“How can I go home? If I have to keep paying somebody? I keep paying what my family owes. ” — Mohmen, Tannery Worker
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Gregory Warner
My Pakistani friends were disappointed when I told them I was going to the Korangi the morning after arriving in Karachi. Karachi, after all, is Pakistan's wealthiest city, right on the ocean, and here I was descending into the industrial zone. It was like spending your first morning in New York City by visiting a waste pumping station in New Jersey.
We left downtown Karachi in the morning, by taxi, the sun in our eyes. We drove a half hour east, crossed the Malir River, and quickly got lost. The Korangi has literally thousands of factories. We pulled up to an auto repair shop festooned with Pakistani flags and asked directions to the tannery district. "Turn left," the man told us, "and follow the canal."
We found the canal. Black liquid oozed down its banks, caked in places with white foam. As promised, it led us to the tanneries. Some were massive brick buildings, others little more than a few machines in a garage. But every factory had at least one wooden drum, as large as an elephant, endlessly turning, washing the animal hides.
Our driver ventured into the sprawling slum where the workers live. But the dusty streets were too crowded for a car, and we soon ditched the taxi and caught a ride by motorcycle. We passed doors and telephone poles plastered with memorial posters for Benazir Bhutto, the candidate for prime minister who had been assassinated some months before. Except for the mobile phone kiosks and outdoor televisions hooked to generators, the town looked like it hadn't changed in a century. Ice cream vendors in pushcarts rattled past welders who sent sparks cascading onto the street. Horses pulled cartloads of animal hides. The smell of death and decay hung everywhere.
I met Mohmen (he goes by one name only) in one of the largest factories, which employed some 450 laborers. I wonder now what drew me to him in particular. It certainly wasn't his job, which was almost unimaginably dull (transferring skins from a cart to a conveyor belt, a job he'd done six days a week for four years). It wasn't that he was the youngest laborer I met (at 17, he was four or five years older than some of the other workers) or had the toughest life. But there was something about him that, for lack of a better word, I'll call cheerfulness. Not that Mohmen was the joking type — he was actually rather quiet. But even here at work, under the dim light from dirty windows that were never opened and never let in air, Mohmen's eyes sparkled with a sort of secret wink.
I'm not sure I ever found out what that secret was, though I spent most of the next two days following him around. I walked with him to and from work, picking our way through tufts of animal fur that littered the streets like leaves after a storm. I spent time with him and his brother and older cousins in the concrete apartment where they slept together on thin mats. I learned that when Mohmen was 13, his father sent him from his village to the Korangi to earn a living; that he missed his mother terribly and had been home only once in four years. When I asked him directly how he was able to keep smiling, he simply said that he had "made his peace" with poverty.
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