The Karachi hotel carpet straightener

This happened twelve years ago, but I remember it clearly, still.

I was sitting in the lobby of a swank western hotel in downtown Karachi, Pakistan, waiting to meet the bespectacled stranger who would serve as my guide, my journalistic fixer, in a country where journalists were targets.

He was himself a local reporter, a father of two daughters, and he was taking a risk to work with me.

But he cared about freedom of expression in his homeland and decided to partner with a foreign correspondent. 

And the pay was good, considering the risk.

It was a sunny winter morning in 2008 and the lobby was bustling with activity: men in business suits and Shalwar Kameez, the flowing uniform worn by most Pakistani men.

The furnishings were ornate, expensive carpets and furniture — all of it recently installed after the hotel had been bombed by religious extremists the prior year. 

I felt uneasy about staying at a place that had so recently been scene to such violence, but in Pakistan it was hard to find any hotel western hotel that hadn’t been targeted in some way by terrorists. 

So you took your chances. 

It was like standing a spot that had recently been struck by lightning — could it strike again so soon?

Like a lot of western journalists in Pakistan at the time, I grew a scraggly beard that came in red and streaked with gray, as if that was enough of a disguise. 

Who was I fooling?

I was a target, if anyone wanted me to be one.

I had come to Pakistan in the aftermath of the assassination of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto.

That year, there was to be presidential election back home and I planned to tag along with a politician from Bhutto’s party as he went on the stump.

I wanted to experience the fear and loathing of campaigning amid such terrorism and violence. Since the tumultuous 1960s, many Americans have forgotten — or repressed — the violence associated with being a political figure wandering among abject strangers. 

I was working in Washington when Ronald Reagan was shot, and now even that seems so long ago. In Pakistan, the threat was real.

On that trip, I'd flown I flew into Islamabad airport a few weeks prior, making my way through the teeming capital crowds, as rigid as the statues out front.

I was petrified of making any sort of eye contact, perhaps for fear of upsetting someone with my Westernness. When I did catch someone’s attention, always male, (I never looked twice at a Pakistani woman) he considered me with coal black eyes, most times with a gaze so intense, so piercing, that it still makes me shiver to recollect it. 

That glare always compelled me to avert my eyes.

I took whatever precautions I could while traveling in Karachi, and everywhere else.

The fixer was known to the newspaper, and had worked with the regular correspondent who covered the region. She had returned home on leave, and I flew in to fill the gap.

I felt like a babysitter, watching over a couple’s children. I wanted to make sure that nothing serious happened in my watch. 

If it did, I would call right away, interrupt a dinner, or get Mom out of a movie, just to make sure I was giving junior the right medication at the right time.

Journalism beats are like that. They’re like pampered children, or beloved vegetable gardens, groomed with care over time by their minders. 

I didn’t want to mess up.

Still, I did have one story idea.

In Karachi, the city where journalist Daniel Pearl had been kidnapped and murdered in 2002, there was a mullah who had washed Pearl’s body in the Muslim tradition, even though he had been Jewish.

It was a gesture of respect, and the mullah had not given many interviews. I wanted to talk to him about the newest rash of violence. 

But the reporter whose beat I was covering decided it wasn’t a good idea.

She wanted that one for herself.

So, I backed off. 

I’d have to find another story.

Waiting that morning in the hotel lobby, I didn’t know what my fixer looked like, other than a brief description he’d given me over the phone. 

And so I was hyper-watchful, eyeing everyone who crossed the space in front of me.

And that’s when I saw him.

Not my fixer. Somebody else.

He was an older man in a Shalwar Kameez, who skittered back and forth across the floor, crablike, on a particular mission.

Each time a guest or waiter or anyone else walked across the expensive lobby carpet, he’d rush over, produce a small comb, and straighten out the fringe, the sometimes unruly ends that come with many Pakistani carpets.

He worked quickly — comb, comb, comb — making sure every single threads was straight.

And then he skittered back to his corner to wait, like a ball boy in a tennis tournament.

When someone walked past and upset a few strands, he’d be back.

Comb, comb, comb.

Finally, the fixer entered the lobby. 

Even with this trusted many by my side, I tried to be ever-so-cautious in Karachi.

For a Western journalist like me, the city will be forever associated with the brutal assassination of one of our own.

One evening, I arranged to have dinner with my fixer.

The restaurant was three short blocks from my hotel.

Still, I took a taxi, and paid the driver to wait for the return ride, rather than walk.

That’s how cautious I’d become.

One day, when we went out of town on a story, we needed to hire a car.

This was a major issue. Western journalists were schooled to never do business with strangers, for fear of the worst.

Months later, a colleague at the newspaper, told me that he had once broken that rule and almost didn’t live to regret it. He had flown into Kabul not long after the 9/11 terrorist attack to cover the invasion of Afghanistan that everyone knew was coming.

He didn’t have a fixer and he didn’t have a driver, and he needed to travel to Jalalabad, so he took a grievous chance: 

He hired both off the street.

The trio left Kabul and, once in the desert, their car suffered a flat tire. My colleague told the others he was going to wander off for a moment to take a leak.

He came back ten minutes later and the tire was fixed. They were ready to go.

He never saw the driver again, but continued to work with the fixer. They were a good team. One night, months later, over dinner, the fixer turned to the journalist, and said “You know, I don’t know if i should tell you this, but remember that first trip we took together to Jalalabad?”

It had been so long before, many stories under the bridge, but the journalist remembered.

“Well,” the fixer said, “remember when you walked away for a bit  As soon as you were out of earshot, the driver turned to me and said, ‘Let’s kill this guy. I know a mullah who would pay a pretty price for his head.’”

The fixer shook his head, and said No.

The driver shrugged and said OK, and went on fixing the tire. 

Just like that. 

I still remember how that story floored me.

How we all perhaps come so close to death and never even know it.

That day in Karachi, the fixer and I hired a stranger to drive us. When the regular reporter found out what I’d done, she scolded me.

Never take risks, she warned. 

They could get you killed.

And I will never forget that old man in the Shalwar Kameez who hurried across the carpet of that western hotel to comb out that frayed carpet fringe.

It was a simple gesture, a bit of imposed order in a violent, chaotic, disorderly world.

Like a children's parade in a battle zone.

Comb, comb, comb.