By Noor Ali

Karachi hits us before we clear the office gate. The muffler throbs, a burn climbing through my left shoe into my calf. Riding pillion behind Khalid, I brace as he nudges his bike into evening traffic. We inch along Drigh Road, past the station, where trains never stop, only slow. Bags thrown first, shalwars hitched. Then one-two-three, people jump.

The traffic lights are out again. A warden in his once-white uniform flails and blows his pea whistle in our direction. Khalid doesn’t stop. He threads his 70cc through tight gaps between cars that honk and hiss as we squeeze past their mirrors and bumpers. A car might take forty minutes to clear this stretch; a bike only needs room for a knee. As always, my role as Khalid’s human-sized blinker is to stick out an arm and flap it furiously to carve a path ahead. Right. Left. Right. If challenged, I glare back. “What’s your problem?”

A thick blanket of dust clings to me. It scratches my throat, soils my shirt. Black diesel fumes belch from battered, decorated rickshaws. My eyes sting. Horns blare, another migraine incoming. But Khalid is seven years older, mildly asthmatic, and drenched beneath his red helmet. I should feel grateful. I don’t. He gives me a ride most evenings. Not because he enjoys my company, but because he winces at the idea of my two-bus commute. A captive audience doesn’t hurt either.

At the next light, a W-11 lurches to a stop beside us, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan bleeding through its blown speakers. Zakhm pe zakhm kha ke jee, apne lahu ke ghoont pee. Live on, wound after wound. Drink your own blood. Papa hated Nusrat. “Too Pakistani,” he’d say. He preferred his Bollywood, the television blue in the evenings, some hero clawing his way up from the ashes while Papa nodded from the settee. I used to watch with him, his fingers stroking my hair.

One evening at Zainab Market, I stood beside him while he searched his wallet.

“Not everyone is born with a silver spoon, Waris beta,” he said, returning the remote-controlled car to the toy seller.

“But why not, Papa?” I looked away, my eyes welling.

He never replied. I thought maybe he had dozed off, TV remote in hand, when those silver spoons were handed out. By high school, I knew better. My best friend was chauffeured in a Corolla. His best friend, Ahmed—not me—wore Jordans. Children of fathers who understood what Papa never did. You didn’t have to be born with a silver spoon. You could yank it with your bare hands, or forge one from your own backside even after the world wrote you off. It didn’t matter where the spoon came from. You had to clench it, then shove it so deep it could never ever be taken away from you.

Then, there were others. Spoonless and powerless, like us. Toppers in school. The sort who queued and waited their turn. Never rocked the boat. They woke up twenty years later exactly where they began.

There had to be another way. This couldn’t be all.

“Aey Hero, give me something naa. Allah will give you a moon-faced bride.” A hijra with kohl-lined eyes and conical breasts snaps me out of my thoughts. A kid, eight or nine, hovers close, red balloons tied to a wooden stick taller than he is.

I slap my trouser pockets. Both phones are still there. “Go on, chal!”

Flashers spinning, a police mobile barks from behind, “Move aside! Move aside!” and tears past us. Khalid brakes, then guns it, throwing me backward as he swerves in behind, slipping into the path the mobile cuts through the traffic. Off to Al-Mateen. A couple of bikers fall in after us.

Once a roadside dhaba off the Karachi–Hyderabad highway, Al-Mateen now tries hard to pass itself off as a family restaurant. Khalid and I come here often, escaping dinner and the same conversations waiting at home. The second floor is reserved for families. Cooler. More private. You must arrive with a woman—wife, mother, sister, or sister-like secret girlfriend—to get a seat up there.

“Bro, look at your four o’clock.” As he removes his helmet, Khalid nods toward someone stepping out of a Camry next to us. A fair-skinned girl, dupatta wrapped around her head, tugs down her kurta, bunched from the ride. An uncle, maybe her father, gets out from the other side. They make their way toward the restaurant. Khalid catches me staring and grins.

“C’mon, bro, leave her alone.” He nudges me forward with an arm around my shoulders.

The restaurant has taken over half the street with its charpais. Each woven bed comes with two stuffed round pillows with faded floral patterns. Cars, bikes, and rickshaws squeeze through the other half of the street as waiters slip between them. We choose a charpai away from the diesel smoke and loud families. A security guard with a bushy moustache and a shotgun eyes us.

Khalid’s phone rings. He stares at the unknown number, then picks it up.

