Amid days of rage, Karachi struggles to find some normalcy

On New Year’s Eve, a consignment of pickup trucks that the United States had bought for Pakistani law enforcement officials fighting militants had been picked clean; brakes, steering wheels, batteries had been carted away.

The truck drivers, ethnic Pashtuns waited in vain for rescue here in the southern ethnic Sindhi heartland. One of them had his left ear caked with blood; the mobs had pelted him with stones and then burned his coal truck, costing him his only source of income.

“You don’t know what the next day is going to bring,” is how Sheena Hadi, 27, put it on New Year’s morning here in Karachi. “We are in a gray area right now.”

While shops in Karachi, the city worst hit by the post-assassination violence, had been shuttered since Thursday evening.

But as 2008 dawned, shops and restaurants opened, Seema Ahmed stepped out to do what she had never done in her 40 years in Karachi: stock up on food grains, in the event of another upheaval. Munizeh Sanai, a radio disc jockey, made sure to wear flat shoes in case she had to make a run for her life. And the family of Shoaib Umer, stranded here after its train home to Lahore was canceled Monday, spent the afternoon at the mausoleum of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Down the street, in a cafe that had opened for the first time in four days, a pair of entrepreneurs, laptops open, were busy at work on a marketing plan for an anti-littering campaign in Karachi. It was a strange enterprise at a time when the city was littered with hollowed, charred cars.

But Tooba Zarif Husain, 26, and Salman Yaqoob Raja, 25, were unbowed. They said they hoped things would return to normal in a few months, once the elections were over. Theirs were rare voices of confidence in the ability of President Pervez Musharraf.

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