The first time I met Siraj, over a decade after he had set up shop here, I got lost, which felt ironic on a visit to a map-maker. But I had never been to Orangi Town before and I couldn’t find the right turning. Siraj is nothing if not a doer, so as soon as I called to explain, he jumped on his motorbike and drove around to find me and guide the car. Within minutes of parking up, he was deep into an explanation of the local criminal syndicates and the way they exploited the area, talking with the authority of a university professor. He often broke off to grab a specific document or diagram from the bundles of paper that surrounded him. I came to realize that this was how he made sense of his sometimes painful and chaotic surroundings: through evidence, order, information.

He showed me around the compound. The main room was fitted with a cluster of desks and computers, together with a large draftsman’s table, another gift from his former boss. On the walls were large, sketchily printed photographs of his mentors and former employers, showing them at work around the area. These people — Arif Hasan, Perween Rahman, Anwar Rashid — were pioneers who had both literally and figuratively put Orangi on the map: architects and planners who had gotten the area regularized and recognized by the authorities, in the process becoming famous for the way that they worked with the community. Siraj was trying to carry on this tradition. Alongside the photographs, the maps that he was working on were fixed to the walls with bright plastic tacks, the precisely drawn network of streets spreading out like a fine spider’s web.

The office was in Ghaziabad, the part of Orangi where Siraj had spent most of his childhood and still lived. He told me that it was as familiar to him as his own skin: the houses made from unplastered concrete blocks with small slit windows to keep out the dust and heat; the higgledy-piggledy winding alleys, some of which looked as if they had been hacked out of the hills which made Orangi look so different from the rest of Karachi. Once, before the city had grown and swelled around it, Orangi had been at the very outskirts. Unlike Lyari, where the apartment blocks were so close together you could barely move, Orangi was punctuated by expanses of bare earth. For years, this had been the place where new arrivals to Karachi could find plots of land to call their own. The constant construction, as people built their homes on any spare inch of soil, meant that piles of rubble, brick, and dust were a semi-permanent feature of the landscape. Clusters of people from all over the provinces that would become Pakistan were already living here when the Mohajirs came from India in 1947. But the area rapidly expanded after this point. Finding that no provision had been made for their arrival, many Mohajirs ended up in Orangi, carving a new settlement from the dust to replace the homes and businesses they had left behind. In the decades since then, as Siraj grew from child to adult, and Karachi’s tentacles extended into the rural areas around it, Orangi had expanded so much that it was practically its own city, a web of bumpy kacha (untarmacked) roads and sharply angular buildings that looked like military pillboxes.

What Siraj loved about Orangi was that the people had built it for themselves. Most of the area’s residents, his own family included, had been displaced from elsewhere. They did not have the ancestral ties to the soil that many people in Pakistan claimed, but they had still made it their own. Siraj himself had been born in Karachi, but migration was in his blood. After Partition in 1947, his family had uprooted themselves from their home in Bihar, India, to join the new Muslim homeland in Pakistan. Initially, they settled in the flat and humid landscape of what was then East Pakistan, but tensions steadily rose between Urdu-speaking migrants like Siraj’s family and the local Bengali population, who were badly discriminated against by the West Pakistani central government. This culminated in a brutal civil war in 1971, which Siraj had grown up hearing about from his parents and grandparents. They spoke of the gnawing fear they had lived with, the crumbling of the world they had built. His maternal grandfather, Nana, had been a railway worker in East Pakistan. When the violence broke out, Urdu-speakers were targeted. One day, while Nana was out buying groceries, he was set upon by an angry mob. They killed him and dumped his body in the river. Nani, Siraj’s maternal grandmother, told him that over the course of the war so much blood was spilled that the river ran red.

In December 1971, East Pakistan became the independent state of Bangladesh. What was once known as West Pakistan became simply Pakistan. Siraj’s family was displaced for a second time. They arrived in Karachi to find a region that was not equipped to deal with them, or even willing to acknowledge their existence, despite everything they had already sacrificed in the name of Pakistan. Rather than being viewed as citizens, they were treated as newcomers. Many had problems getting official documentation and some were never able to get full Pakistani citizenship. There was no resettlement support or housing for the refugees from the Bangladesh war. Siraj’s family, like so many others, were on their own. At first, the family lived in a rented house in Korangi, an industrial area of Karachi where Siraj was born. A few years later, they bought a small plot of land in Ghaziabad and moved there in the early 1980s to construct their own house.

