Karachi

Karachi began as Kolachi, a fortified fishing and trading settlement beside a creek at the western edge of the Indus delta, defended by two gates named for sweet and brackish water — Mithadar and Kharadar — which still name the oldest quarters. Traders shipped goods to Muscat and the Gulf, and the Talpur rulers of Sindh built a small fort at Manora to guard the harbour. British forces took the town in 1839, four years before they annexed Sindh.

Under British rule the harbour was dredged, a railway pushed inland and Karachi became the port for the wheat and cotton of the Punjab, growing into a planned colonial city of stone civic buildings, churches, gymkhanas and the Saddar bazaar. Municipal works came early, and by 1900 it was one of the busiest grain ports in the British Empire. Its population was strikingly mixed: Sindhi Hindus, Gujarati and Parsi merchants, Goans, Jews, Baloch and Memons all built quarters and institutions that survive in the street names.

Partition in 1947 remade the city. Most Hindu Sindhis left, and hundreds of thousands of Urdu-speaking Muhajirs arrived from India; Karachi served as the capital of the new state until the government moved to Rawalpindi and then Islamabad in the late 1950s. Industry, Pashtun and Punjabi migration and Afghan refugees after 1979 pushed growth further. Ethnic and political violence, arms and sectarian killings made the 1980s and 1990s bitter decades, and a long security operation from 2013 brought murder rates down sharply, leaving a city that is calmer than its reputation but still under strain.

Karachi is the most cosmopolitan city in Pakistan, and the least defined by any one group. Urdu is the common language of the street, but Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi, Balochi, Gujarati and Memoni are all spoken at home, and the city contains large Christian, Hindu, Parsi, Ismaili and Bohra communities alongside the Sunni and Shia majority. That mixture is the source of both its energy and its politics.

It is the country's media and creative capital. Television drama, advertising, publishing and the fashion industry are based here, and the Karachi Literature Festival, art galleries, the National Academy of Performing Arts and a long line of musicians and painters — Sadequain's murals are on public walls — give the city a cultural weight the rest of Pakistan acknowledges. Truck art, painted in workshops on the city's edges, has become a national emblem.

Religious life runs from the formal mosque to the Sufi shrine: the hilltop darbar of Abdullah Shah Ghazi above Clifton draws crowds with its drumming and offerings, and Muharram processions are among the largest anywhere. Social custom is conservative by international standards and liberal by Pakistani ones — women work throughout the city, cafés are mixed, and dress in Clifton and Defence is freer than in the old city. Hospitality is emphatic: guests are fed, refusals are negotiated, and meeting times are treated generously.

Around twenty million people live in Karachi, making it one of the largest cities in the world and by far the largest in Pakistan; nobody knows the true figure, and census counts are politically contested. The city generates a large share of national tax revenue and hosts the central bank, the stock exchange, the two seaports, textile mills, car assembly and much of the country's manufacturing, while more than half the population lives in unplanned settlements known as katchi abadis.

Days start late and end later. Offices open mid-morning, shops stay open until late evening, and restaurants fill after ten at night; Sunday is the weekly holiday, with Friday afternoons broken by prayers. Commuting means long journeys by minibus, rickshaw or motorbike, and the school run and the evening rush choke the main arteries. Middle-class life centres on Clifton, Defence, Gulshan-e-Iqbal and North Nazimabad; working-class districts such as Lyari, Orangi and Korangi are dense, industrious and poorly served.

The standing grievances are water, which is delivered unevenly and often bought from tankers, power cuts in summer, drainage that fails in monsoon rain, solid waste, and transport. Heat is a serious public-health issue after a deadly heat wave in 2015. Set against this is a tenacious commercial optimism: the city absorbs migrants from everywhere in Pakistan and keeps growing.

Karachi eats better than anywhere else in the country because it eats from everywhere in it. The Muhajir kitchens of the old city gave the city nihari, beef shank stewed overnight and eaten with naan at breakfast; haleem, a thick mash of wheat, lentils and meat; and biryani in the Karachi style, layered with potato and heavily spiced. Sindhi biryani with dried plums, Pashtun karahi and grilled tikka, Punjabi paya and Balochi sajji all have their own restaurants.

The street classic is the bun kebab, a fried patty of spiced mince or lentils with egg, chutney and onion in a soft bun, sold from carts everywhere. Other staples of the pavement are gol gappay, crisp hollow shells filled with spiced water; chaat; anda shami; and, near the fish harbour, fried and grilled seafood — prawns, crab and Arabian Sea fish, which are cheaper and more central to eating here than anywhere inland.

Burns Road, near the old city, is the oldest food street, known as much for its sweets as its meat: rabri, thickened milk cooked down slowly; falooda, a cold drink of milk, vermicelli and ice cream; and kulfi. Tea is constant — doodh patti, boiled thick with milk and sugar, and sweet chai from roadside stalls — alongside sugarcane juice, fresh lime and, in summer, Sindhi mangoes, which arrive from the interior between May and August.