The Unknown

I stand on the cusp of the unknown.

The sky is clear and the strong wind brings the salty scent of the beach. The sun shines off the shards of broken glass scattered on the dirt road. I don’t know what led to this—the shards on the road, just like I don’t know whose car it is that’s parked in front of a small solitary three-wall, corrugated roofed structure that stands erect against the wind, somehow.

I, along with a couple of friends, had gotten on to a public bus from our neighborhood in the early hours of that morning with only 100 rupees each in our pockets, a small piece of information that the furthest stop of the bus will lead us to a small obscure beach lying on the southern periphery of Karachi, and a yearning to leave behind our claustrophobic setting of northern urban Karachi.

What the name of the beach was, it’s exact location, we did not know; neither did we care. We were drawn by the allure of reaching a destination unknown to us. The bus had been filled with vendors and their assortment of fruits and vegetables, which they were transferring from the Vegetable Market near the highway to their shops at various points in the city. As our bus bullied its way through the traffic on the broad but ill-maintained roads heading toward the commercial center of the city, the saccharine air gave way to the perfumed odor of middle-class office workers, most of them wearing gaudy watches or belts.
The bus further threaded through various areas of Karachi—a city that is at best a conflict-ridden patchwork of ethnic enclaves, with only roads connecting them together and, perhaps, the bus the only space that passengers of different ethnicities share.

Our signal for our stop, five hours later, is that there are only three of us passengers in the bus. Carrying no cellphones or watches, we are offered one by the bus conductor to note the only time when the bus will return that day.

We refuse.

We fully realize that if we miss our bus, we will have to spend an entire night in a secluded corner of Karachi. For once in our orderly, safe and measured lives, we decide to take the risk of relying only on our own instincts.

We see the shards on the dirt road, the small structure and a downward rocky slope that leads to a line of beach houses, guarded by a police van whose headlight is smashed.

With only our four limbs and impulses to rely on, I jump into the water, leaving the known behind as a distant memory, fully embracing the unknown.