Hijabistan

by Sabyn Javeri

  But mere clothes are not enough when one’s mind is insecure. The body must not only be covered up, it must be locked up.

  And so he began to lock me up every morning when he left the house. Soon, the windows were boarded up too, the stairway to the roof barred and door padlocked from outside. The cable was cut off. The phone disconnected.

  My mother said, ‘He loves you too much. He doesn’t want any other man to cast eyes on you.’

  Or a woman, I thought, or a bird, a worm, an ant…

  It was in this airless darkness that my nameless daughter was born. I had no phone to ring for help. No window or balcony off which I could shout out my agony. No doorway I could run through. I lay there withering in pain, shuddering, shivering, praying to Allah for mercy.

  When he finally returned home and found me lying in a pool of blood and vomit, he rushed out to get the midwife, remembering, even in this emergency, to lock the front door.

  I delivered on the floor. The old midwife took the hijab I had torn off my head during labour and folded it into a triangle. Tenderly, she tucked the baby in and swaddled her tight. I was handed the parcel as if it was something repugnant.

  ‘The first one doesn’t matter,’ the toothless old lady mumbled, encouraging me to put her to my breast. ‘But the second-born must be a boy. Remember, a boy is a provider. A boy will bring you status. A girl is a liability.’

  ‘A girl,’ I said, the wonder in my voice making the little thing open her eyes a notch.

  ‘Put her to your breast,’ the old woman said as she wiped the soiled floor on her haunches.

  I held the baby tightly. Just born and already wrapped in a hijab, I thought with a smile. A thing to be hidden from the rest of the world – a man’s honour but not his pride.

  I held her tight.

  I still don’t know if I did it consciously. All I know is that the urge consumed me. The next thing I knew, the old lady was screaming, trying to pry the baby out of my hands. I had squeezed the cloth around her too tight. She was turning blue.

  ‘Let go,’ I could hear the woman scream. ‘Let her go,’ she shouted as I held on harder, squeezing the hijab tight around her little body till I heard her tender bones snap.

  She didn’t even cry.

  The voices faded. And I felt as if someone had turned off the volume on the cable. I could see the midwife’s lips moving. My husband behind her. Their faces angry, their fists balled. They seemed to be moving in slow motion.

  ‘It was her fate,’ I said as the baby’s neck flopped to one side.

  I pulled the hijab over her tiny mouth and nostrils.

  The urge, you see, was much too strong.

  Radha

  The monsoons had come early. Lines of rain twisting like thick ropes descended from the sky as Radha opened her front door and stepped out. Gathering the falls of her chiffon sari, she quickly ducked back inside. But it was too late. Her glance fell on her new jewel-studded golden slippers, now stained a deep brown. Her pink-painted toes peeped out from her soaked slippers and for a moment she was reminded of Qari Sahib’s sermon about nail polish making ablution impure. ‘Water does not touch the nails if they are painted. You remain filthy,’ his voice thundered in her mind and she felt a violent shudder run through her body. ‘Huh,’ she snorted as she felt her skin soak in the moisture, her toes squishing against the wetness. If Qari Sahib had ever actually worn nail polish himself, she thought, he’d know how little a difference it made!

  A loud rumbling noise made her look out the window to see if Chaudry Sahib’s driver had finally arrived. Seeing nothing but a muddy brown sky frown back at her, she realized it wasn’t a car horn or even thunder, but a cleric clearing his throat into the mosque’s loudspeaker. Soon enough, she heard the distant din of the Azan. Radha’s face crumpled with irritation for she had been plunged into darkness at the first hint of a raindrop, whereas the mosque always seemed to have enough electricity to blast the Azan, come hail or storm. Loud enough to wake the dead, she said, giggling at the thought of skeletons congregating. And then, just as suddenly, she stopped laughing, a deep maroon creeping up her cheeks. What is wrong with me? she chided herself. How could I be so disrespectful. What if Amma or Abba had heard! At the thought of her parents, Radha felt an icy grip clasp her heart. It wasn’t the first time she would be letting them down. And just for a moment, she allowed herself to feel the remorse and the regret, and something else that she could not quite explain. It wasn’t self-pity, nor was it nostalgia. It was, perhaps, something even stronger than emotion.

