God Wears Lipstick in Karachi

Zahra Haider

The author paints a deeply-felt, throbbing portrait of the city she did not grow up in, but chose: Karachi.

I did not grow up in Karachi. I was raised in Islamabad, a city of polite silences, manicured hedges, and the performance of order. Islamabad doesn’t ask anything of you except to behave. To speak softly and sit still. To be a good girl with straight hair and acceptable opinions. There, everything is spaced out emotionally, geographically, socially. The chaos is behind closed doors and the trauma always has manners. 

My memories are paved in the sterile quiet of Margalla Road: bougainvillea-covered walls, diplomatic silence, the city’s obsession with keeping its chaos indoors. The city taught me to contain myself, lower my voice, dress like a good girl, and think like a man. Everything felt soft-edged, too manicured to belong to the mess of real life. Karachi, by contrast, expands. And it’s in that expansiveness that I began to recognise myself.

Karachi doesn’t pretend to be clean. It doesn’t pretend to be polite. It is loud and sticky and fragrant with survival. It’s not a city. It’s a fever. A feeling. An argument. A story that keeps interrupting itself. It took me years—and a marriage— to see the heat for what it was: not danger, but vitality. Not a threat, but a pulse. A beating heart.

And Karachi was never mine. Not until I married a man who belongs to it, who can name its roads in the dark, who understands its violence and beauty the way a child understands a mother’s rage, instinctively, without needing explanation. It was never mine until it became unavoidable. Until I started returning, awkwardly at first, then with the ache of attachment I wasn’t prepared for. Now, the city holds a version of me I had long buried: the unruly one, the soft one, the one who could cry on the street.

My grandmother grew up in Karachi after fleeing Agra during Partition. She was a girl with memory heavy in her bones and a future she had to build herself. Karachi became her landing place. Her survival space. She didn’t return to Karachi after she got married. She lives in Islamabad now and spent a decade in Mississauga in the ’70s, trying to make a home in a place that could never quite see her. Her siblings stayed in Karachi and her entire family still lives there. And my great-grandmother, the matriarch I never met but whose name I carry like a secret in my bones, spent most of her life in Clifton. She died there, in a city that held her, even as the rest of us scattered and displaced.

'Escaping Through' by Fariha Taj

Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like to be raised there. To walk the same streets my great-grandmother once did. To go to school with my third cousins on my mother’s side, instead of being raised closely with my father’s extended family. To develop a spine that could take the noise without flinching. But instead, I was given Islamabad. A city that teaches silence before truth. A city that punishes excess with coldness. A city that could never quite hold the fire in me without trying to turn it into steam.

I never felt more at home in my family than I did in my grandmother’s arms. Her words may cut, but her love never does, and she never makes me feel as if I am too much. Even when my husband met her for the first time, she lovingly said, “Zahra toh kabhi complain nahi karti! Yeh bohat easy-going hai. Hamesha se aisi hi rahi hai.” (Zahra never complains, she is so easy-going... all the time.)

When I think of God, I think of my Nani’s hands—veined but beautiful, steady yet now-fragile, always reaching for more than just what’s in front of her. She is soft in the way we’re told grandmothers should be. And she is always safe. And when I return to Karachi now, I feel like I’m walking alongside ghosts that know my name. The city isn’t mine. But somehow, it remembers me. It knows.

So when I say God wears lipstick in Karachi, I don’t mean it as a metaphor. I mean She applies burgundy Revlon lipstick in the rearview mirror of a Careem, curses under her breath on Sharah-e-Faisal, and waves flies off her plate at Boat Basin with a kind of divine impatience. She exists not outside the mess, but within it—greasy, loud, layered, and alive. Full of rage and life.

Karachi does not pretend. That’s what makes it holy. In Islamabad, I was taught to curate myself, to present grief as poise and hunger as ambition. But Karachi taught me to be messy out loud. To cry at 3 p.m. outside the pharmacy. To eat with my hands daily. To show up late, bloated, sunburnt, undone, and still expect to be adored. In Karachi, no one flinches at a woman who falls apart in public. They might just pass a tissue and keep moving. You are not judged for being undone, the way you would be in a city like Islamabad or even in Canada. You are simply another human surviving the day.

And this, to me, is sacred.

God in Karachi isn’t a bearded judge in the clouds. She’s a woman at a dhaba with kajal smudged under her eyes and yesterday’s lipstick still visible. She is the art student chain-smoking in the parking lot of T2F, talking about revolution and heartbreak in the same breath. She is the spirit of Sabeen Mahmud, who carved out space for difficult conversations and paid for it with her life. Her name still hangs in the air there, not just mourned, but mobilised.

God is also at rooftop raves in DHA, spinning through the night in crop tops and imported sneakers, even barefoot girls dancing like nobody’s looking, even though everyone is. She is in the girls who show up to brunch in Clifton, the queer kids creating zines at Kitab Ghar, the Khwaja Siras who don’t wait for tolerance to make an entrance and walk as if they own the roads. She is the softness in chaos and the chaos inside softness. She is everything.

She is in the woman breastfeeding in traffic. The aunties who flick cigarette ash from their Generation kurtas and ajrak dupattas. The girl who just got dumped and is crying into her coffee at Luna or Triggy or one of the other plethora of coffee shops in the city. The widow who kisses her fingers before touching the photograph of a man who never loved her well. She is not transcendent. She is imminent. Intimate. Slightly inappropriate.

