Lifestyle - The rich in Karachi & other luxuries

HINDOL SENGUPTA

It’s a languorous lifestyle with the day often starting well past noon. Yes, we have enough money, thank you.
The rich in Pakistan, unlike the rich in India, seem unhurried. They have the luxury of time and deciding their own pace.

I had heard of the rich in Karachi long before I went to Karachi. It was in desultory Delhi that I first heard of the rich in Karachi — their giant homes, their wild, expensive cars, their late night parties, their women, the list went on.
Then I went to Karachi.
I write on fashion in India, so in Karachi I went to meet, on the afternoon that Pervez Musharaff whined about losing his job on national television, the doyenne of Pakistani fashion, Faiza Samee.
Like Ritu Kumar back home, Samee has single-handedly saved scores of heritage textile crafts from dying out in Pakistan. The elegant, salwar-kameezed, peaches and cream complexioned woman lives in the old-moneyed Karsaz neighbourhood of Karachi where every Indian going to Pakistan for the first time has to go to show their face at the Foreigner Registration Office.
But I wasn’t going only to see her revivalist genius. I wanted to see her legendary store, in one part of her workshop-cum-home, which opens for only two hours everyday.
Flying in to buy
People fly in from Lahore, taking the right Shaheen Air (Pakistan’s domestic airline) flight, to arrive between 4.30 and 6.30 p.m. when Faiza Samee opens her doors. Such is the luxury of the rich in Karachi.
Samee, who buys Birkins (from Hermes and one of the most expensive handbags in the world) on whim, lives in a leafy white-washed home that is slightly My Name is Red meets Gone with the Wind, once dazzlingly white-washed, it now has intricate filigree patterns as Samee reinvents age-old architecture traditions on her walls in the same way that she resurrects vintage stitch and weave techniques.
Over kebabs and a stinging mixed dal (from Sri Lanka and Pakistan, she told me), Samee said she is often bored of commerce. She doesn’t wake up before four p.m., she likes to go away to London in summer, she doesn’t care much about brand building, she is not interested in doing pret lines and she is now more interested in rebuilding her home (it has already taken three years and likely to take another three) rather than clothes.
Unlike many other rich designers in India, she doesn’t have a flagship store and is unlikely to ever try to get one and unlike any designer I know in the subcontinent, she has no interest in showing in London, Paris or New York.
In fact, she shrugged off Selfridges. Asked by Selfridges to give them a hefty buyer’s discount, Samee said no and that she was much happier selling in the subcontinent, thank you.
Thank you, we have enough money — that is the essence of the languor of the rich in Pakistan. The rich in Pakistan, unlike the rich in India, seem unhurried. They have the luxury of time and deciding their own pace. They have the liberty of working, many a times not working and they never seem to not have time for lunch.
And why only lunch?
In Pakistan, the rich are mainly found in coffee bars. Not our kind of coffee bars but think of coffee bars that replace our bars. Where the light is always the colour of air-kissed, fermented sunlight, where the coffee always comes with a message in cream floating above the froth, a note for the creamy layer as it were. On my first night, on Pakistan Independence Day, the message in the cup patriotically said — think green.
Social hub
The rich in Pakistan, bereft of real bars or pubs or nightclubs, spend all their evenings and a large part of their nights in these coffee shops. Everything is said and unsaid at these coffee shops and a lot, as the ad line goes, can happen over coffee.
Karachi, like all bustling port towns, is slightly a city in heat. Only, it arches its eyebrow more delicately than Mumbai or Marrakesh, more casually than the city of my birth, Kolkata. The rich there carry their handbags a little bit more loche-ly than the rolling-in-money-mistresses in Delhi, the city which truly flaunts money in India.
It is only, after all, in Karachi where diamonds flash in coffee shops and people discuss buying Maseratis over cafe lattes.
The rich in Karachi, especially the young among the rich, all speak with an accent. This is funny because if you think of the rich in India, even in the biggest cities — Mumbai or Delhi — most people don’t speak with an accent. Even if they went to college abroad.
The hip, young, sometimes rich in Pakistan layer their anxieties about the country with indeterminate accents, coating their words with sassiness learnt in different lands which somehow, sometimes don’t fit in at home and yet must be used to differentiate them and their ideas, their enterprise from the daily sound of crumbling dreams.
They also, the rich, eat. Eating is the favourite past time in Karachi. Everyone goes out to eat. The meals are elaborate with at least two different types of meat — lamb and beef, and roti and rice and kebabs and curries and two types of vegetables and salads and yogurt and kheer and malai. After breakfast, they discuss lunch and then tea and dinner and then there is coffee.
The restaurants are always full. Hameed Kashan, who owns one of Karachi’s new, young joints called Build Your Own Burger (BYOB), says there is always people hopping into his tiny restaurant and takeaway and sometimes he doesn’t know how to handle them.
For instance, he had originally intended his joint to be non-smoking but almost everyone smokes in Karachi, so what can he do?
Business is good
But business is good in Kashan’s eatery as it is in almost every restaurant in the city — from the ethnic The Village to swish Japanese walk-ins.
Everything that the rich in India do, the rich in Pakistan does with more languor. They eat more elaborately, their cars are more luxurious and usually they have more of them. Their homes are bigger, with lawns and driveways (unheard of in boxy Mumbai) and they have lots and lots of domestic help.
During a coffee session, Faiza Samee told me the story of how burglars attacked their home long ago but fled when they saw dozens of people roaming in and around their mansion.
“I mean, there’s always around 50 people living in our home,” explained Samee, then noticing my shocked expression added, “as in maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. Say 40 would be right.”