At first they built just one room, with an adjoining bathroom. Siraj’s mother carefully cut hessian flour bags into sheets and stitched them together to create a makeshift awning that they erected on bamboo poles to cover a temporary kitchen. Under the shade this gave from the sun, Siraj’s mother would make roti over a wood fire. At that time, different ethnic groups lived more or less side by side. The local Pashtun community controlled the building industry, running small brick factories that produced the ubiquitous concrete bricks used in the area. Siraj’s eldest brother, Shamsuddin, was friends with one of these brick makers, who let the family have some on credit to hasten the construction of their home. Gradually, more rooms were added.

Because Orangi was an unplanned settlement, where waves of migrants to the city had simply built their homes with no regulations or support, there were no amenities. This meant it was not connected to mains water, electricity, or gas supplies. At night, residents filled glass bottles with kerosene, dropping in a lit scrap of jute to create an improvised lamp. The pungent, oily smell rose over the area as night fell. The lamps gave the new homes a warm glow, but they were hazardous: Once, Siraj’s mother knocked one over and the hot kerosene splattered across her arm, permanently scarring her. Later, the area pooled their resources to buy a diesel generator which gave them some electricity in the long evening hours. It was shared between many families, so despite its loud clattering, it didn’t give a huge amount of power to each household — sometimes only enough for a small tube light at Siraj’s home. They would place it strategically in a doorway or on top of a wall so that it partially illuminated two rooms. In the evenings, Siraj did his homework in this half-light, fixated even as a child on order, routine, and the importance of getting things done. When the generator wasn’t working, he waited until the morning, using the hours between dawn prayers and the start of school to complete his assignments before setting off for his lessons on foot.

The lack of amenities gave the days and weeks a certain familiar rhythm. The family had two bicycles and every afternoon after school Siraj and one of his brothers (they were eight siblings, five boys and three girls) would hang blue jerrycans on their bikes and cycle off in search of water. There were public taps at the corners of some streets and they’d stand in line here to fill the cans. Sometimes, if the queues were particularly long, they’d go to the house of one family friend or another who had managed to dig a well near their home. They’d fill up there and cycle back to the house, jerrycans clanking against their bikes, trying not to splash too much water.

Shamsuddin, or Shamsu as he was known by the family, was eighteen years Siraj’s senior. He had come to Karachi later than the rest of the family, having fought during the civil war with a pro-Pakistan militia; he had been held for several years in Bangladesh as a prisoner of war. During that time, Siraj’s parents did not know if Shamsu was dead or alive. He emerged from captivity and arrived in Karachi with outlandish stories about his time in prison: He claimed that they had lived like kings, eating chicken salan (a tomato-based stew) all day, and that to entertain themselves the prisoners came up with ever more inventive ways to torment the guards. Within a year of arriving in Orangi Town Shamsu seemed to know everyone. He organized people in the community to demand better services. He worked the night shift in different factories, which freed up his days to agitate for change. He ran a small welfare association with some friends. They never registered it formally and used their own money to help people when necessary. He would sit at the chai hotels whenever he wasn’t at one of the factories and make connections.

Siraj knew from the way they greeted Shamsu when he moved around Orangi that people respected him, but he had only the vaguest understanding of what his brother did — something to do with getting people connected to water and electricity. When some locals rigged up wires to tap into the mains electricity supply in an adjacent area, Shamsu was not satisfied. He repeatedly wrote to Karachi’s electricity board demanding that they put his part of Orangi Town on the grid. “I am not a thief,” he would insist. “I want to pay my bill.” His battle with the electricity board took eleven years of writing letters and pushing for meetings in the stuffy offices of local bureaucrats. But he did eventually get the area connected. The government erected the pylons and Shamsu organized local residents to pool their money for the cables to connect them. Electricity lines were strung up above the houses, a tangle of wires looping between tall poles, black lines etched across the sky. Through changes like this, life in Orangi had gradually improved. Now the houses had running water and mains electricity, at least some of the time. Gas cookers replaced the wood fires.

In spite of the respect Shamsu commanded in the area, their father was constantly berating him, particularly when he spent his own money on local improvements. “How long are you going to live off your father for?” he would say. “For God’s sake, earn some money. Please let me help you set up a shop.” Siraj could see his father’s point: his brother often struggled for cash. But he still admired Shamsu’s selflessness, his hard work and his high status in the community.

It had never been in question that Siraj would finish school. If there was a single value that defined their community, it was a belief in education. There was a phrase he often heard repeated: “Even if you can’t put three meals on the table, get an education.” But in the mid-1990s, in his twelfth and final year of school, Siraj was drifting, uncertain about what he wanted to do with his life. The lessons were taught by strict old men who seemed to care more about scolding students than actually teaching them anything. Siraj heard about some boys from the neighborhood going to Saudi Arabia and making a lot of money, so he’d begun to talk about that, without really knowing what it would entail. His father did not like the idea at all. Knowing that Shamsu was the person most likely to change Siraj’s mind, he quietly asked him to intervene.

