi world — who suggested categorizing the entries by theme and getting them published. He recalled that long ago, perhaps in 1955, the Sindhi journal Mehran had launched a similar idea titled ‘Hik Deenh Ji Ghaleh’ (The Story of a Day), even offering a prize for it. He himself had submitted the first story, he told me with a smile, just to set a standard for other writers. Later, Maulana Ghulam Muhammad Girami, a scholar of high standing and journalist; Shamsher ul Haidri, a distinguished Sindhi poet, journalist, and playwright; and Siraj ul Haq Memon, an iconic novelist, linguist, and journalist, all contributed their observations of a single day. These writings were published until 1968.
I agreed with Joyo Sahib that I would group the write-ups by subject and get them published, but I failed to do so. Recently, I sat down to organize my notes. I found various entries about the taxi drivers of Karachi city. Some were very brief and incomplete; others were short but held a finished truth. I have chosen five stories from each year, all of them gathered from the drivers of those cars. In total, there will be thirty-five stories covering the period from 1993 to 2000.]
The Republic of Bystandism
The sky over University Road didn’t just hold rain; it bruised. Heavy, graphite clouds hung so low they seemed to scrape the tops of the decaying concrete plazas. Below them, the streetlamps bled a sickly, sulfurous yellow onto the wet asphalt. I stood on the curb, the chill biting through my collar, frantically flagging down the yellow Mehran cabs splashing past toward NIPA. If the storm broke now, the city would drown, and my cubicle would remain a distant shore.
A battered taxi, its yellow paint peeling like sunburned skin, skidded to a halt. I wrenched the door open and threw myself into the back seat, cutting off the bite of the wind.
The interior smelled of old tobacco, damp vinyl, and unspoken grievances. We rode in a heavy, shifting silence as the engine rattled violently past the dome of the PIA Planetarium. Through the cracked rearview mirror, the driver’s eyes locked onto mine. They were deep-set, dark, and heavy with the exhaustion of a man who saw too much of Karachi’s underbelly.
“Need petrol,” he grunted, his voice like grinding gears.
“The next pump is right there,” I said, gesturing toward the brilliant, fluorescent glow of a commercial station a thousand yards ahead.
He grunted a refusal, swung the wheel hard to the left, and veered down a fractured side street. “Not that one. The pumps there are rigged by ghosts.”
“A favorite spot of yours, then? Do you get a kickback?”
“No. Just the truth.”
We rolled into a dimly lit, skeletal filling station that looked like a relic of a forgotten decade. A lone attendant, wrapped in a frayed shawl, moved like a phantom in the gloom. The driver didn’t ask for a full tank. He simply held up three fingers: “Six hundred rupees.”
As the pump clicked, I leaned forward, resting my hands on the frayed fabric of the front seat. “Why this ghost town? The other station is brighter, faster.”
“The meter runs true here,” the driver said, not looking back. “In this city, an honest meter is a revolutionary act. You get what you pay for. The fuel isn’t stretched with kerosene.”
“Fuel economy is just mechanics,” I argued, playing the skeptic to draw him out. “It’s about your engine’s efficiency.”
He slotted the car into first gear and slammed his foot down, pulling us back into the chaotic arteries of the morning traffic. “A clean engine dies on dirty blood. It’s not mechanics, my friend. It’s politics. Irani petrol floods the veins of this province, and the state is the junkie.”
The word hung in the air, heavy and dangerous. “How does a syndicate that massive operate in broad daylight?” I asked.
A humorless smirk cut across his weathered face. “Because everyone takes their communion. The border guards open the gates, customs agents lose their ledger books, the pump owners fix the price, and the bureaucrats sign the permits in air-conditioned offices. It’s a beautifully orchestrated machine. A democracy of thieves.”
He swerved violently to avoid a pooling pothole, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“They have a hierarchy for the poison,” he continued, his voice dropping an octave. “The highway trucks get the sludge. The second-tier, diluted garbage goes straight to the fringes—the katchi abadis. They pump it into Shirin Jinnah, Gadap, Sohrab Goth. They choke the poorest neighborhoods first, because the poor don’t have the paperwork to complain.”
“An absolute institutional collapse,” I murmured, staring at the blurred landscape of concrete and power lines.
“Collapse? No, it’s a masterpiece. It works perfectly for the people who designed it.” He suddenly pointed out the window toward a ramshackle wooden cigarette cabin on the corner, where a vendor was lighting a match. “Look at him. Go ask that man how the tankers sneak past the toll plazas at midnight. He will draw you a perfect map, complete with the names of the officers on duty. He knows everything.”
“Then why doesn’t anyone speak up?”
“Because if you ask that same man to stand as a witness? To sign a complaint? He will change his tune, look at his shoes, and tell you he has a family to feed. We have plenty of analysts in Karachi, but no martyrs.”
The taxi screeched to a final halt outside my office block. The corporate glass facade reflected the dark, unforgiving sky.
“Corruption doesn’t survive because of the men at the top,” the driver whispered, finally turning around to face me as I handed him his fare. “It survives because our morality has a price tag. We trade our outrage for an easy life.”
“Then how do we break a machine like that?” I asked, holding his gaze.
“You can’t educate a spine into a man,” he said softly. “Society lacks the moral courage to fight the very monster it feeds.”
I stepped out into the damp, heavy air. As the yellow taxi vanished into the grey morning gridlock, his words remained behind, echoing like thunder over the roar of the city.
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Dr. Zaffar Junejo has a Ph.D in History from the University of Malaya. His areas of interest are post-colonial history, social history and peasants’ history. He may be reached at junejozi@gmail.com
