So what brought Chachi to Karachi, my kids? What else! Fashion Pakistan Week! Some young skeptic and pragmatists amongst you would of course object to the scandalous riot of flesh on the ramp during the worst of times but as Rizwan Beyg would put it, 'It's defiance, sheer defiance'. So be it! If the government hasn't got the vision/time/energy/balls, then somebody's got to take the initiative to try to change things. By the way, so much was the official patronage for this event, power was cut during the fashion week's opening evening, leaving the hall in darkness for several minutes. But then…it's Karachi, baba!

Yes. It's Karachi. And so much has changed! For better or for worse, that can be a long debate. I mean yes, the signal free corridors and overheads are great and all, but where did the sea breeze go? Thanks to the new high-rise apartment blocks and beach-view towers the muggy days fail to melt into breezy evenings anymore. It's 5 pm and if I wanted to cook eggs, I could leave them on the window sills and collect them two minutes later. Unlike a decade ago, today if you want to view the sea from you 'sea-side' home, you'll rather have to turn on your TV set and get Baywatch. (Though if you were the type that likes Baywatch, chances are you would not watch the sea very much!)

 Chachi loves beaches. And really I am a no fuss girl. (I would never lament the absence of white sandy carpets or hot hunks in little chaddis). I am and will die a true 'Lahore-waali' , but then again I'll always remember my first sight of the sea at Hawkes Bay. I was nine, perhaps, and my jaw dropped at the spectacle of a vast stretch of water spread all the way. The sky had put on a special show just for the little girl who had lived all her life in the flatness of Lahore. The setting sun with that lilac-pink horizon! For a moment it all became one – the sky merged into the ocean and the waves touched the clouds. Sublime!

My other unforgettable Karachi moment is of course my first and (fortunately) only public bus ki sawari! The crisis is still there, I see. Men and boys dangling perilously from bus doors like goat corpses hanging on a butcher's shop; it all takes me back to the '60s. A very chic Chachi in her best French chiffon sari was supposed to accompany BBC's training team to PTV. (Chachi was quite a dish in her flaming jawani ke din and it had never been a problem to stop a taxi. Somehow nothing seemed to work that day.) A bus crammed with bodies stopped and heaved for a long time like an old constipated dinosaur about to empty its bowels, as the people who struggled against the people who wished to get in. It was during that ill-fated jiffy that I boarded the bus and it resumed its journey and I noticed I had lost a shoe! "Roko! My shoe has fallen off!" I cried.

"In this traffic? For a slipper?" Laughed the dim-witted, pea-brained conductor with a gallon of mustard oil on his hair. "All I can say is, baji, throw out the other slipper, too. And do that quickly. At least some lucky beggar-woman would get a whole pair."

Chachi still has that single beige-cream suede-charmer spike-heeled Palazzio pump. And its heel surely would have some DNA from that ujjad bus-conductor's forehead. May be high-heels are like drugs. They can get people so high but also bring them down.