A Good Wife

by Samra Zafar

I sat for a few seconds trying to put my questions into words. “I don’t know where to start,” I finally said.

  “Just start at the beginning. Tell me about yourself.”

  The room was warm and inviting, but it was the counsellor’s voice that quelled my nerves and drew me in. I started to tell her about Ruwais. And then my engagement. The nikah. The rukhsati. And then the floodgates opened.

  By the time I told her about what had been happening at home, my conflicting emotions were on full display.

  “I just don’t know why I feel this way,” I confessed. “Everyone tells me that I have a normal marriage. And I know that deep down Ahmed loves me. Whenever I talk about leaving, he cries. I just can’t figure out why I make him angry. But if I could be a better wife, a better mother . . .”

  I told her about our recent fight about my late return from school. “It was so stupid of me. I mean, it’s not as if he isn’t being supportive too. He helped me shop for a new laptop for school. Just the other day he gave me a big high-five when I got a good mark on an assignment. I’ve just got to figure out how to stop the bad stuff from happening.”

  By then I was awash in tears. I took a deep breath and tried to wipe away my running mascara.

  “Listen to me, Samra,” said the counsellor. “This is not your fault.”

  “But if I didn’t push back, if I found a better way to respond to him, maybe—”

  “Samra, it doesn’t matter what you say to him.” She was leaning towards me, speaking slowly but firmly. “This is not the right way to be treated. This is abusive. You are being abused.”

  It had been one brief hour, but that first session was a revelation. Long after I left the office, the counsellor’s words continued to run through my head as if on a loop: “It’s not your fault.”

  I suppose the idea that I was not to blame had been implied by Nuzah at the drop-in centre and by the counsellors I’d talked to there and when I was at the apartment. But I hadn’t heard those exact words, and I hadn’t taken that meaning from what they said. And even if I had, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. Now, hearing the idea expressed clearly, bluntly and without hesitation, it had entered my consciousness. Despite my unhappiness, my complaints to my parents and my protests to Amma and Ahmed alike, deep down I’d always assumed that if I had managed things better, been a good wife, a better daughter-in-law, a more compliant woman, I could have prevented my husband’s outbursts and tempered his anger. All my appeals to him over the years had been pleas to treat my faults with more patience and understanding, to be more forgiving when things weren’t “ideal.” I knew his jealousy was unfounded, but I felt I could have banished it from his mind—if I’d just been smart enough or sensitive enough to figure out how.

  Could I have been wrong about all of that? Was the counsellor right and everyone else I knew wrong?

  And I thought about the other strange thing she was telling me: “You are being abused.”

  Abuse. Until the counsellor gave me that word, it was not part of my vocabulary. No one I knew ever used it, in English or in Urdu. Abused women were ones who suffered lasting physical injury—or worse.

  And Amma always reminded me that it could be worse. “At least you don’t have broken bones,” she had said more than once when reminding me that a woman’s role was to submit to her husband and keep the darker details of her marital life from the world. Yet she never had seen the full extent of Ahmed’s rages.

  But now that I had a word for the pain I had been enduring, now that I could name it, did I have a defence against Amma’s claims? Questions pulsed through my mind. I couldn’t wait to get back to my second appointment at the health centre to talk further.

  During our third or fourth session, after I had talked about how Ahmed could be violent one minute and sorrowful the next, the counsellor pulled out a piece of cardboard with a diagram printed on it. She laid it on the low table between us. The diagram was labelled “The Cycle of Abuse.”

  The counsellor explained how the stages of abuse formed a continuous loop. During the “tension” period, the abuser gets angry and annoyed, and communication between the two parties breaks down. The abused feels uneasy, as if he or she needs to walk on eggshells and concede to the abuser to avoid conflict. Next comes the “incident” or “acting out” phase, in which the emotional, physical or sexual abuse takes place. Following that is a “honeymoon” or reconciliation period, during which abusers often apologize for their behaviour and promise that it won’t happen again. During this time, the abuser might also try to minimize what happened or make excuses, pointing out the things the victim did to provoke the outburst. Afterwards, a period of “calm” often marks the relationship—a time when the abuse abates and both the abuser and the victim act as if it didn’t happen. The abused may believe or hope that the abuser has changed and that a new type of future is possible. And then the tension begins to build again.

