Human Actions
Intimate Strangers: Balcony Love in Karachi, Then and Now
Bilal Tanweer
Bilal Tanweer reads two excerpts in which intimacy between strangers is established through nonverbal gestures across apartment balconies. The first is from his translation of the Urdu humorous novel, Chakiwara Mein Visaal by Muhammad Khalid Akhtar (1964) – forthcoming from Picador India, Love in Chakiwara and Other Misadventures. The second excerpt is from his novel-in-progress.
In Karachi, the women’s movement is often guarded and there are many social barriers to free interaction between men and women outside of their own families. By way of these excerpts, Tanweer would like to highlight the balcony as a space that allows – by virtue of its location, inside and outside – a subversion of these controls and allows initiation of contact/intimacy with strangers. Since the two works he has chosen are temporally situated five decades apart, they implicitly make an argument for the persistence of social barriers to free interaction between men and women, and also point to the enduring practices that serve to unsettle them.