Arya News - In almost every street, a woman sits outside the door to her home, selling something; food, snacks, fruit, beans, cholay, or whatever else she can manage.
LYARI – Where the name Lyari goes, images of violence soon follow. Its past full of unrest and stories of vicious gang wars, its present linked to football and forgotten dreams. But a walk through Lyari tells another story, one of resilience and strength.
Down its dusty roads and often perilously narrow streets, where sometimes even motorbikes struggle to squeeze through, life continues.
Every few steps, a window opens into another home; every street, a small economy of its own. And at the heart of it are women.
In almost every street, a woman sits outside the door to her home, selling something; food, snacks, fruit, beans, cholay , or whatever else she can manage.
Supplies sit on the doorstep of a house in Lyari, waiting to be sold. These women are not running big businesses — they sell solely to keep their homes running, to feed their families twice a day. Sometimes only once. They are not part of an economy; they are the economy. In their hands lies the art of survival, quiet but strong.
Many people believe Lyari’s economy collapsed after the years of gang violence it endured, when young men were drawn into armed groups, many killed either in clashes between rival gangs or during security operations, or lost to drug addictions, and it was often the women who had to carry what remained.
But in Lyari, women propping up the economy is not something new. It has always been part of the area’s roots and culture. Long before the years of violence, women were the ones keeping both homes and the streets alive through daily labour.
Amma Jaani
Amma Jaani. PHOTO: DAWN
Jaani was only 11 when her father died. After his death, darkness filled both their lives and their small home as they had no money to buy gasoline to light their lantern. For three days, neighbours shared their food with Jaani’s family as per Balochi custom. On the fourth day their grief found a troubling companion — hunger. By the fifth day, her younger siblings began to cry from hunger pangs.
“For two days we didn’t eat anything,” Jaani recalls. “My mother was torn between mourning my father and finding something for us to eat. On the sixth day, I stepped outside.”
In Lyari, everyone knows everyone and streets are communities. Jaani walked to a nearby chai hotel owned by Pathans and asked if she could work there.
“There’s no work for girls here,” one man replied. “But if you want, you can wash our clothes.”
Jaani agreed. After finishing the work, she was given Rs10. With that money, she bought food and her family ate that night.
The next day, Jaani returned to the same hotel, but they told her, “You already washed our clothes.” So she went to another hotel, and then another. She washed clothes in most of the tea hotels around Lyari until her father’s chaliswan — the 40th day of mourning.
On days when the hotels had no work, she went to nearby houses belonging to affluent people, cleaning floors and washing dishes.
A woman sits with a host of snacks before her, hoping to sell some. PHOTO: DAWN
Jaani remembers that her body began to change too soon. “I got my period when I was still 11,” she says. “There was bleeding, pain, and I fainted. I didn’t understand what was happening, but my mother did. She knew it was because I had been working too much for my age. That day, she told me to stop.”
Jaani said her mother was in itekaaf (spiritual retreat) at the time, but hunger does not follow customs. Her mother borrowed some money from their neighbours and everyone agreed. With that money, she bought banklek beans, a local Balochi dish often eaten at breakfast. That night, she soaked the beans in water, and in the middle of the night lit the firewood, added salt, and let them boil until the Fajr azaan . Early in the morning, after prayers, she placed the pot outside their home and began selling the beans.
Jaani says they earned just enough to eat once or twice a day, but nothing more. “But at least with that, we could survive,” she adds. She would sit beside her mother, helping her sell banklek beans every morning, until the day she got married.
Amma Jaani’s banklek. In the first year of her marriage, she gave birth to a son. The marriage lasted only two years; when she was pregnant with her second child, a daughter, her husband divorced her, and she returned to her mother’s home. Not long after, her son fell ill and passed away. A few years later, her mother also died, leaving Jaani to continue selling banklek on her own.
Now, Jaani is in her late 60s. She still sits in front of the worn-out doorway of her house in Shabaig Lane, the same spot where she once sat with her mother. Her hair is white, her skin pale, yet her smile remains wide and welcoming. The street knows her; everyone who passes greets her, and she replies with an even warmer smile.
