From rags to rap

Meet Asif Balli, the rapper who gave up a life of crime for music

“If I weren’t a rapper, I would have been a criminal or dead by now” were some of the first words I heard Asif Balli say.

Son of a scrap collector and a housemaid, Asif was born and grew up in the Buffer Zone area. He also collected scrap from an early age to support the family. His everyday routine included waking up at 4AM, walking the streets to collect scrap in a big sack, then walking four kilometres to his school in Gulberg. After school, he would go back to work.

Hard work and hustle was never a problem for Asif. But somewhere along the way, he got involved in criminal activities. He started stealing and dealing drugs.

“There were gang wars and a lot of crime where we lived,” he says. “I’d also pick up things from shops here and there. I started to enjoy that I was getting money. Then I got involved in drug dealing, courtesy of the local gangs. Because we were kids, the police didn’t suspect us.”

But once he started getting a reputation, he quit. “My parents didn’t know that their child was involved in all these activities.” He went back to stealing since he thought “nobody would find out”.

And so it happened that while struggling to carry a big sack full of stolen jewelry, plastic, phones and many other things from a house, Asif was caught.

“People caught me and everyone gathered to beat me to a pulp with sticks and pipes. I was beaten up so bad that my body was all blue and I was barely even conscious,” says the 26-year-old rapper. “But someone took mercy on me, called the cops and told them that a kid is being beaten up and tortured for stealing. When they arrived, I had almost fainted due to the severe beating. I was unable to even move but my mind was conscious and I could hear the cops telling the crowd that they were behaving like animals beating a kid to death.”

While Asif spent two days in prison, his parents were unaware of his whereabouts. “They thought I had died.” As his family visited police stations and even Edhi to find their son, Asif spent his days in jail with three other men who were arrested for gambling. Perhaps out of mercy, cops imposed a gambling charge on Asif as well despite him confessing to his crimes in court.

The hearings continued for a couple of years but soon, he was bailed out and resumed his studies, while keeping the reason for his absence a secret.

A Bohemian shift

After the incident, Asif’s family moved to Lyari to escape the criminal environment. “My father suspected that I’d end up dead too if I kept on this path.” In Lyari, they didn’t have a house, just a piece of land where they set up camp.

“We had small walls and our home didn’t have a gate for three years. We slept under an open sky and earth. My father put us here in a sort of a jungle. No friends, nothing at all. This is where hip hop started for me.”

Once at a family wedding, Asif’s cousin played Bohemia’s Ek Tera Pyar and it moved him. He had listened to English language rap but never connected to it due to the language barrier. But listening to Bohemia, “I had goosebumps. The music attracted me.”

The beatdown and going to prison had changed Asif. He had decided never to “do anything wrong that would hurt my parents and live a good life and work hard.” He resumed collecting scrap and saved up a few hundred rupees to buy an MP3 to listen to rap.

“I would play Bohemia on my MP3, put on my earphones and collect scrap everyday. This is how I got into rap. I memorised the lyrics and would rap along. I realised that this music gave me peace. I could say things through rap, express myself and motivate and inspire others too. So, I decided to pursue it.”