The stories of five residents illuminate different aspects of the Pakistani city where terrorism and ethnic conflict have been rife

When the British journalist Samira Shackle moved to Karachi, she was advised not to ask questions. The city was in flux: riots and gang battles sometimes shut down entire streets. Bombs went off on buses and in crowded spaces. Newspapers carried daily updates of the number of casualties. Wealthier homes and cafes were protected by security guards with metal detectors and AK-47s. Shackle stayed with her aunt in a safer – more affluent – neighbourhood. She grew used, as she writes, “to experiencing Karachi from the windows of a car”.

Things were once different. In the 1960s and 70s, the city was a stopover on the hippie trail to India and Nepal. Tourists sunned themselves on its spotless beaches and partied in its casinos and nightclubs. A swelling population of partition-era refugees and Pashtun migrants ensured cheap labour that fuelled a period of economic growth. “Hashish was easily available,” the Pakistani journalist Nadeem F Paracha once wrote about those years, “but people still didn’t know what heroin or a Kalashnikov was”.

Shackle, too, was lured in by the contradictions enmeshed in the city’s charm and danger. By the time she arrived in 2012, political parties and public officials had for decades been running a parallel economy with crime syndicates. Replenished by American and Saudi aid during the presidency of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the city’s affluent classes flourished, even as newer migrants, fleeing calamities elsewhere, were trapped in a cycle of diminishing resources and ethnic violence. Power cuts were frequent. Water had to be delivered in tankers. Mangroves and villages were lost to real estate projects.

In Karachi Vice, Shackle tells the stories of five residents, carefully chosen to reflect different sides of the shadow city. There is Zille, a crime reporter who courts cops and mobsters alike for his scoops. A school teacher in a violent neighbourhood can only watch as her friends and family succumb to an influential ganglord. A Pashtun ambulance driver and a mohajir (a Muslim immigrant from India) surveyor are both driven by a wish to improve their lives. Then there is Jannat, whose ancestral village is being swallowed up by a murky private township near Karachi.

Shackle excels at drawing out the incisive quote. Jannat is circumspect about the possibility of having to abandon her home. “You have to do these things,” she tells Shackle. “For your children.” Safdar, the ambulance driver, struggles to process the trauma of rescuing bodies from blast sites: “I don’t dwell on my memories. Memories are a prison.” Parveen, the teacher, can’t recall the good times in her neighbourhood. She doesn’t have to explain her reasons: “They snatched all the happiness from us.”

But the book’s triumph is Zille, the one character whose motives aren’t always transparent. Shackle can never quite pin him down – he lies to her three times about his age – and yet the city comes to life through his eyes. His career overlaps with the gang wars that broke out at the turn of the millennium and the 2013 “Karachi Operation” approved by a newly elected Nawaz Sharif to weed out crime in the city. When a group of Taliban gunmen stormed into the city’s airport in June 2014, Zille sneaked inside during the siege to relay live updates. He ended up on the militants’ radar. “When you are on a terrorist hit list,” he tells Shackle, “everybody knows that you’re a real journalist.”

The ordeals faced by Shackle’s protagonists seem to suit the powers that be just fine: behind the cover of violence and ethnic conflict there is good money to be made. Shackle is reluctant to insert herself into the narrative, but she is surely part of Karachi’s story, since her mother was born and brought up there. How does she herself perceive the city?

In recent years, the city’s position in the World Crime Index has improved. On the face of it, the Karachi Operation would seem to have succeeded. But Shackle reveals horrifying instances of young men, some of them teenagers, who have disappeared after being picked up for questioning during the crackdown. Their families hang around funeral homes, searching for unidentified corpses. The nexus of crime, politics and business at the centre of the violence is still in place. Many gangs and militias have merely moved their kingpins out of the city. Work continues apace on the private township that threatens Jannat’s village. Farmlands and settlements are being razed to build a gated banlieue with “world-class” amenities. In photographs of the area, you can spot a replica of the Eiffel Tower being built on a distant hill.

Karachi Vice is published by Granta (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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