Dawn, March 6, 2006
Relocating the US consulate
By Anwer Mooraj
‘HAVING a good time, wish you were here.’ This was the kind of one-line message one received from a friend back in the 1960s whilst he was enjoying the winter sunshine in Blackpool, or stretching his legs on the pier at Bournemouth; or reading about Stephen Spender’s ‘gentle ocean, (which) like an unfingered harp, spread her white lace on the shore.’
It might sound a little strange, after all that’s happened in Karachi during the last 30 years, but there was a time when one could, and probably did, scribble this sort of message on a postcard and dispatch it to a friend living abroad. The ’60s were Karachi’s golden decade. There was no democracy. But there was a lot of law and order, and one didn’t have to look over one’s shoulder while wolfing down nihari in Burns Road at four o’clock in the morning.
These days, one would be loathe to send this kind of memo to anybody living abroad, unless one harboured a sinister desire to drastically shorten his temporal existence — what with bomb blasts, riots, demonstrations, strikes, demands to recall ambassadors, exhortations to sever diplomatic relations with every country that printed those disgraceful sacrilegious caricatures, more strikes and more demonstrations. On this occasion there has been no let-up in the fury that has erupted, and one never knows when the next riot will take place. The damage in Lahore alone was estimated at over a billion rupees.
Every time the mob goes on the rampage, setting fire to foreign banks and fast food establishments, smashing cars, burning buses, and killing a few people in uniform who try to stop them, one is reminded of those opening lines of Yeats’ powerful poem The Second Coming which describes far better than any ode this writer knows of the state of affairs in Pakistan today.
‘Turning, and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer./Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world./The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.’
It is by now clear to the thinking man that the recent turmoil was caused by a number of reasons: chronic unemployment, the rising cost of living, the inability of the government to curb some of the heinous crimes that are taking place and needless extravagance by officials who have a penchant for wasting the taxpayer’s money. An uprising had been on the cards for some time. All that was needed was an event or an incident to blow the lid off the bottle and trigger off a mass revolt. This was provided by a clutch of editors in Denmark and a number of other European countries. Predictably, whenever there is gross disenchantment in the Muslim world, US embassies and consulates are targeted, even though on this occasion the Americans wouldn’t touch the cartoons with a barge pole and actually condemned their publication. The assault on the US consulate general in Karachi nevertheless took place, and it was certainly not the first of its kind.
The white building on Abdullah Haroon Road which hoists the American flag, shaped like a small ocean liner with its portholes facing Frere Hall, has an interesting history. An entry in my scrapbook points to a piece by the late Australian journalist Richard Hughes. In an article in The Far Eastern Economic Review he wrote that a fakir’s historic curse would have been blamed for the November 1979 burning of the US embassy in Pakistan by rampaging students, had the state department not correctly shifted it from Karachi to Islamabad when the latter become the capital of Pakistan.
The current consulate general is apparently built on cursed and haunted land. It has survived in popular belief because for the first and only time in history did the state department bow to superstition and adjust architectural design “to placate the supernatural”. According to Hughes, over a hundred years ago, a rich Parsi gentleman by the name of Sohrabji Rustomji built a beautiful residence on this very spot, which later came to be referred to as Sudden Death Lodge, because whoever resided in the place or had anything to do with its construction was swiftly dispatched to the kingdom beyond the clouds . In the centre of the plot was reputed to be the tomb of a pir. The story goes that a fakir appealed to Rustomji not to trespass upon the grave. The plea was apparently rejected and a curse was solemnly placed upon the place.
The curse became effective at once. Four workmen died in the course of duty, members of the Rustomji family perished mysteriously and an English family by the name of Reid that subsequently took up residence pegged down from unnatural causes. The building was razed in 1925, and this large tract of land, located on the road named after Queen Victoria, remained vacant for 30 years. Readers with a macabre sense of history who are interested in other fatalities that took place in the building should read Dew and Mildew, by the distinguished English education official, Percival Christopher Wren, who faithfully and gruesomely documented the continuing fatality.
A number of US consuls general in Karachi, Faulk, Archard, Kennedy and Bauman, had at various times expressed dissatisfaction with the building. They cited reasons for wanting to shift to another location, like faulty air conditioning and inadequate security. In private conversations, however, what came across was that these diplomats were also concerned with the fact that their office was located at a strategic and sensitive commercial location, and that every time Abdullah Haroon Road and Fatimah Jinnah Road were closed to vehicular traffic, after there was a whiff of insurrection in the air, it caused the travelling public no end of misery.
Two plots were subsequently made available — one next to the Karachi Grammar School in Boat Basin and the other in Phase 8 in Defence Housing Authority. The former caused a storm of protest from parents of school-going children and the latter was rejected because it was too close to the sea and was vulnerable to amphibian attacks. Finally, much to the relief of the officials, the waiting is over.
A news item appeared in a section of the press on September 26, 2005, which reported that the Karachi Port Trust had approved the allotment of a piece of land measuring 10 acres, situated on Moulvi Tamizuddin Khan Road, for the construction of the new American consulate at Karachi. The report added that the present location of the US consulate at Abdullah Haroon Road had been under threat since 1995, particularly after 9/11, though it did not specify how the new location would in any way diminish or lessen the threats to the building or to the officials who worked within.
The public learned that the new US consulate would be constructed by demolishing the present building of the Central Cotton Committee, which also houses the Wool Testing Laboratory. There was a charming bit about the building being “one of the architectural landmarks of Karachi depicting the blend of cultural values of both the United States and Pakistan” and about the move marking “an important step in the revitalization of the M.T. Khan Road, an important link of the city with the port area, which had fallen into disrepair in the past two decades.”
One hopes that the people who run the KPT know what they are talking about, because anybody who has recently travelled on the road originally named after the queen-empress of India would acknowledge the fact that currently M.T. Road, when judged by its importance, is probably the worst thoroughfare in Karachi. One wishes that the next time the prime minister or the president decides to pay a visit to this city, their 10-car motorcade is taken on a sightseeing tour on the stretch between PIDC house and the Bahria Centre.
The report concluded by stating that the Pakistan government was reportedly of the view that the addition of the new building at M.T. Khan Road would help in improving the image of Karachi and the construction would be used as symbol to attract more American investment in the country. Why does one get the feeling that we’ve heard that one before?
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