And yes, She wears lipstick. Not as decoration. As a declaration. As defiance.

My own mother taught me restraint. She is westernised. Dolce & Gabbana heels, Dior perfume, and discipline. Beauty was meant to be elegant, never loud. Rage was meant to be rational. Mess was meant to be private. And for a long time, I believed her. I thought control was sacred. I thought withholding made me worthy. I learned to want less. I learned to eat slowly. I learned to cross my legs and keep my voice low. And to always straighten my hair and my shoulders. My mother even called Karachi a “crazy, crazy city.”

And now, with borders tightening and tensions rising and the subcontinent being squeezed by politics that were never ours to begin with, my desire to return always feels fleeting, fragile, distant—as if I’m loving a place that might not let me in again.

But Karachi taught me another prayer. A louder one. One where lipstick is worn like armour, where grief doesn’t wait for permission, where you can argue with your husband in Dolmen Mall and still get club sandwiches after. One where beauty isn’t about being palatable. It’s about being present. Full. Unapologetically alive.

Karachi doesn’t ask you to be small. It asks you to be real. To sweat, to stumble, to spill, to survive.

But Karachi is not just a city. It’s Sindh’s wild, beating heart. And Sindh is its own kind of scripture. A land of saints and shrines and soil thick with stories. The language of longing was born here, somewhere between Shah Abdul Latif’s poetry, my maternal ancestor from the Indus Valley, the dusty breath of the Thar desert, and even the ghost of Pakistan People’s Party and its dead Bhuttos who continue to haunt the province.

My roots may lie scattered across Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and even Agra and Mississauga, but when I think of belonging, I think of Sindh — not just as a place, but as a feeling. Earthy, musical, generous, wounded. A land that holds contradictions like prayer: the spiritual and the profane, the revolutionary and the ordinary, the woman and the god she carries inside her. Karachi may be the city I wish to return to, but Sindh is the land that has always been waiting.

I’ve started talking to God differently now. Not in rote recitations or whispered apologies. But in full volume. In traffic. In bad Urdu. I speak to Her when I stop myself from apologising for needing love. I speak to Her when I let my stomach hang loose in a mirror and still put on lipstick. I speak to Her when I find myself listening to Nayyara Noor at 3:00 a.m. and crying my eyes out. And sometimes, when I listen closely, I swear I hear Her laugh.

Because God is not tidy. She doesn’t need you to be good. She just wants you to be honest.

And this essay, more than anything else, is a love letter to Karachi. To the city I was gifted through marriage, and now dream of returning to with the kind of longing that feels both sacred and completely out of reach. Every time I leave Pakistan, I wonder if I’ll ever come back. And now, with borders tightening and tensions rising and the subcontinent being squeezed by politics that were never ours to begin with, my desire to return always feels fleeting, fragile, distant—as if I’m loving a place that might not let me in again.

And sometimes, sitting in my quiet apartment in Montreal—heater humming, fridge full, an uninterrupted flow of hot water, light and clean, breathable air—I feel guilty for wanting it so badly. I feel strange romanticising Karachi from the safety of a place that so many back home are still dreaming of. What does it mean to miss load-shedding and water trucks while living in a building where the light going out is a rare occurrence? What does it mean to miss Karachi's heat while scrolling from under a weighted blanket in Canada?

This is the wound of privilege and exile: to have left for survival, to have been given comfort, and still ache for the chaos. To want to go home when home is the place everyone else is trying to leave, knowing all the while that if I returned, I’d still live there with the same ease, the same lightness, the same borrowed immunity I carry here in the West.

But love doesn’t require permission. It persists, even when it aches. And Pakistan still calls to me, through traffic jams and motia, through WhatsApp voice notes and airport layovers, through memory, through blood.

So no, I don’t believe God lives in some unreachable heaven. I believe She lives here. In Karachi. In the crumbling walls of a Seaview apartment. In the motia seller outside a shrine. In the breath between gulps of chai. In me.

And yes. She wears lipstick. It always stains her dupatta. But She doesn’t mind. It reminds Her that She’s still alive.

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Zahra Haider is a feminist writer and researcher from Islamabad, Pakistan, currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Her work explores the intersections of gender, state power and the Pakistani diaspora, blending digital archiving with community-driven storytelling. She is a recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant to develop her debut novel, Parallel Lines, and her short story, Ajrak and Ashes, was shortlisted for the 2025 Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize. Her essays and insights have been featured in the BBC, CNN, CBC, VICE, Foreign Policy, Dawn and others.

Fariha Taj is a visual artist and creator who graduated from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in 2013 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Fariha’s art has been exhibited in prominent shows including the Karachi Literature Festival (ArtNow), Amin Gulgee Gallery, IVS Gallery, FOMMA Trust (in both Karachi and Lahore) and the unique Aghaz-e-Safar show at Cantt Railway Station. Fariha’s artwork is on permanent display at the Ambiance Hotel in Pakistan. She was also part of ‘Seeing is Believing’ art showcase with Standard Chartered Pakistan, supporting the Layton Rahmatullah Benevolent Trust.