A Good Wife

by Samra Zafar

  It was the perfect job.

  My chief concern about working had been how to manage my interactions with the customers—especially the male ones.

  Once I started going to the drop-in centre, I had begun to feel a bit braver about reconnecting with my old acquaintances. The profiles of a couple of friends popped up whenever I chatted with my parents over MSN, and I decided to renew contact with both of them. My old friend from Karachi, Fahad, was delighted to hear from me, and we started to exchange messages. In one I told him something hurtful Ahmed had just said to me. Fahad offered the comforting words I needed.

  The next day, I noticed that the temperature in the whole house had dropped several degrees. No one was talking to me. As I helped Amma get dinner prepared, she broke her silence. “Why do you talk shit about your husband behind his back?”

  I asked her what she meant. She quoted a line or two from my message to Fahad. Then she said, “Are you having an affair?”

  I sputtered something about just being friends, but I couldn’t concentrate on my defence. The question of how she knew about Fahad was fogging my mind.

  It turned out that spyware had been put on the computer, and my MSN chats were being monitored. I didn’t know exactly how it had come to be there, but Amma could not have been the one to install it. I stopped corresponding with my friends again, but Ahmed’s growing possessiveness now became jet fuelled. Any contact I had with any man, no matter how casual, could be suspect.

  Recently, while out shopping with Ahmed, I had asked a male sales associate where the baby shampoo was. The young fellow directed me to another aisle and I thanked him. But before I could move off, I felt Ahmed’s hand around my forearm, his fingers pinching deep into my flesh.

  “You really enjoy talking to other men, don’t you?” I protested that I couldn’t find the shampoo. “You could have found a woman to ask, if that was the real reason,” he snarled.

  As soon as I was offered the job at Zellers, I’d realized that men might soon be approaching me to ask about shampoo. And I knew that any career in retail would be short-lived if you couldn’t smile or talk to male customers. As I walked into the manager’s office that first day, I had tried hard not to think about what would happen if Ahmed witnessed such an exchange.

  The ladies’ change room area, therefore, was about as safe a place as I could be in the store. Here, I worked chiefly alone but was constantly with people. And I could talk. At the drop-in centre, the familiarity and intimacy of the group was a minefield. How to talk every day and not become friends? But at the store, my interactions could be friendly but brief. I could talk to the customers about fashions or the weather, or just about anything, without ever worrying that our conversations would veer into dangerous territory. Even if a customer wanted to reveal some aspect of her life—or ask about something in mine—she would be gone in five minutes, and the chances were good that I would never see her again. Nothing in this work, I thought, could upset Ahmed.

  I was wrong, of course.

  Since I was only part time, I worked primarily late afternoons and evenings. Ahmed would pick me up in the car at the end of my shift. Knowing better than to keep him waiting, I always hustled out of the store. One day, I couldn’t wait until we got home to go to the washroom. I ducked into the toilets and got back out as soon as I could, but this tiny delay meant that other employees were already exiting into the parking lot.

  Ahmed had a friend in the front seat, so I climbed into the back. Before I could even shut the door, however, Ahmed was interrogating me. “Why were others out before you? Where were you?” I tried to say something but he cut me off. “Who were you talking to? What guy were you flirting with?”

  “Ahmed, I just stopped to go to the washroom!”

  “Stop lying to me,” he came back. “You love talking with other men. You’re just a shameless whore.”

  I could see Ahmed’s friend sitting in the front seat, silent. Heat rose through my chest and into my face. My throat was tight. This was the first time Ahmed had so openly derided me in front of his friends. It was an act of belligerent humiliation.

  It seemed that I might be allowed to keep my new job and the small scraps of freedom it afforded me—but Ahmed would make sure I knew my place.

  * * *

  If Ahmed was ambivalent about my job, Amma and Abba were simply put out. They still had not gotten over my defection to the drop-in centre—my obvious desire to spend time away from the home was an affront to them.

  They agreed to look after Aisha because it was what Ahmed wanted. But I knew they weren’t happy with me for going along with it, which made me nervous. During my shifts at Zellers, I called home every couple of hours to find out how Aisha was doing. Most of Amma’s reports were complaints. Aisha, now three, was curious and mobile. Our house was more or less baby proofed, but you still had to keep an eye on her. I knew it was exhausting.

  After about two weeks, Amma began her campaign to have me quit work. “I can’t take care of your daughter,” she said when I called one day. (It didn’t escape me that at times like these, Aisha became “your daughter” instead of “my grandchild.”)

  “If you love working so much, find someone else to take care of her.” But Amma knew we couldn’t afford that.

  “I’d rather give you the money than have you work,” she finally said. I knew that wouldn’t happen either.

  Amma complained to Ahmed when he got home from work, too. “Aisha is too much for me to handle these days, Ahmed. Make Samra stay home.”

  Ahmed was clearly conflicted. All the money I made was transferred into his bank account, and it was a big help. But he didn’t like the fact that my working made his parents unhappy—and me happy. Perhaps he worried about the way work might transform me.

