When Karachi turns against you

A brutal nudge brought back the reminders of the realities of living in Pakistan, and with them, the realisation that it is a luxury to be able to leave the country.

I came to Pakistan after years away with nothing but a yearning for its culture, traditions, and a closer look at the nostalgic moments I had carried with me. I never realised that returning to reconnect with the good would also mean confronting the bad and the ugly that follow alongside it.

After nearly 10 years of living in Canada, I returned to Pakistan.

My family and I were heading back from a live music event to our favourite ice cream parlour through Mai Kolachi Road in Karachi after dinner when we found ourselves stuck in traffic between tankers and trucks.

In a split second, the night took an entirely different course.

Men wearing white masks began pounding and banging violently on our car. With every loud thud, we looked around, confused and unsure of who they were or what they wanted. Then I saw them on both sides of the car.

One was pointing a shotgun directly at my father.

On the other side, another man was holding what appeared to be a butcher’s knife in one hand while opening my mother’s side door and aggressively pulling her out with the other. She was still restrained by her seatbelt, and he continued trying to drag her from the car.

In the backseat, I was sitting with my two younger sisters. One of them was completely frozen, while the other was howling and struggling to breathe, having what felt like a major panic attack. Toward the end, she was choking and gasping for air, as though her breath had stopped.

Having to ignore them, I leaned over my mother’s shoulder, desperately trying to pull her back into the car as the man continued to pull at her. I was so focused on getting my mother back inside that I completely disregarded the gun pointed at my father the entire time. I reached across from my father’s side and began honking.

Everything else is a blur.

None of us remembers why or when they left, even though the traffic around us was still completely halted. We were simply left sitting there, trying to comprehend what had just happened, counting our stars that we had somehow made it through.

Throughout the night, we were shell-shocked by what had happened and by the realisation that this was a reality we could not simply escape. We had only ever seen something like this in movies, and suddenly it had come to life around us.

At least in fiction, you know the protagonist will survive until the end. In reality, there is no such certainty. One pull of the trigger, and we would have been gone.

What happened to us was not occurring in a vacuum. Karachi has long struggled with pervasive street crime, and the scale of the problem remains difficult to ignore.

According to police data, over 64,000 street-crime incidents were reported across Karachi in 2025. The reported cases included robbery, mobile-phone snatching, and vehicle snatching or theft. More than 70 people were killed and hundreds injured in incidents of street crime during the year. More than 17,000 citizens reportedly lost their mobile phones, while more than 46,000 cars and motorcycles were stolen or snatched.  

The statistics raise a complicated question. What about the crimes that never make it into the statistics in the first place?

The complete reversal of an otherwise ordinary evening left us stranded in our thoughts, trying to make sense of what had happened and what it meant.

During what was meant to be a simple family outing, I was physically assaulted, my mother was forcibly pulled from our vehicle while restrained by her seatbelt, and I watched a shotgun and knife being used to threaten my family. We were left with bruises, but more than that, with an experience that was deeply traumatic and difficult to reconcile with the ordinary evening that had preceded it.

The experience made me confront a privilege I had rarely considered: the privilege of having been able to leave.

For millions who remain, insecurity is not an isolated encounter that can be processed and left behind. It can become something people learn to anticipate, account for, and live around. It shapes the roads they take, the times they travel, the precautions they take, and the risks they quietly accept as part of everyday life.

This raises a broader question about what the available data can, and cannot, tell us about security in Pakistan.

The Global Organised Crime Index, for example, assesses Pakistan not only on criminal markets and criminal actors, but also on the country's resilience and ability to respond to organised crime. The 2025 index gives Pakistan a criminality score of 6.32 and places its resilience considerably lower, highlighting weaknesses in the country's capacity to respond effectively to organised criminal activity. 

The 2025 Global Peace Index offers another perspective, ranking Pakistan 144th out of 163 countries. While the index measures broader dimensions of peace -- including conflict, militarisation, and societal safety and security -- it nevertheless places Pakistan among the countries facing significant security challenges. 

But international indices and official crime statistics can only tell part of the story.

The gap between what organisations such as the UNODC, the Global Organised Crime Index and the Global Peace Index report, and what people actually experience on the ground tells us different realities of Pakistan’s security environment. There are crimes that are never reported, due to distrust in law enforcement, victims who do not believe reporting will lead to action, and everyday experiences of insecurity that may never enter official statistics.

Because a crime that is never reported does not necessarily mean a crime that never happened.

The writer is a Pakistani-Canadian entrepreneur based in Toronto.