Kartography

Two Karachi childhood friends, Raheen and Karim, grow up in the privileged seaside world of Clifton, until Karim's obsession with mapping the divided, violent city and a buried secret from the 1971 war drive them apart. Shamsie maps the real Karachi: the affluent villas of Clifton, the beach at Sea View, the tense old-city districts around Saddar where the ethnic violence flares, and the wider fractured metropolis Karim tries to chart, its wound reaching back to the war that made Bangladesh.

Raheen

Clifton (the families' homes)

Part 1

In the sheltered gardens and villas of Clifton, Raheen and Karim share a childhood of easy privilege and deep friendship, insulated for a while from the city's violence. The comfortable seaside enclave is the paradise from which the buried truth about their parents will slowly expel them.

Part 1

explicit Raheen and Karim grow up in the wealthy seaside neighbourhood of Clifton, a real affluent district of Karachi; their families' villas are sited there.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Karim

Sea View (the beach)

Part 1

On the crowded, camel-strewn beach at Sea View, the young Karim begins the fascination with maps and the shape of the city that will define him. The sea, open and unmarked, stands against the divided land behind it, and against the closing-in that adulthood and the city's fractures will bring.

Part 1

explicit The friends spend their youth at the beach at Sea View on the Clifton shore, a real stretch of the Karachi coast on the Arabian Sea.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