I am in an idyllic setting, the breezy, February sunshine filters through the gulmohar trees in the leafy walled gardens of one of the ubiquitous Frank Lloyd Wright-style ‘white houses’ of the affluent ‘Defence’ sector. It’s like being in a garden in, say, the south of France in April. The Arabian Sea is a five-minute drive away, with their zoomorphic hedges and modernist monuments the municipal parks are ordered and clean, everyone is characteristically hospitable and all seems well in Karachi, Sindh Province, Pakistan.

It is salutary to recall, as one traverses the endless intersections adorned with the flags of political parties, that it was in the Indus Valley that one of the first nodes of human civilisation arose from the unbroken fields of the Neolithic. Over the past weeks, I’ve been teaching creative writing amidst the air, light and stone of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (affectionately known as the ‘IVS’), which is one of the premier arts institutions in the country, and have visited a number of excellent and evocative exhibitions. The main building of the School – an angular, almost Escher-like structure dating back to the times of ‘The Britishers’ (as the British of the colonial era are known here) - was lifted, stone-by-stone, from its original site in the central part of the city and rebuilt at the new site, which lies a hundred yards from the shoreline of Sinbad’s (Sindh-bad’s) Sea.

Within the grounds of the School, there are water-spaces inhabited by turtles and goldfish who have been able to grow to maximum size. In the spirit of a Duchampian installation, right at the centre of one of these ponds there lies a disused vintage lift of the type once ubiquitous in Argyll Street department-stores – it is no accident, it seems to me, that in a strange synchonicity, the pig-iron of the lift is emblazoned with the place and date of its manufacture: Glasgow, 1904. Ships, lifts, railway engines… as is the case in much of South Asia, the ghosts of my city and of the Imperium of which she and her sons were in the van, hover just beneath the surface of the hidden, old parts of this southern polity. By the side of the coastal road, the students lovingly have restored a patch of derelict ground adjacent to a scruffy block of flats into a contemplative, Zen-like garden and so now there is a literal continuum between art and the ocean.

In the Urdu, Persian and Arabic languages, there is a consonance between the words for ‘garden’ and those for ‘paradise’. In spite of the hyper-materialism, endemic militarism, questionable infrastructure and cancerous right-wing religious extremism that afflicts a society whose vital statistics are three times worse than those of the Brazil of the proverbial ‘Brazil’ economy, the visual, musical and literary arts in Pakistan itself (and not just in the Pakistani diaspora) are vibrant, engaged, rooted and cutting-edge. Indeed, I also am here as a co-director of Glasgow-based arts production company, Heer Productions, pioneers of the Pakistani Film, Media and Arts Festival, in order to catch the 8th annual KARA Film Festival, which has been postponed for over a year because of security concerns. Anything which smacks of human happiness, of the human image or of stretching the human spirit is deemed a target, it seems - perhaps the perpetrators are afraid of looking into the mirror. While in Karachi, I learn that the first-ever South Asian Scots-made feature film, ‘An Act of Terror’ has been short-listed for the BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award. When we gaze into a mirror, we see our breath steam-up the glass and we know that we are alive.

Over the past three decades, in the wake of superpower wars in old Bactria – the ‘Great Games’ of empire are unending - psychotically misogynistic ‘Pol Potters’ now occupy large swaths of the ‘Land of the Pure’. This context serves to emphasise the courage and verve of the artists of this nation, many of the leading proponents among whom are women - and indeed nearly 80% of the students at the IVS, and most of my class, are female.

Up north, the weather is still chilly, and just a stone’s throw from the outskirts of the national capital, Islamabad, is a diorama of scorched earth, smashed schools and a million internal refugees from the North-West Frontier Province, a region which, while among the least developed and most traditional in the country, sick to the teeth with the Mediaevalist idiocy of the mullahs, in 2006 voted in a left-of-centre, secular provincial government, a government which quite literally now has been murdered and beheaded into submission by the Taliban. The tourist valleys of Swat, whose ‘Sound of Music’ scenery is reminiscent of that of Austria, since last month legally have been subject to Sharia Law administered by bloodthirsty ignoramuses whose avowed aim is to extend their diktat throughout the country. I fear for my friends, old and new, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Parsee, pagan, atheist – for Pakistan is a polyglot nation and for various reasons national statistics probably represent underestimates of the demographics of especially minority religions - and for my extended family, who also dwell in this unnecessarily benighted land. I fear for Pakistan.

March will herald the big heat. Pakistanis are used to the rising mercury of global warming, and to the fitful flow of electricity in a country rich with fossil fuels, and to shortages of water as well, since in Karachi the water-supply is controlled by the institutionalised criminal gangs which hold this city of 12 million souls to ransom. Pakistanis are familiar with paradox and absurdity. And yet, everyone here is profoundly apprehensive as the flames of burned-down schools (courtesy of the Taliban) and bombed-out wedding-parties (courtesy of Main Street, USA) begin to lick at the walls of the hot metropolis. “This is not Islam”, is the refrain of even the most orthodox nowadays. But this has been brewed for over thirty years now and just as Pol Pot’s Kampuchea can hardly be described as having been communist, similarly, in the cauldron of a Taliban Pakistan there will be neither art, gardens, peace nor Islam. God forbid.

Suhayl Saadi’s new novel, ‘Joseph’s Box’ will be published by Two Ravens Press in August 2009. He wishes to acknowledge the support of the Scottish Arts Council. www.suhaylsaadi.com