The End of the Empress

Before it became a bazaar, the land beneath Empress Market was, briefly, an execution ground. In 1857, during the War of Independence, local soldiers rebelling against colonial rule were blasted from cannons or hanged in public view, their remains sliced and sunk in a nearby drain. Karachi was the size of a small town at the time, home mostly to soldiers and fishermen, but for years after the executions, people would strew rose petals on the site, in memory of the spilled blood of their countrymen. In the mid-1880s, the British built a market for themselves on the grounds, a grand structure in the Indo-Gothic style: vaulted roofs, cusped arches, a 140-foot high clocktower studded with leopard heads. Ever since, Empress Market, christened after Queen Victoria, has presided over the toot and rattle of Karachi, watching it swell from a harbor settlement of 85,000 to a metropolis of at least 16 million people.

Tajdaar Khan’s first memories of Empress Market are from when he was so little, he didn’t need to wear pants. He would accompany his father to their shop — Sardar Khan & Sons, in Garden No. 4 of the market — and watch him sew shoes. At the time, they lived close enough, in a makeshift room above a nearby tea house, for Tajdaar to totter over, bare-bottomed, holding his father’s hand. When he was in eighth grade, his father developed hemorrhoids and his health began to fail. Tajdaar — whose name means emperor, crown-wearer — remembers pointing, innocently, to a blood stain on his father’s shalwar. He remembers, too, his father’s subsequent embarrassment and shame. Soon after, Tajdaar dropped out of school and took over the business.

He was good at it. He specialized in Peshawari chappal, a traditional Pashtun sandal: two bisecting straps of leather affixed to a sole made from truck tires. Tajdaar had lived in Karachi all his life, but his family came from Kohat, a city in northwestern Pakistan. Kohat made a muddled cameo in the eighth and final season of Homeland, Showtime’s sand-tinted war-on-terror fever dream, but other than that, people outside the country have no particular reason to know it. They may know Peshawari chappal, however: In 2014, British designer Sir Paul Smith released a similar shoe, priced at £300 and called, inexplicably, “the Robert.” A couple of years ago, Christian Louboutin trotted one out too, with its trademark red sole. On each occasion, Pakistani Twitter howled in indignation.

Tajdaar, who thinks he is 57 years old but speaks tremulously, like a much older man, didn’t know any of this and even if he had, probably