| Street Smart: Professionals on the Street | Rumana Husain | The Karachi Conference Foundation, 2015

Husaini, the 60-year-old key maker has been making duplicate keys for the last 30 years in Saddar | Street Smart: Professionals on the Street

Street Smart: Professionals on the Street by Rumana Husain is a welcome and natural extension of the author’s first book, Karachiwala: A Subcontinent Within a City (2010). The author cultivates her bond with the city, in which she was born in the early 1950s and has lived in since. From the more extensive survey into the lives of the diverse cross section of communities and ethnicities documented in Karachiwala, evolves the narrative of the street in Husain’s second book, published this year by The Karachi Conference Foundation in support of the I am Karachi consortium.

Through portraits and interviews, Husain weaves a story of Karachi that encompasses the more peripheral professionals, who work on the streets but, nevertheless, contribute to the collective machinery of the metropolis. This book, serves as an important social document as its subjects and the brief histories of the professions they follow, has been researched in detail.

Mariam Ahmad, the potter sets up an open air stall on a footpath in Ranchore Line | Street Smart: Professionals on the Street

Qadeer Ahmad pulls his handcart | Street Smart: Professionals on the Street

The foreword comes from a journalist who has commented on nearly every aspect of Karachi in his weekly columns Karachi Diary in the daily Dawn (from the late 1970s to the late 1980s). It is with this commitment that Ghazi Salahuddin recognizes the passion with which Husain has taken her journey into the meandering pathways and forgotten lanes where ordinary people live. Through her book, she has brought their obscure professions to our attention, introducing us to a selection of workers who “represent a dying breed/ those that portray changes in Karachi’s lifestyle”, from a knife sharpener to a food delivery man.

The accompanying portraits of each street professional, places them all in their local setting as well as contextualizes them in their surroundings, making these photographs portraits of the city as it were. On the cover is a portrait of Aslam Shirazi, a 50-year-old parrot fortuneteller, who sits outside a shrine, for example.

Aslam Shirazi, the parrot fortune teller is on the job from 9 am to 9 pm daily | Street Smart: Professionals on the Street

The underlying aesthetics in this book has much to do with a personal, direct contact with people whose services Husain writes about and is inspired by. For example, who would have known that the bhisti or water carrier and the typist are still at work today? Husain not only informs us of wondrously obsolete professions that people still engage in but also shares something of each of their lives. Shah Mohammad, the water-carrier was initially a tyre-puncture repairman; Saghir Mohammad, the typist, migrated from Bangladesh in 1973. Mohammad Bashir has been cleaning ears since 1986, but believes that in this day of the cotton swab, his children will not take up the same profession. These are stories of individuals but also of conventional services that are detached from the mainstream, of people who earn a mere pittance. By devoting a book on professionals who are located in the informal setting of Karachi, the author has also in a way provided a glimpse into "the realities of a city that must survive to protect their own future", as Salahuddin notes.