Every morning, Jaani sells banklek . On a good day, she earns up to Rs300. On other days, it is less. By afternoon, when her brother Babul, who runs a small rented shop nearby, goes to rest or visit the bazaar, Jaani takes his place. The shop is run by both of them, equally.
Amma Haneepa
In Lyari, if there was one woman-run business everyone knew, it was Haneepa and her daal. She woke up every night at 3am to cook the daal. By the time the Fajr azaan resonated through the neighbourhood, her daal was ready. She would heft the large pot to the heart of Baghdadi on Shekaa Road and wait for people returning from their Fajr prayers.
Fishermen on their way to the fisheries, municipal workers, bus conductors, drivers — everyone stopped by for Haneepa’s daal. She first set up her pot in the late 70s, selling the daal for four annas a bowl. When she died in 2013, she sold a bowl for just Rs10.
A street in Lyari. Her son Mehmood Aalam, now a retired government school teacher, says his father died in the 90s, but their home had always been run single-handedly by his mother. “When father came home holding a few mangoes in his hands, we understood he had earned something that day,” he recalls. “He worked on daily wages and most days there was no work. When he did get work, he brought home fruit, whatever was in season.”
People came to Haneepa’s stall from far beyond Lyari — from Hub Chowki, Mauripur, Mawach Goth, and other areas with large Baloch populations. “If they ever came to this side,” her son says, “they would never leave without eating her daal. ”
Ghulam Hussain, a retired professor from Abdullah Haroon College, lived in the same neighbourhood as Amma Haneepa. His mother sold bajya and was known as Amma Maryam Bajya Wala. Back in the day, you could get four pieces for Rs1 with a roti. To him, Amma Haneepa’s stall was more than just a place to eat. “Even if someone wanted to announce a death,” he recalls, “after the mosque announcement, it would happen here. Everyone sat here, ate daal and roti. The message would spread ‘the person who used to come here is now no more.’”
Haneepa raised six sons and two daughters on her own. Every morning, she cooked a three kilogramme pot of daal, which finished by 8am. She returned home for a short rest, and by 2pm, she was back again. By 3pm, the second pot would also finish and she would return home once again to cook another pot, to sit outside till Isha prayers. Three pots a day, every day.
A woman sells food on a street corner in Lyari. Her son recalled one morning in 2008 when he had gone with her to set up the stall when a group of young men appeared — eight or nine of them, armed. “I was scared,” he says. “They came to our stall, bought daal and roti, and sat nearby to eat. They were the men of the gangster Haou.” They came often, sometimes joined by others — Jengu, Rashid Reeka, Baba Ladla and other names whispered across Lyari. “The sight was strange,” he says. “Gunmen, labourers, rickshaw drivers, footballers, all eating in the same place. But the rush never stopped. My mother, surrounded by a hundred men, just kept working.”
Haneepa’s daal was famous and, above all, cheap. In a neighbourhood where poverty ran deep, many families cooked only naan or rice at home. They would send a dees or a big bowl to Haneepa, and she would fill it with daal. That bowl would feed an entire family.
Food is ready to be sold at a doorstep in Lyari. At the time, there were no gas connections in Lyari. She cooked on wood, using a little gaslet to light the fire. “She always told us to make the quality good, and the price low. This area matters. Baghdadi survives because people like us make sure their kitchens are not overburdened,” her son says. Haneepa’s daal was for everyone — not just Baloch, but anyone who came by.
“She never did it for business,” explains her son. “She just sold enough so that the family could live.”
After Haneepa’s death in 2013, her daughter continued the stall for a few years. But after her daughter passed away, no one could carry it on. Today, every Ramazan, Haneepa’s granddaughter brings out the same pot and cooks in her grandmother’s memory.
Amma Saeeda and her daughter Hafeeza
Amma Saeeda and her daughter Hafeeza. PHOTO: DAWN
At the edge of a narrow street, right in front of her small doorway, sit Amma Saeeda and her daughter Hafeeza. On a small wooden table, they arrange jars of toffees, fried snacks, chaliya and biscuits among other treats.