  I was stunned. It was as if someone had recorded the rhythms of my married life. I couldn’t help thinking of the time when Ahmed had thrown water in my face and then taken Aisha and me to the park and out for pizza.

  “These phases,” the counsellor continued, “can be very short—a few days, say—or quite long, months at a time. For some victims, the honeymoon and calm stages are extremely brief or don’t happen at all.”

  The counsellor then produced another chart. It was called “The Power and Control Wheel.” In the pie slices of the circle were descriptions of the ways an abuser asserts power over the abused—from insisting that a man must be in control of everyone in his family to using coercion and threats to keep the abused in line. It noted that abusers often destroy their victims’ property and make threatening gestures and actions. They isolate their victims, keeping them from family and friends. Abuse can also take the form of economic control: making sure the abused has no money and has to ask for every penny he or she needs. Children were also often used as a tool of control, the chart explained—the abuser might threaten to take them away, or make the victim feel guilty about what might happen to them in a separation. Abusers also tend to blame the victim. They minimize the abuse. They deny that it happened. Putting the victim down, humiliating her, calling her names, making her think she’s crazy—these are all ways to exert power and control.

  I sat looking at the power and control diagram, thinking about the way in which it captured and summarized so many things about my marriage, about Ahmed’s words and actions. I felt as if I were being swept up in a powerful cyclone of emotion, twisting helplessly as I moved through anger, sadness, denial, confusion, panic, self-pity, guilt, fear.

  I was almost dizzy when I finally looked up at the counsellor. “So how do I fix this?” I asked her.

  “Samra, you don’t,” she said flatly. “You can’t. The only way for the cycle to be broken is for abusers to realize that their behaviour needs to change—and to work on changing it. The victim can’t do anything to avoid the abuse other than walk away.”

  Over the next months, I went to see the counsellor every week. I needed repeated affirmation that I wasn’t crazy, that the way Ahmed and I had been living wasn’t normal or healthy. And I needed time to decide how I felt about my past and my future—and what I wanted to do now.

  The one thing I was becoming certain of was that somehow I had to share my new understanding with Ahmed. In the past, he had repeatedly apologized for his behaviour and admitted he hadn’t been a good husband, but I was sure he didn’t realize just how unacceptable his words and actions had been. I guessed he wasn’t even aware of how often he’d called me names or snapped at me. I began to respond any time he flung nasty words my way.

  If he called me “whore,” I would return with “You don’t have a right to call me that.” When he addressed me as “bitch,” I would snap back, “I don’t deserve that!”

  One night, while I was in the kitchen making lunch for the next day, Ahmed came in to tell me Amma was upset and that I should talk to her. I kne
w what the problem was. She was annoyed that I was now spending more time at school and had begun to tell me to close the daycare. In fact, only a couple of children were left, and I was gone for only a few extra hours each week. I thought this was just another campaign to make me leave school. I told Ahmed I would talk to her later. He was not happy with my response, but I didn’t make another comment. Instead, I focused on the rice in front of me.

  My silence always infuriated Ahmed. This time, he lunged at me, grabbing my upper arm and yanking me to face him. He was now holding both my arms, pinching hard.

  Instead of begging him to let me go, I tried to pull away from him. “You aren’t supposed to do this to me!” I shouted.

  Ahmed’s eyes grew even darker. “Now you’re telling me what to do, you bitch?” He let go of my arms and brought his hand down across my face. “Who are you to stop me?”

  There was, as the abuse cycle predicted, an apology of sorts later in the evening. “You know that it makes me so angry when you don’t talk, because I love you. I don’t want to do this, but you push me to it.” And some fast food appeared on my desk several hours after that.

