Pakistan and My Experience

I'm a Pakistani Canadian. I was born in Canada and raised here all my life...

I'm a Pakistani Canadian. I was born in Canada and raised here all my life so this article won't be accurate and in fact, it's completely personal to my own experience. When I was 2, my mom and I lived in Pakistan for a year because my dad was unable to provide for our family, as my parents had both recently immigrated and were struggling to find jobs. Naturally, I don't exactly remember much from that time in Pakistan. However, I've gone multiple times afterwards on summer vacations, march breaks and/or winter breaks to visit my family there (my father, mother, brother and I are the only people in our family that don't live in Pakistan).

When I was younger, I actually really loved going to Pakistan. At the time, my mom's family all lived in a pretty big house but being a large family, we separated the second floor for one of my grandpa's brother's family, two rooms for the other brother, and the rest for my grandpa's family. We were all a conjoined family and honestly, it felt surreal. One moment, I'd be downstairs eating breakfast and the next, I'd be upstairs playing cricket on the balcony with my cousins. As I grew up, things changed. Was it due to the passage of time? Or was it because I grew up?

I recently visited Pakistan this summer. For context, my family is in Karachi, the financial capital of the country. The second I stepped in the Karachi airport, I realized this wasn't the same place I remembered. Everything felt so rundown. The floors were brown and that was not their original colour. The technology used in the airports looked so old. The doors for the officers checking passports had the strangest locks on them. I thought to myself that hey, I should give it a chance; I only just got here. After stepping out of the airport I took a glance of everything around me; I felt nostalgic. Then, I looked at the taxis. Taxi drivers and bargaining was happening all around us, as we scrambled to find just one taxi without a rope attached to the roof of the car and an actual compartment where we could put our extra suitcase. Unfortunately we had to tie our suitcase to the top of the taxi with a rope on the roof for the whole hour-long journey to our village, paranoid from the possibility that our suitcase falls onto the highway. I mean, why does the financial capital of Pakistan have cars with ropes attached to them. It felt as if the country was unaffected by technological advancements over the past decade.

Once we arrived at my dad's house it was around 12 AM and the dogs were wandering and howling like wolves on our street. My uncle told me to not be scared but I did find the castle of garbage sitting in front of what used to be a cricket field, a little bit alarming. In fact, this cricket field had now become a cow 'farm'. Even my dad, who was born and raised in this very village was astonished to see how low it had gone. My parents and cousins told me to leave my phone at home whenever I went outside so it wasn't stolen by a random guy on a motorcycle. I was told not to go outside during political rallies so that I wouldn't get caught in it and held at gunpoint. Everything was also very crammed. Our street was so thin, it was impossible for normal-sized cars to drive on it, largely due to the fact that people kept expanding and dividing their houses. When we went to mom's side's house, that's when I really saw a difference from the last time I visited. The original house we had was now multiple houses, divided by family, of course due to financial reasons. It didn't feel like the same house that I remembered, because time passed and things changed.

My dad always told me something that I kept in mind when I came to Pakistan: "Don't come for the place. Come for your beautiful family that loves seeing you and would do anything for you". We ordered 6 boxes of pizza and when we all finished, I witnessed my cousin open the door and chuck the boxes onto the pile of trash lining the cricket field like fence. At first, I was angry at my cousin for doing this. Then I thought to myself, is it really their fault? We had to stock up on big tanks of water every week, in order for us to be able to drink clean water. The truth is our village had reached it's "expiry date", as my father said. In other words, the government gave up on it. Trash piled up higher and higher everyday, but the people had no other place to throw their garbage because it wasn't gonna magically go away if the government didn't care to touch it either. Every place needs to be maintained in order for it to truly flourish.

Now, of course Pakistan is a beautiful country. I've only lived in a village, but I've also seen some of the more luxurious places in Karachi, which were also around a thirty minute drive from where we lived. And I've only been to Karachi. So again, that does make my perspective inaccurate in terms of the country as a whole, but I do believe that poverty and danger to such a large scale is unacceptable anywhere. How can one man be living in a luxurious villa with guards everywhere when another community is worried about their next meal? Could you say I was blinded by my childhood all those times I visited Pakistan before and never saw it with this new perspective? Yes. I truly was unaware because it didn't all go downhill in the span of a couple years. I really believe that there is hope but it hurts to see so many people, including my family and the majority of the population in Karachi to be living in unbearable conditions, especially in what's called the financial capital of the country.