NON-FICTION TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF THE POLICE.

"This is all because of the British,' said Divya Aunty, her chin pointing in the direction I was looking, face contorted with despair, her tone accusatory, as if she knew what I was thinking.

It was August 15, India's Independence Day. I had accompanied my maasi [maternal aunt] to national celebrations at the convent school in a suburb of Bombay [Mumbai] where she taught. Divya Aunty, my maasi's colleague, seemed to believe that I - raised in Canada, the West - required a timely lesson in history.

In my recollection, I hadn't been looking at - nor had my adolescent brain noted - anything in particular, other than distaste for how the city seemed to become a grey, amorphous sludge following the rains. Aunty was referring to the potholed, cracked pavements and the open gutters that annually collapsed and overflowed under the pressure of incessant downpours. Perhaps she had known what I was really thinking.

How the British were historically responsible for contemporary economic underdevelopment in its former colonies was an understanding introduced to me in university, which later became an analytical practice. I learned that the kinds of statements Divya Aunty made reflected a form of national shame, that the expression itself was a people's 'postcolonial predicament', that the 'real' India of the past was, regrettably, irretrievable.

Zoha Waseem takes an empathetic look at the colonial structures and subpar conditions that constrain the development of a modern and efficient law enforcement force in Karachi

Later, working in Islamabad in the non-governmental sector, where I moonlighted as an ethnographer of neo-colonial discourse in a developmentalist state, I would come across a related postcolonial conundrum. It showed up when I spoke to Karachiites who grew up in the 1990s, and the conversation would inevitably turn to the spates of violence that had marked their youth.

Where they were when an explosion went off was coupled with memories of growing up playing street cricket, adjacent to stories of mobile phone snatchings, carjackings and hold-ups at gunpoint. In my work, as well as socially, I tried to understand how a socio-economically mobile group had witnessed violence and felt fear. Terms such as 'uneducated', 'corruption', 'extremism' and 'mindset' trailed off interjections - dekhain, main aap ko bataata hoon [look, I'll tell you] - to my layered questions and ended nowhere.

By the time I arrived in Islamabad in 2016, the military...