  But this time, I didn’t say thank you.

  * * *

  My increasingly oppositional attitude did nothing to chasten Ahmed, of course. He only became angrier. And he began to suspect that I was being influenced by people outside our home.

  “Who are you talking to?” he demanded one day. “Ever since you started at that damn school, you’ve been different.”

  More and more, I felt as if I had been right all along. The only way for us to have a different kind of life, for Ahmed to truly change, was to get rid of his parents’ influence. Our brief time in the apartment and the weeks in Karachi and Ruwais after my father’s death had proved that simply living under a different roof wasn’t enough. Ahmed needed to recognize that his attitude about marriage and about the role of a wife was misguided—that Amma and Abba and many of our family members and social circle had it wrong. He needed to understand that his behaviour was unacceptable. He needed to learn to control his anger.

  One evening when we seemed to be in one of our “calm” phases, I told Ahmed I had something that I wanted him to look at. I had printed out a copy of “The Cycle of Abuse.” Now I handed it to him.

  He read the page quickly before dropping it in disgust. “I knew you were getting brainwashed by white people,” he said. “Going to all the wrong places for advice. If you think we need help, then we should go to a mosque for advice, stay in our culture.”

  I shook my head. I suspected any imam Ahmed chose would only reinforce the idea that a wife should be obedient to her husband, that a husband should control his wife. At least for now, there would be no professional help for Ahmed.

  * * *

  My reluctance to go to a mosque for counselling did not mean I was comfortable walking away from everything about the culture and religion in which I’d been raised. In fact, I’d recently been concerned about my youngest sister’s unorthodox behaviour.

  Around the time Sonia was born, I had received troubling news. My mother was remarrying. Her wedding took place not long after the finish of the iddat, the period of a widow’s mourning and waiting prescribed by the Koran. It seemed to my sisters and me shockingly soon after my father’s death. Ahmed, Amma and Abba had also looked on it with disapproval. But the person who was perhaps affected most by my mother’s decision was my youngest sister, Bushra, who was still living at home when not at boarding school.

  Now after almost three years, she needed her own space and had moved into an apartment in Abu Dhabi. My two other sisters had lived in the city as well, but they had shared an apartment with a family—not lived alone. I admired her boldness but feared she was being reckless and creating a dangerous social isolation for herself. I was so worried, so desperate to talk with someone, that I confided in Ahmed, making him promise not to tell his parents.

  * * *

  Amma was throwing one of her dinner parties, and I had invited a couple Ahmed and I were friends with. I was in the kitchen getting food ready with Amma and my friend when I heard my phone beep. It was a text from a classmate: Mid-term marks were just posted. Go look. There’s a surprise for you!

  I excused myself and raced downstairs to my computer. On the university portal, the professor had made a public announcement, congratulating me on a perfect score. When I got back upstairs, I couldn’t contain my excitement. I told Amma and my friend what had just happened.

  “Hmmmpf,” said Amma. She looked pointedly around the kitchen. “You should have told your classmates that you don’t do anything at all other than study. So of course you would get a good mark.”

  I knew that Amma’s implication would be heard and understood by everyone within earshot. I was neglecting my home and my family for school.

  My face was suddenly hot, humiliation driving the words from me. There was an awkward pause before my friend began to talk about something else.

  For the rest of the evening I was quiet. At the table, I didn’t join the conversation and couldn’t manage to eat. After dinner I busied myself cleaning the kitchen, and once the guests had left I disappeared downstairs with Aisha and Sonia.

  Ahmed followed me. “Is something the matter?” he asked. He had been in a good mood all night, and now his voice was warmly solicitous. Despite his ongoing resentment about school, he’d also been supportive of my academic accomplishments. I decided to be honest. I told him how happy I had been about the mark and how Amma had embarrassed me in front of my friend.

  “You’re right,” Ahmed said when I was finished. “Amma shouldn’t have said anything. She talks without thinking. But you shouldn’t worry about it. You’re pulling your weight around here and doing everything you need to do. Don’t let her get to you.”

