Shoot & Tell: Nausher Khan

Nausher Khan

Afghan Boy
He works in a flea market on the shore of Karachi’s Clifton Beach, an Afghan refugee who’s lived in Peshawar – a city in the north of Pakistan close to the Afghan border – for two years and in Karachi for the last year.
He is a porter at the market where he carries bags full of groceries for women who do their weekly shopping at the market. This boy stands apart from the rest, though, as he was born with- out hands or feet, making his menial job of carrying groceries around a lot more challenging.
He works here every weekend with his friends and two older brothers, who all fulfill the same duties as their younger counterpart. Though he’s picked up this weekend job at the age of eight, he still goes to school full-time at the request of his parents.
It is very easy to condemn his life as doomed and abys- mal, yet he seemed content; he knows nothing better, but will one day hopefully amount to much more than the apathy of strangers.

Sufi Culture
These spiritual beings live off of the friendly donations of passersby, sitting outside the mausoleum of Bulla Shah, a renowned Sufi Punjabi poet. They consider themselves children of an omniscient being and, without any particular religious affiliation to Islam, they live their lives in search of eternal tranquility and harmony.
They live in collectives and use natural herbs and scents to alter their perception of the world and try to achieve true nirvana. They indulge in the poetic works of Bulla Shah and other Sufi poets and write their own poetry all day long.
The figurative hippies of the South Asian community, they are disassociated with the rest of society and march to the beat of their own drum.

Little Girl
Across from a family of six at rest on the ground in the middle of the street in Karachi sits their youngest child, Parvin, who is determined to get back into her house. Their landlord kicked them out when they couldn’t pay the rent, a miserable 1500 rupees – about $18 Canadian.
They plan to sit there until the landlord takes off the lock, something he might not do for days, if at all. Until then, they sleep on rough unpaved streets lined with garbage, racked by a stench that’s nothing short of stomach-churning.

Flying Boy
An 11-year-old boy walks along the waste-ridden streets of Machar Colony, an area in the heart of Karachi, Pakistan. Though it’s just over two kilometers square, the colony is home to more than 850,000 permanent residents, and 300,000 temporary residents.
These people are the poorest of the poorest in this entire world, sleeping under tents on the bare ground accompanied by at least five other siblings.
This boy walks to his shift at the warehouse, where he works 11 hours a day peeling shrimp; from here they’re wrapped and sold at high-end super markets around the world. It’s a practice not uncommon in southern Pakistan’s port cities.
It’s why most families here include six children – they are sources of income. If you want to have a stable salary coming in, you need several sources of income, and the infant mortality rate is so unjustly high that you have a few more – you can’t afford to take any chances.
This young boy will likely live an anonymous life, will be just another face no one got to know.

The Urban poet
Sitting under the shade of the concrete structure sits Mohammad Iqbal, an M.I.T alumnus fluent in five languages, the second youngest in a family of 13 and, for the past 14 years, a man on a spir- itual journey to uncover the nature of God.
With absolutely no perceived need for material goods, Iqbal uses his only worldly possession as a cushion on which to rest himself while writing his 12-page long poems – these are in French – from points of inspiration drawn from his life.
The unbearable hustle and bustle of the Lahore, Pakistan inner city streets does not seem to disrupt the state of peace he’s found in his surroundings. He claims he is to sit in that exact place until he is either forcefully removed or until he gets from God the inspiration he seeks.