Saeeda, now in her early seventies, was married to a donkey-cart driver. He worked on daily wages, carrying goods to Bolton Market. “What he earned was only enough for the day’s meal,” Saeeda explains. “If he didn’t get work, it meant going hungry.”
When she was pregnant with her third child, her husband stopped working. He said he had pain in his joints, but they had no money for treatment, so he stayed at home, and Saeeda stepped out. She began running a small stall in front of their home — the same stall she has continued to operate for the last 40 years.
A woman sits outside her home, ready to sell snacks. PHOTO: DAWN
Saeeda had 12 children. Seven of them died from sicknesses she could not afford to treat. Her husband too died after a long illness. She has five surviving children: three daughters and two sons. Only one of her sons is married.
“It’s a hawai rozi ,” she said, a living that comes and goes like the wind. “Sometimes we can afford one meal a day, sometimes not even that. But still, there is hope. I sit here, I earn. I have the power to run my home. Despite all this poverty, I never lose heart.”
Amma Mahtuk and Amma Aatuli: two sisters
Amma Aatuli There is a street in Shah Baig Lane known as Gwadar Gali or Gwadar Street. It got its name from two sisters, Mahtuk and Aatuli. Their grandfather migrated from Gwadar and settled in this lane, and the sisters made it known through their work. Both sold fruit on the same street, each a little distance apart.
People in Lyari still remember them — loud, fierce, and fearless. They cleared their own space on the road, set up their stalls, and called out to people passing by to come and buy fruit. The street became famous across the area — everyone came to Gwadar Gali to have fruit. For Rs10, a plate was filled to the brim.
Gwadar Gali. Mahtuk has passed away now, and Aatuli left the work about nine years ago after suffering from a stroke. Still, every Ramazan, she returns to the same street, selling fruit again with her son by her side.
Before her marriage, Aatuli worked at the Karachi Fisheries. Her job was to cut the heads off shrimp, and when it wasn’t shrimp season, she helped pull fish from fishing nets. “One day,” she says, “I came home from work still smelling of fish. My mother told me to sit in the bashana — the bridal veil.”
Aatuli was married to a jobless man, which pushed her to start working again. She then went to the Sohrab Goth fruit market, bought fruit, and began selling them. Later, when the market moved to Jail Chowrangi at the old Sabzi Mandi and then to Lea Market, she kept going.
Snacks being sold outside a house in Lyari. Aatuli now has seven sons and two daughters. Her husband died of tuberculosis long ago. For as long as she can remember, almost 50 years, she has sold fruit.
Amma Zullu
In 1965, Zuleka, known to everyone as Amma Zullu,* became famous in Lyari for her seekh boti . She would fold and tightly wrap her chador around her forehead, light the fire, and set up her ishkar (grill). People gathered around her as the smoke rose, waiting for the sizzling meat. At that time, each seekh cost only four annas, and the crowd around her stall never seemed to dissipate.
Mumtaz now runs Amma Zullu’s stall. Years later, when Amma Zullu passed away, her husband’s sister took over the work, since they lived in a joint family. Mumtaz recalled that he was 12 years old in 1984 when his mother Fatuma took over the stall after his Phuppo Zullu’s death. He often helped her. In 2006, when his mother passed away, Mumtaz continued the work — keeping the legacy that began with Amma Zullu alive.
These are but a few of the women whose quiet strength and dignity feeds their families. Even a short visit will make you realise that these women are not in competition with men, nor do they wait for empowerment. They have been empowered all along — quietly, through resilience, through work that begins before dawn and ends late into the night.
In Lyari’s narrow streets, where every corner holds a story, these women do not just earn; they endure. Their hands keep kitchen stoves burning, their strength keeps homes standing, and their names — Amma Jaani, Amma Haneepa, Amma Saeeda, Amma Aatuli, and many others — live on as the heartbeat of a neighbourhood that survives through them.