Birds from the Empress

As a child I loved going with my mother and grandmother to the bustling Empress market in Karachi. It was full of smells (both pleasant and less so), suffocating in its humidity and loud with the call of stallholders shouting out their prices and young boys offering to carry your shopping in exchange for a rupee. As you walked from the cooked food and vegetable stalls toward the meat market, the aromas of chicken tikkas grilling on the barbecue and earthy vegetables would be replaced by the smell of live chickens and raw meat.