  The job did bring me both satisfaction and pleasure. At work I felt competent and independent, someone who could take responsibility and handle it well. It gave me a little thrill every time I strung the lanyard, with its enormous collection of keys dangling at the end, around my neck—or answered a question, or made an announcement.

  At the same time, I missed Aisha. And I worried about her, too. Amma was used to playing with her, not taking care of her daily needs. Was she getting her meals on time? Was Aisha going to bed when she needed to? One day I came home from work to discover that she had been left too long in her pull-up diaper. She was soaked and beginning to get a rash. I felt sick.

  Just as the leaves were beginning to turn, Ahmed told me to stop taking shifts. In some ways, I was surprised it had lasted as long as it had. I let my manager know that I wasn’t quitting but wouldn’t be available to work for a while. I suspected that when the cheques stopped coming Ahmed’s mind might change again.

  Sure enough, after a few months the budget shortfalls reappeared. It was late November—the Christmas shopping rush was underway—and I had no problem picking up shifts again. But I could feel the strain in the house intensify.

  When I came home one evening with shopping bags of things I had bought on my own—some snacks, a few clothes for Aisha—Amma raised her eyebrows and Ahmed frowned.

  “Why are you wasting money? You know we need that for the household.” His obvious resentment made me feel guilty, as if I had been thinking only of myself.

  I knew Ahmed’s parents thought that I was selfish—and that my parents were, too. They both began talking about my missing dowry again. “That’s the trouble with people who have no sons to support them in their old age,” Amma would say. “They think they have to keep all of their money to themselves.”

  Now, when my parents called and asked to say hi to Amma and Abba, Ahmed’s parents either refused to come to the phone or rushed off.

  The point was clear: if my parents had cared enough about me and my “new” family to give us a big dowry, Amma and Abba would not now have to live with the shame of having a shopgirl as their bahu.

  * * *

  My Zellers job was, among other things, a much-n
eeded distraction. As well as the excitement of getting my first job, that spring had held a huge disappointment.

  Earlier in the winter, I had finished my fifth grade-thirteen credit. I had everything I needed academically to apply for university. But I still had to discuss the process with Ahmed.

  It was never easy to know how to broach my school work with him. He had been supportive whenever his parents weren’t around, and I had been sharing my results with him as I worked through the courses, always careful not to boast or to telegraph my hope and ambitions in any way. In the early days, he had tried to act pleased for me, but I could tell that it was becoming more of a strain for him. With each credit I earned, we moved closer to the troublesome idea of university—and to the possibility that I might spend more time out of the house and out of the family’s control. I just couldn’t be sure how Ahmed would react now that I was ready for the next step.

  When the grade for my course came in, I sat down with the transcript and tried to figure out what to say. In the end, I decided to focus on the fact that I had earned 100 percent. Wasn’t that a great way to finish off ?

  When I handed Ahmed the transcript a few days later, I was shocked by his unalloyed response. “Wow!” he said, a big smile on his face. “Congratulations! You’ve really got a knack for this. So, what’s next? What are you going to do now that you are finished?”

  Of course he knew what I wanted, but I was thrilled he was inviting me to make plans.

  “Apply for university!”

  “Which schools?” he asked.

  We talked for a little while about where I might apply; in the end, I put in my application to just two—York and University of Toronto, Mississauga campus.

  Then it was a matter of waiting.

  The intervening months were not always easy, but whenever I felt low, I was lightened by the thought of next year. The drop-in centre had been a lifesaver but going to university—that would get me out of the water altogether!

  And then, one afternoon in the early spring, two envelopes arrived in the mail for me. I ripped them open before I even got out of the front hall. I had been accepted to both York and U of T. I could hardly wait until Ahmed got home to share the good news.

  When I did, in the den, out of earshot of his parents, I could tell he was proud of me. He let me break the news to his parents.

  That evening, as we cleaned up the kitchen after dinner, I brought out my acceptance letters to show Amma and Abba. There was a moment of quiet. No one made a move to look at them.

  Amma smiled stiffly. “Oh, that’s good,” she said, but there was a little mocking lilt to her voice.

  “Yes, congratulations,” said Abba. He did not look up.

  Then Amma let the smile drop from her face. “But who will take care of Aisha if you are at school?”

  “Well,” I said hopefully, “when you first heard I was pregnant, you did say you would be happy to care for the baby if I were in school.”

  Amma shook her head. “Aisha is too much work for me now,” she said.

  I had expected this response and had thought of a solution. “Well, then, I’ll only go part time,” I offered. “I can take night courses, or classes in the afternoon when Aisha is napping.”

  Amma turned her back to me and began to put the leftovers into the fridge. She clearly didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  During the next couple of weeks, I pored over the university websites, looking at courses and professor profiles, imagining what it would be like sitting in a lecture hall or studying in the library. But I started to get a little worried. I could hear hushed conversations between Amma and Ahmed leaking out from under the door to the den. Ahmed was becoming very quiet whenever I mentioned anything about school.

  One day, Abba told me to sit with him while he was having his afternoon tea. He occasionally did this—sat me down for talks about the proper role of wives and mothers, or how a Muslim family should behave.