  ‘But is there anything stronger than emotions?’ she wondered aloud, a melancholic smile inching its way up the corners of her mouth. Her mood lifted at the thought, replaced by a rush of adrenalin as she glanced around her tiny flat, her eyes resting on the flat-screen TV, the sound system, the fancy lamps, the shiny Kenwood toaster and finally at the paintings on the wall. ‘Ahh,’ she exclaimed to herself, ‘art!’ Now that was something her parents could not only have never been able to afford, but never understand either. They wouldn’t see the point of spending money on pictures. They were strictly utilitarian, or so the tightness of money had made them. ‘But whose fault is that?’ she said to herself. Abba never ventured beyond his pitiful nine-to-five and Amma never dared to get a job, not even in a school, preferring instead to whine about the shortage of money, causing Abba to die young. Even after that, her mother had preferred to live off the charity of others instead of trying to earn her own. Radha shook her head and frowned. She would never be like that. She didn’t care what they thought of her. She cracked her knuckles and took a determined step forward. The same survival instinct that propels the wounded to keep moving, kicked in. She threw back her shoulders and straightened her back, as if someone were pulling at her crown with a string. Facing the mirror, she touched a few flyaway wisps of hair and patted them back into place. ‘Work is work,’ she told her reflection.

  The rumble of thunder outside made her shiver and she wondered why she had felt the need to reassure herself like this in the first place.

  Not letting herself mull over this any longer, she glanced at her wrist and grumbled, ‘Where is that stupid driver of Chaudry Sahib’s?’ Getting no answer from the mute watch, she whipped out her mobile phone and punched in a number.

  ‘Abdul Rahim,’ she shouted, ‘you bastard! Where have you gone and died now? Why is the car not at the gate? And why do you give me one-bells if you are not outside? What do you mean, you are outside? I’m standing outside, you harami! Acha, acha, coming, but if even a single strand of my hair gets wet, I’ll see to it that you lose your job.’

  Stuffing her phone back into her purse, she stepped out once again. The streets, still muddy and filled with water, resembled the sea at low tide. A calm sea sans waves, much like how she had been feeling before this silly boy of a driver fanned her fury. Sure enough, a car came honking down the street, barely visible and almost ghostly in the watery mist. Radha locked her front door, then stepped forward tentatively, unsure how to get across without staining the edges of her pale pink sari.

  ‘Ruqaiyah, baji,’ the driver rolled down his window and called out.

  Radha had been planning to dash through the deluge to the car, but the man’s words stopped her. She stood rooted to the spot, willing the man to come as close as possible to her door. Part of her feared he might splash her, and part of her felt defiant. Let him splash even one drop at me, and if I don’t get him fired, my name isn’t Radha.

  But her name wasn’t Radha. Her name was actually Ruqaiyah Begum. But she preferred the soft ‘dha’ sound to the harsh ‘qa’ of her real name. Plus, Ruqaiyah, the name given to her by her parents, reeked of the old-fashioned Urdu-speaking families of the old part of town, to which she belonged. For a second, the word ‘belong’ made her halt and reflect. Oblivious to the driver’s honking, she savoured the word like she had savoured the falling water before her. It was a delicious word, she decided, and if it had a taste, it would t
aste like grapefruit – sweet at first, but with a bitter aftertaste that left one’s tongue reeling.

  The driver’s incessant honking continued as he refused to budge an inch further. By now, the neighbours were beginning to peer out of their windows at the racket. Another complaint was all Radha needed to be evicted from her ground-floor flat, and so she hiked up her sari and trudged through the water to the nearby car. Probably feeling chastised by the concession she was making, the boy grudgingly got out of the car. He bent to open the door for her just as she gave him a push, laughing as he fell backwards into the water.

  When he got back dripping wet into the car, he stared at her through the rear-view mirror. She feared it was anger that flashed in his young eyes, but as soon as he caught her eye, he winked at her. Radha ignored him.

  Harami sala.

