Karachi by PIA

Flying to Karachi on Monday morning instead of Sunday evening was a bad idea. The morning flight from Islamabad takes off at 8:00. I had hoped to be in PACP office by 10:30 which would mean missing first meeting of day but I had thought that I would be able participate in all important meetings with the health and the planning and development secretaries.

The flight PK 365 arrived in Karachi 11:30 instead of 9:55. I hired a radio cab for Sindh AIDS Control Program near Jinnah Post Graduate Medical Center. Kept searching for the PACP office on Rafiquee Shaheed road but it was nowhere to be found. Eventually, I got out of the taxi in front of the Blood Transfusion Center inside JPMC. Met a guy in the corridor who was wearing his staff ID. He led me to another guy in the lab who was able to described SACP location. It was already 1:30 in the afternoon,  which meant I had missed important meetings of the day. Thank you PIA! 

The office of SACP was in a walled compound housing many other department of health. The whole compound was below the level of the road. The entrance was filled with foul smelling sewerage water. Some stepping stones and bricks had been placed in the big puddle for the pedestrians to enter the compound. I had to watch my steps very carefully. You don't want to turn up at a high level government office dripping sewerage water!

After two days of meetings with provincial health bureaucracy and visits to HIV counselling and treatment facilities, I was set to fly back to Islamabad next day early in the morning. I was staying with a friend in DHA. Last evening, we had gone to a travel agent to request a change of date for my flight but to no avail. We went to Seaview and Boat Basin in the evening and talked excitedly about - among other things - a film called Welldone Abba. The next day, I set off from DHA at 6:15 am thinking that my flight was at 8:00. Reached the boarding desk at 6:55, they told me that I had missed the flight as the plane doors were already closed and that they could not reschedule my travel before 11:30 at night as all flights before that were full. Bad planning on my part but now I had no option but to stay at the airport from 7:00 am to midnight. I could perhaps go back to the friend in DHA but that would be an unnecessary hassle for him and for me. I stayed in the airport lounge, the 'veranda’ [as they call it] and kept changing from one wooden bench to the other. The airport security won’t let me in the air-conditioned passenger lounge behind the glass doors until at least 2 before the flight. I managed to spend a couple of hours at noon in a restaurant with comparatively more comfortable seats. Tried to write down some fieldnotes but that was not easy in that heat, noise, sweating, and flies all around. Instead, I managed to finish reading a book called ―Tehzibi Nargisiat aur Taliban.

I got in the air-conditioned passenger lounge behind the glass walls as soon as I could. As the time to board drew closer, the flight was cancelled due to a ‘technical fault’. There was uncertainty and chaos all around. We didn’t know whether PIA was going to put us up somewhere for the night. Many people had nowhere to go and I had already waited for a whole day n the veranda outside. We didn't even know if they would reschedule our flight or simply give us a refund, if so when. Some people murmured that there was not ‘technical fault’ but it was because of an ongoing strike by airline pilots. 

We were led to reservation desk by a PIA official. Some passengers were belligerent, some were even unreasonable and abusive, refusing to take their luggage back and asking for an overnight stay and a boarding pass for the first flight on the next day. We were then sent to an airport 'hotel' which had been an army barracks at some point, or at least shared architectural aesthetics of a barrack; a very old, two storey building with long corridors and dilapidated walls and roofs.

The hotel did not have enough rooms to accommodate each one of us separately. They started adjusting two people per room. The crowd leaders, the belligerent ones got ‘adjusted’ first. I was one of the last ones standing at the reception [there was no queue!]. The one standing before me requested that he be given a room to himself. His request was accepted. I was encouraged to ask for a similar 'favour' but they still tried to put me with someone else; “don’t worry the room is same but the beds are separate!’. I was offended, I smiled and insisted on a separate room. They finally obliged.

My room was at the far end of a long corridor on the first floor. The room was air-conditioned. Thanks goodness! The air-conditioning was already on. Why? Somebody had checked out and not bothered to turn it off [and then they complain about the electricity crisis in the country!]. There was a television too but someone had stolen the plug from the line (guests or thieves?). I took out my own plug and turned on the television (that’s the second thing you do in a hotel room, the first being jumping on the bed flat on your back. But in this case the mattress was not very inviting so turning the tele on was the first thing!). A few moments later a waiter knocked the door, asked if I needed water, brought water in a tea thermos from the 1950s or earlier, when PIA first set up as the national flag carrier. He offered to wake me up for Sehri - the early morning eating during the month of fasting. I don't remember whether  I took the offer or gave him any tip for bring that thermos of water. We were not offered any food that evening. 

At Sehri in the big dinning room, I saw many people wearing their Ahram—a special costume for performing the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. A flight to Jeddah had also been cancelled. I was in no mode to keep a fast that day but I had to wake up for Sehri as I was already starving. I knew I won’t be able to drink even a glass of water till I reached home in Islamabad at around 2:00 in the afternoon, if i was lucky and the next flight was on time. One couldn’t be sure of the rescheduled flight – what if it really was because of the pilot's strike and they were not back at work! The meal in Sehri was not enjoyable at all - chicken curry cooked in very low quality oil, mixed vegetable curry which tasted bitter and was cooked in equally bad quality oil, chapattis from last night, and a cup of tea. Forcing the food down my throat, and after smoking a couple of cigarettes, I went back to my bed.  The flight was at 11:00 am on the 12th of August. Coming down from my room into the lobby, as I passed by the dining room a sweeper sitting at some distance gestured that there was breakfast inside. I wondered why he though he need to do that. I might have looked at the dining room door with disgust after my experience of food earlier in the morning, and he might have taken it as a yearning for food. For a split second, I thought, let’s go inside and have another smoke while it is permitted inside that room whereas outside it was Ramadan, but then I decided not to.

At the reception, the shuttle service to the airport was not ready yet. After handing over the room keys, I gave a second thought to the idea of going to the dining room for a cup of tea and a cigarette. I entered the room sheepishly expecting at least 15-20 ‘non-believers’ or ‘not-so-firm-believers’ enjoying their breakfast but the hall was empty, except for two men sitting in a corner sipping their tea furtively. There were two other men behind the reception desk who were going through some paperwork and had furious faces. Then there were half a dozen uniformed waiters hovering over and around the gentlemen sipping their tea—these two were probably form Sakardu in northern areas of Pakistan bordering with China. 

This place at this time was totally hostile to a very Punjabi looking person who must be a Muslim and who must observe fasting during Ramadan. I traced my steps back to the main lobby and waited for the shuttle.

We were picked up from the hotel at 9:00am and were timely in for the flight. I was given a window seat from where I could see the water surges in Indus and other rivers from a height of 12000 feet – this was the time of 2010 floods. It was captivating. I tried to guess the actual course of the river and the extent of submerged areas but it was very difficult from that height. I was hoping that we might fly over my own village, so I kept looking alternatively on the geographic positioning map on the screen and down through the window on the surface below which had blurry shapes of mud houses punctuating vast swaths of Thar and Cholistan desert and green fields of Punjab.

To my astonishment, PIA offered some snacks during the flight. Apart from children and a few daring individuals, most people didn’t take anything. I was among the less daring ones or to put it differently I showed respect for the fellow passengers who were fasting. The passenger sitting next me fell asleep. I thought it was a good opportunity to ask the stewardess for a cup of coffee. She passed through the aisle at least three times, I couldn’t draw her attention. My failure, nothing against the PIA hostesses professionalism! I was too polite to raise my voice so as not to wake up the person snoring in the seat next to me or getting noticed by other passengers while asking for tea in Ramadan. 

'Great People to Fly With'