  “Samra,” he started out earnestly, “tell me, what is your goal in life?”

  “Well, university first, and then . . .”

  “What do you want, a PhD, a master’s?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “So explain to me what is so important about an education if you don’t really know what you want to do.”

  “Abba,” I said, a little impatiently—it was frustrating to have to justify something that seemed so obvious to me—“I want to push myself to reach my potential.”

  “But your potential for what?” Abba said. He was talking to me as if I were a small child. “Why would your potential depend on education? A woman’s real potential is in her work as a wife and mother. And you don’t need school for that.”

  “But—”

  Abba ignored my interruption. “Look at Amma. She has only an eighth-grade education, and yet she is the most admired woman in our family. In our circle of friends.” He looked at me over his cup of tea and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “You understand, don’t you?”

  I understood. University would only make me unhappy and strain my marriage. It was best to forget about it. I nodded at Abba and then excused myself, taking my tea mug to the sink. I had no intention of forgetting about it.

  And then another letter arrived. It was from the Ontario Student Assistance Program, OSAP, and it held bad news. Ahmed’s salary combined with his assets, which unfortunately included a brand new car that Abba had bought in Ahmed’s name in order to save on insurance, meant that our family income was too high for me to qualify for any grants or loans. I called the office immediately and explained that my husband would not pay for any of the courses, but they were firm. Our family income was high enough that some portion of it could be allocated to my education. We had decided not to do that, and OSAP had to be reserved for those who did not have the means to make that choice. As I hung up the phone, my shoulders sagged. There was no way to explain that I wasn’t actually part of my “family” in any meaningful way—at least, I certainly didn’t have the power to make any choice about how the family income was spent.

  After dinner, I went into the den to speak to Ahmed. I stood nervously with the OSAP letter in my hand. He was sitting in front of his computer. I told him that if I were going to start university in the fall, we would have to come up with the tuition. But I tried to assure him that if I started with only one or two courses, it wouldn’t be that expensive.

  Ahmed didn’t seem concerned about the OSAP decision. But he also wasn’t interested in talking about solutions. He waved me away.

  “I don’t have money for useless things,” he said. His tone was as curt and quickly dismissive as if I’d asked for some ridiculous kitchen gadget.

  “But Ahmed, I thought—”

  Before I could remind him that he had let me apply, before I could argue about the agreement we had made before we were married, he had moved on to another objection. “Besides, Aisha is too young. Who would take care of her?”

  Ahmed’s question didn’t require an answer. He had turned his back to me. I could see his shoulders becoming rigid and his jaw clenching. There would be no more discussion.

  I tried to broach the subject again a few days later, but Ahmed’s response made it evident that this was about more than finances or daycare. “What do you want me to do?” he shouted. “Fight with my parents?”

  The following weeks were heavy with disillusion and despair. I thought back to that afternoon in the condo when Amma had dismissed my hopes for an education. The decision had been made even before then. And it was Amma and Abba who made it. Why had I allowed myself to believe Ahmed would stand up for me when the time came? Why had I imagined my life could be any different now?

  * * *

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the opportunity that was being snatched from my hands. Some evenings, I would pull the acceptance letters from my desk drawer and lock myself in the bathroom to cry undisturbed, sitting on the edge of the tub, reading the offers over and over agai
n.

  The letters weren’t the only reminders of what I had lost. We lived fairly close to the University of Toronto Mississauga campus, UTM, and any time we drove to shopping malls or dinner parties, I would sit in the backseat and peer out the window, trying to spot the signposts that pointed in the direction of the school. Before that OSAP letter, whenever I spied one of the blue graduation-cap icons, I’d smile wistfully. The signs always seemed like a promise—a tiny beacon of my future. That’s where I will be heading soon. Now I felt foolish for believing in this fairy tale. The little blue caps became a taunting reminder of the cramped, closed world I lived in. Every time one flashed by the car window, I turned my head away and swallowed hard to prevent the tears that threatened to come.

  * * *

  My university application was not the only one I had made.

  I had been asking Ahmed about the possibility of returning home for a visit ever since Aisha was born. Of course, our financial situation effectively ruled it out, but the idea that I would at some point go home to visit was never disputed. After all, my family had never seen Aisha, and even Amma and Abba could not object to a grandparent’s desire to meet a new grandchild. But despite their openness to the idea, a trip was entirely hypothetical as long as a financial argument could be made to keep me back.

  Since going to the drop-in centre, I had begun to talk with my parents more often again. (Nuzah and the counsellors had implied that they had not been as misguided in their hopes for my sisters and me.) During one of our conversations, my father advised me to get my Canadian citizenship as soon as possible.

  “As soon as you have it,” he said, “apply for passports for both you and Aisha. Once you have those, I’ll buy your plane tickets.”

  My citizenship was important. I had shared with my parents what Amma had told me about the precarious nature of a woman’s parental rights in Canada. And while Nuzah and the counsellors told me this wasn’t true, my parents and I were nervous. We feared Ahmed, as my sponsor, might be able to prevent me from re-entering Canada if I left. Could he come and get Aisha from my parents’ home, bring her back to Mississauga and leave me behind?