  I was so relieved to have Ahmed’s support and sympathy that it almost felt worth the earlier humiliation. I went to bed feeling soothed and happy.

  The next morning Ahmed and I were in the kitchen together while Aisha was in the den watching cartoons. I was feeding Sonia breakfast. Ahmed was having his morning tea. The pleasant peacefulness from the night before lingered in the room.

  The sounds of heavy footsteps on the stairs preceded Amma’s arrival. She walked straight over to me, her expression sour. “So, what’s your problem?” she demanded. “You didn’t eat dinner last night and you didn’t talk to anyone, and this morning you didn’t come to my room to say salaam.”

  I had no intention of apologizing, and I knew nothing would be gained by explaining myself. I just wanted to put the evening behind me.

  “I really don’t want to talk about it, Amma,” I said.

  “You aren’t behaving properly. You have to talk to me,” she said impatiently.

  I tried to deflect her again, but she kept at me. Finally, I told her how much she had embarrassed me the night before.

  Amma rolled her eyes at my words. “You always twist things! You always try to make me look bad. I was just trying to praise you and point out how much you do.”

  “Amma, I know what I heard. I know what you meant,” I said.

  “Are you calling me a liar?” she responded.

  I moved to the table to clear up the breakfast dishes. I didn’t want to continue the pointless conversation.

  “Are you?” Amma demanded.

  Suddenly the air was broken by a booming voice. Ahmed was on his feet. “This is no way to treat my mother! Why aren’t you answering her?” The full force of his anger hit me like blow to the stomach.

  “Ahmed,” I said, reeling in surprise, “we talked about this last night.”

  Amma snorted. “Oh, you are so conniving, trying to turn my son against me!”

  I could feel the earth rolling under my feet. Things would only get worse if I stayed in the kitchen with Ahmed and his mother. I picked Sonia up and headed for the basement stairs.

  Ahmed was beside me in an instant, grabbing my wrist and spinnin
g me around. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Downstairs. To my bedroom.” My own anger kept my voice firm.

  “Oh, you’re running away! Just like your sister ran away to live on her own. You’re just a family of shameless girls.”

  Something about Ahmed’s exposing my young sister to his family like this, something about the way he had used my concern against me, unleashed in me a white-hot fury. “You have no right to drag my family into this,” I screamed. “I told you that in confidence!” I kept going. “Why are you yelling at me after you were so supportive last night? How dare you? How dare you?”

  Amma was standing stock-still in the kitchen, her mouth open. Ahmed looked astonished, too. They had never seen me this angry before.

  I turned on my heel and fled down the stairs with Sonia, closing the door behind me. When I got into my room, I sat on the bed, still seething.

  A few minutes later, they both came down to talk me. But I wasn’t interested in Ahmed’s excuses or Amma’s sympathy. I had long ago learned that any feelings I shared with Amma would be reported back to Ahmed in a way that would cause more friction between us. Clearly, any confidence I shared with Ahmed could go in the other direction. And I wasn’t going to listen to either of them tell me I was the one misbehaving. “I don’t want to live like this anymore,” I told them. Then I wouldn’t say another word.

  That was the first time that I had actually stood up for myself in that house, with those people. And it felt good.

  * * *

  With my outburst, I felt as if I had broken some sort of spell. I didn’t want to slide back into old patterns with either Amma or Ahmed. But I knew that would be difficult. The only way to prevent it, I thought, was to live as separately from them as I possibly could.

  I began to do whatever chores I could in my bedroom. When the daycare kids arrived, I took them into the basement whenever we weren’t out of doors. There was plenty of room down there for them to play games and have naps. I bought myself a small fridge, a rice cooker, a microwave and a toaster oven. I had everything I needed to cook meals for myself, the girls and the daycare kids. Despite Amma’s grumblings, I didn’t rejoin her upstairs during the day or in the evenings if I could avoid it.