“Hello, Syed Khalid speaking. Who’s this?”

“Assa—al—m—s—” The call breaks. A woman’s voice. “Is this Kh—halid sir?”

“Syed. Syed Khalid. Yes, speaking.”

Khalid lets her speak for half a minute, then hangs up without a word.

“Selling me solar panel again, bhenchod.” He waves a waiter over. 

“Half kilo chicken biryani, half kilo mutton karahi, four, no, five naans, and two diet colas.” Khalid places our usual order. Stroking his long, greying beard, he tells the waiter how the gravy should be sautéed and the naans puffed properly.

“Why don’t you get a bike?” He stretches against a pillow.

With Khalid, I prefer sticking to safer ground. Cricket. Politics. No religion, the third of our national opiates, he being a devout Sunni. Not my finances either.

“Well, Mama’s terrified I’d get into an accident. Crushed by a speeding bus or something.”

“Okay, then why not buy a small car? An Alto.”

“Tsk. Too expensive.”

“How about a bank loan?”

Seriously? “It’s my first job, remember? And do you know how much interest they’re charging these days?” I light a cigarette.

“What if I put you in touch with my brother’s friend? He’s at Habib Bank. Helped me out with the kids’ education loan.”

“Ok, yes…maybe.” There’s no maybe. By the tenth every month, most of my salary disappears into groceries, bills, and my younger siblings’ pocket money.

Khalid says nothing. He looks at the traffic.

Then he leans forward and pats my hand twice. “I get it, bro. But you’re twenty-three. Don’t think so much.”

With three of his five kids under ten in school, Khalid’s always around by the time I stumble into the office. Glued to his headset, a cup of chai in hand, he nods whenever our eyes meet. He could probably recite my entire morning routine by now: slipping through the back door, sprinting to the bathroom, tucking in my shirt, loosened from clutching the bus handrails, brushing the dust from my shoes, dabbing the sweat from my forehead, and finally collapsing into my chair.

But he also knows the rest. He’s known me for two years, since I joined this firm as a junior, still a year from graduating. Every day we sit in the same forty-square-metre matchbox with ten other men and a woman, staring at our flat screens for nine hours. He’s been to our fourth-floor one-bedroom apartment. He knows transport isn’t the only problem.

The sizzle of our food breaks the silence between us. Pink paper napkins flutter as the waiter unloads plates, spoons, two bottles of cola, and a blackened cast-iron wok onto our charpai.

“Salad and raita are free, na? Were the naans just made?” Khalid asks, but the waiter is already walking away, waving, shouting at the kid filling the water jugs.

I wonder if either of them will still be here in twenty years. Will I?

“Chal, let’s eat before it gets cold. Bismillah!” Khalid leans in.

I scoop some biryani onto my plate. A chicken wing comes with it.

Last year, a cousin of my brother-in-law invited our family to dinner at the Sindh Gymkhana, Karachi’s oldest members-only club. Until then, I hadn’t even heard of the place. None of us knew how to use the silverware, which spoon to use for what, how to hold a knife. Papa lasted a minute before eating with his hands. I persisted until I pressed too hard with a fork and a chicken wing flew off my plate, landing on the white tablecloth. I still remember picking it up and putting it back on my plate. Can still feel that taxi ride home. Mama saying she was still hungry, Papa snoring against the window.

“Where are you lost, bro?” Khalid says.

“Nowhere.” I stab at a chunk of mutton with my spoon.

He watches me for a moment. “It isn’t so bad,” he says as he folds up his sleeves.

“What isn’t?” I notice the worn-out strap of his watch, a rubber band looped through it.

“All this. This city, our country. Everyone’s so depressed these days. As if we’re all doomed.”

“Aren’t we?”

Khalid pauses with a morsel halfway to his mouth.  “Do we not have food on our table three times a day? Or a roof over our heads? Family, health?”

“Well…the roof over my head is rented—”

He drops his head, shakes it. We’ve been down this road before.

“—This food is full of filth, dyes, antibiotics, who knows what. But sure.”

“Abay yaar—”

The lights cut out. A collective gasp rises from the crowd. The headlights of passing cars seem brighter. I shut my eyes.

Not so bad?

Somewhere nearby, a generator rasps twice, then chugs to life. The clamour returns.

“You know what… I can’t even remember my dead father’s voice anymore.”

For a moment, Khalid says nothing. Then he heaps a spoonful of karahi onto my plate. “What a negative bugger you are.”

