Rafia Zakaria is the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan and Veil. She is a columnist for Dawn in Pakistan and writes the Read Other Women series at the Boston Review.
It sits on a hill—a fact that does not, in most places, distinguish a house as anything beyond ordinary. But it does in Karachi, which is in large part a flat city, squat and sprawling and a bit surly on…