Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Divided City

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