Maybe Khalid is right. Maybe the only way to survive is to keep hoping; to see the glass half full and ignore the dirty water in it. But then, his poverty carries a name. He is poor but a Syed. Ten generations or fifty, who knows, the bloodline still reaches back to the Prophet. The prefix always comes first; he’s always Syed Khalid. Then there are Pashtuns, Qazis, Hajis, and countless others, all deprived yet clutching a fragment of inherited power. If not a silver spoon, then bronze, copper, or wooden.

My folks, on the other hand, are nobodies from nowhere. Gujarat to Deccan to Dhaka to Karachi—uprooted and replanted for generations, pushed along by unknown hands. They survived, always, but never stepped beyond survival. Raza uncle’s advice to invest in stocks was “too risky,” a US visa “too distant,” a bank loan “too complex.” I resented that resignation more than I understood it. They never tried to reach for the top, or even drift sideways into the margins, where land-grabbers and fixers moved through the city in black-tinted Prados like they never had to stop for anyone.

So here I am, buried in the deep center. The middle of the middle class. White collar. Shareef aadmi.

Where’s the power in the middle, Khalid? And hope without power?

“—should get the promotion next year, InshaAllah. Do you agree?” Khalid stares at me.

I blink. “InshaAllah.” I pass him a cola, oily fingerprints smudging the bottle. I turn back to my plate.

As we eat in silence, a faint, quivering voice comes from behind me. “Assalam Alaikum.”

Another beggar. I don’t turn to look.

The voice comes again, softer this time. “Beta.”

Khalid clicks his tongue. I turn. A frail man, late seventies, wavers as he tries to stay upright. A faded grey waistcoat over a baby-blue shalwar kameez. The sleeves hang loose around his thinning arms. A beige pakol rests on his head. His face, creased beneath a white beard, is a map of endurance. Thick black-rimmed spectacles magnify his eyes.

He waits. We’ve taught ourselves not to hear such voices. We return to our food.

Cola in one hand, Khalid types on his phone with the other. Our plates are nearly empty. The old man takes a small step toward us. Still no words.

“O Baba ji, why are you bothering us?” Khalid says, eyes on his phone. “Did you check the score? One fifty-nine, all out!”

I don’t reply. I watch the old man.  He extends a trembling arm and points at our charpai. Then, slowly, a finger straightens toward us.

He wants a naan. Barely warm now. Almost rubbery.

I glance at Khalid, already back to his plate. “Khalid, should we give him one?” I don’t know why I ask.

Without a word, Khalid lifts a naan toward the old man.

The old man looks at us once, then takes it with both hands. As he reaches forward, I notice a tiny red rose embroidered on his kameez cuff.

No thank you. No smile. He blinks once and turns.

Before he can step away, a hawker rushes toward us from the other side. We must have looked promising. This man, in his forties, is a toy seller, an entire shop stuffed into a stretched blue plastic bag slung from his shoulder. His hairy paunch strains against the buttons of his checkered shirt.

“Sir ji, one naan for me too?” he says.

“Should we not eat?” Khalid snaps. Heads on the next charpai turn.

“We already gave one to this Baba,” I say.

“First this budhaa, now you. Who’s next? Chalo, you two better disappear now,” Khalid shoos them away.

The old man looks at us, then at the hawker.

A watery smile.

He tears his naan in half, presses one piece into the hawker’s palm, and begins to walk away.

The hawker looks at the old man, then at the piece in his hand. He raises it to his forehead in gratitude.

He doesn’t look at us.

Someone snorts.

I follow the old man’s uneven gait, the curve of his back receding. Half a naan in hand, he keeps his head straight.

“What a fool.” Khalid’s voice cuts through. A toothpick clicks against his teeth.

A waiter rushing past with a stack of dirty dishes nearly collides with the old man. For a second, I think he’s going to fall.

He pauses. Steadies himself. Keeps walking.

I watch him step off the curb and into the moving street.

I nod, a second too late.

~~~

Noor Ali is a Pakistani writer based in Amsterdam and a food technologist by day. Through his fiction, he explores the lives of people shaped by class, faith, and circumstance across South Asia and its diaspora. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Madrid Review, Beyond Words, and Flash Fiction Magazine, and he was recently selected for Ashoka University’s International Fiction Workshop, led by novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri. He can be found on X at @litficNoor.