Omar Shahid Hamid's ‘The Party Worker’ packs the hall at KLF

It was once known as the ‘city of lights’, but then it became the city of strikes, target killings, and terrorist attacks – a metropolis so plagued by crime and violence that the thought of visiting Karachi would evoke caution in the hearts of Pakistanis from the northern provinces and even more so among those living abroad.

Depending on which side of the bridge one has grown up living on in this city, the stories that will be told will vary; the ‘haves’ will paint a picture of a city that parties till the waking hours, while the ‘have-nots’ will share stories of how mothers begin to panic and worry about the safety of their children just because they haven’t come home at their usual hour.

These are stories that cannot be found in newspapers or TV reportage. There are no journalists who can write about the complexities of the city without putting themselves in harm’s way. It is only through fiction that such tales are told, and Omar Shahid Hamid, a Senior Superintendent of Police, has done just that.

His first book, ‘The Prisoner’ which came out in 2013, was a portrayal of Karachi through the eyes of the police, its characters more literal could easily be identified to the real life individuals they were based on. Reflecting back on his masterpiece before a packed hall at the Karachi Literature Festival on Saturday, Omar blamed his inexperience as a writer for the easily identifiable real life personalities in ‘The Prisoner’ because as he put it back then he “took the entire sketch [of an individual] and placed it into his fictional character.”

Based on events that took place in the city decades ago – the murder of a prime minister’s brother to the kidnapping of the Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl – ‘The Prisoner’ was nothing short of an action movie. It made Omar the talk of the town because ‘The Prisoner’ exposed the ‘haves’ to the underbelly of Karachi they had been sheltered from their entire lives.

When his second book ‘The Spinners Tale’ came out in 2015, Omar had already amassed a following. The main characters – Ausi, inspired by Omar Saeed Sheikh, and the Omar Abbasi modeled after Sanaullah Abbasi a well known police officer in Sindh – take the reader on a ride that will serve as a guide to how most Pakistani youngsters turn to extremism.

In ‘The Spinners Tale’ one cannot identify the other characters, because as Omar Shahid put it, with time he began “to take bits and pieces from personalities from different real life characters and mix them up”, which he says “tends to be more fun as a writer”.

With his latest offering, Omar Shahid says the fictional characters are based on muddled sketches. ‘The Party Worker’ is a sequel to ‘The Prisoner’ and this time we see Karachi through the eyes of a political worker instead of the police.

‘The Party Worker’ opens up in New York where a political party’s chief hit-man having betrayed ‘the party’ is getting ready for a meeting. Even thousands of miles away from the city ‘the party’ held in its grip, the ‘party worker’ is afraid for his safety.

Policeman or Author

Omar Shahid Hamid is the son of a bureaucrat who was gunned down for his principles. His father’s killer was recently hanged. It was after seeing the workings of the Sindh Police through the interactions he had at the time that Omar Shahid joined the Sindh Police.

He currently serves as the SSP Intelligence of the Counter Terrorism Department, having returned from somewhat of a sabbatical in England which he made his home temporarily after threats to his life from terrorists in Pakistan had become too much to ignore.

However, with three books already published, a fourth in the pipeline and having won the Getz Pharma Fiction Prize and the Italy Reads Pakistan award, Omar still sees himself as a police officer, not a writer.

“I still don’t know if I am a writer, it has become an addiction, it is something I need to do,” said Omar responding to a question from the audience at the KLF, before adding, “I’ve always been a police officer. Writing is something that happened… that came into my life but I still don’t define myself as a writer. I tell stories but I very much see myself as a police officer.”