That was how Siraj found himself standing outside the office of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) one hot day in 1994. Motorbikes revved on the bumpy road and the sun beat down over heaps of uncollected rubbish and the haze of construction dust. The occasional elaborately painted truck roared past, a streak of color through a monochrome vista. Siraj had brought a friend with him for moral support. He knew that Shamsu worked with the OPP, helping to coordinate their work in Orangi, but he also knew the people at the top were from outside the area and he imagined that they would be grand. The door opened and they were ushered in. Although they had not called ahead to make an appointment, they were taken straight to the director’s room. A small woman wearing rimless glasses and a serious expression sat on a wooden chair, trying to bash a protruding nail at the side back in with a paperweight. This was not what Siraj had imagined. In fact, nothing in the room matched his expectations. There were none of the expensive trappings that he had anticipated: no glass door, no air conditioning, no servants hovering around.

“Excuse me, sahiba,” said Siraj.

The woman looked up and smiled. The boys introduced themselves and explained that they were from the local area and had come on Shamsuddin’s recommendation to find out more about the organization’s work.

“Of course,” she said. “Young people should always be interested in these things. I’m so glad you are here.”

The boys sat down and, for the next twenty minutes, the director — whose name was Perween Rahman, though she would always remain Sahiba to Siraj — explained the work they were doing at the OPP. She told them about how they had worked with local people to lay sewage lines, gathering small amounts of money from the community to get the funds together instead of waiting for money or permission from the government. She told them that the OPP provided the technical information — the angle of incline necessary to make the sewage flow downhill — but the street-by-street digging was done by the people themselves. “Chota am, burra kam,” she repeated, a phrase meaning “The little man can achieve big things.” The best projects involved bringing in members of the community, she said — someone like her should only ever be a teacher, giving people the tools to help themselves. She told them that the OPP was mapping the area so that they could show the government what was here and get the services they needed. “A map is like an X-ray,” she said. “It lets the doctor see where the problem is.”

Siraj had never given sewage much thought, although throughout his early childhood disposing of human waste was an ever-present challenge and a cause of anxiety for the adults. In the absence of central systems, some people had concrete sewage tanks underneath their houses. A municipal truck came and emptied it once a month, for a cost of twenty-five rupees, the acrid stench filling the air. Others had tanks with permeable walls that allowed the waste to seep into the earth around it. Still others used the “bucket system,” where people relieved themselves into a pot that could then be passed through the bathroom to a ledge outside. Every day, someone would empty all the pots in that area. “We are not dirty people,” Shamsu said once, in a characteristically blunt tone. “We even keep our shit safely in boxes.” Siraj remembered walking through Rig Colony, one of the areas that used the bucket system, on a day when the guy who collected the waste wasn’t on duty. Residents had protested and refused when he tried to raise his rates, so he had decided to show them how much they needed him by taking the day off. The area was a mess. Flies buzzed over the slowly baking fecal matter, the smell overwhelming the senses. The residents soon agreed to pay a higher rate.

When Sahiba explained the lack of resources and the push to get these basic amenities for Orangi, it was as if someone was putting words to Siraj’s experiences for the first time. He left the meeting excited about what he had learned. As he sat in his unengaging lessons at school, Siraj thought of how Sahiba had spoken to him so candidly and wondered if there was a different way to learn. When he returned to the OPP after a few weeks, Sahiba greeted him as if he was already part of the team. She told him to stick around. “This is a place where you can ask anyone whatever question you like,” she told him. “People will always have time for you. But at first just observe and learn. Always look at what someone is doing, how they are doing it and, most importantly, why they are doing it.”

He started to spend almost every day at the office, watching people work. He was captivated by the precision of what they did. The draftsmen worked on large tables, drawing diagrams of the streets outside. They mapped out areas of Karachi that had long existed in concrete reality but not on any city plans, in the process helping them to get connected to water and electricity services. Alongside this work, the OPP’s architects gave practical advice to residents on how to modify their homes or schools. Siraj was particularly taken with the housing work; even years later, he vividly remembered the first time he was allowed to carry out a survey himself — he could still recall the exact dimensions of the house and the name of its owner. As Siraj watched the architects and draftsmen work, the idea of moving to Saudi Arabia faded away entirely. The allure of the new and exotic dissipated, to be replaced by the deep satisfaction of making sense of the familiar.

From Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Divided City by Samira Shackle. Copyright © 2021 by Samira Shackle. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.