  She had no time to waste on the likes of him. Not when the party that awaited her was the minister himself. It had taken great skill and time to get to a place where, even if she said so herself, her art of seduction was near perfect. She had found a way to blow her clients so that they hired her again but did not get so addicted to her that they wouldn’t let her take on any other men, or worse, started talking of leaving their wives. Radha sighed. She was aware that her looks were not extraordinary, but she also realized that most men were like spoilt children who just wanted to be indulged. So she sat on her knees, cock in mouth, stroking their ego, till they coughed up the money and the semen. She had learnt early on that men cared only about pleasing themselves. But what they perhaps themselves did not know was how easy it was to please them.

  She knew that it wasn’t the choicest of professions, but then beggars can’t be choosers, she consoled herself. If this was what life had in store for her, who was she to argue, she thought as she twirled her diamond ring. After all, it wasn’t as if she had planned to choose the oldest profession in the world as her career.

  Radha had been a pre-med student when she got into the business of pleasure, as her pimp called it. It was a temporary arrangement, a stopgap till she saved enough to get into med school. However, she soon realized this was not much different from medicine, healing being the purpose of both. She found sex empowering. And enabling. A few months into this line, and she was independent, both financially and emotionally, from the over-protective, close-knit, suffocating, family consisting of her widowed mother, two younger brothers and a mentally challenged sister.

  And it wasn’t as if she had to walk the streets. It was all very discreet, for her clients had much more to lose than her, should anything get leaked. On the face of it, she was an ad-film model selling anything from detergents to paan masala to apartments. But underneath, there was a whole network of exploitation that went on at that particular agency.

  She could not remember when or how she had become a part of it. Perhaps her memory had blocked it out, but she remembered it had been an older model, a mentor, who had set up the first tryst. When her mother had decided it was more important to school her brothers than her, Radha had decided to finance her own education by getting a part-time job. A friend whose brother worked in advertising got her a job as a receptionist in a small agency. One day, when a model failed to show up, they asked her to pose for a pamphlet. It was there she had met Riaz Uncle. From the first time she met him, Radha had been impressed by the kindness in his wrinkled and faded eyes, and of course the generosity of his very deep pockets. And when an older model brought his proposition to her, she accepted without thinking. And so it was that a man she called ‘Uncle’ took her virginity, in return for basic things like food and education. The thought suddenly made her bitter. But it was replaced with a smile when she remembered him, sixty at that time, showering her with expensive gifts with the understanding that she saw no other. He had passed away three years later. Radha realized she missed him, the man who named her Radha.

  ‘Get married,’ her family – who had looked the other way till the gifts and the cash had flowed – had advised her after the funeral. Their concern for her future had suddenly resurfaced after her patron’s death: ‘Log kya kahengay?’ they had chorused.

  ‘You are twenty-six,’ her mother had coaxed. ‘Who would marry you if word gets out?’ There was a sense of urgency, an anxiety in the household, as her mother hastily hunted for rishtas and Radha – who refused to go back to being called Ruqaiyah – remembered feeling strangely aloof, as if she no longer recognized herself. ‘I feel disconnected with myself,’ she would tell her mother who in turn would tell her to pray.

  And that is when religion came into Radha’s life. Long sermons on seeking His forgiveness, made her turn to God. She would lie in bed telling beads or spend long evenings prostrating on the prayer mat. Until one day her mother took her to a Dars by Qari Shahid, the evangelical TV host who was becoming increasingly popular at the time. At first she was just a disciple, listening to his sermons, nodding her head like a clockwork toy but with time she became so committed that she even started covering her head. She wore a hijab to cover her hair and an abaya to hide her figure, but she could not conceal the sensuousness in her eyes that men were drawn to. Though they had never spoken, she returned home one day to find a demure Qari waiting for her as he sat silently, eyes downcast, in her living room. This time there was no proposition. Instead he had brought a proposal.

  It seemed the right thing to do. And so a quiet nikah was performed and she found herself a bride – no henna adorning her hands, no ornaments on her person, no music and no dances marking her special day. She winced as she remembered protesting the simplicity of the occasion to her mother. ‘It’s not like it’s your first time,’ her mother had replied bitingly. After that, Radha had left the house vowing never to return. But then promises are made to be broken.

  Now, as they slowly made their way through the waterlogged streets of Karachi, Radha examined the old engagement ring on her finger. The marriage had lasted all of eight months but she still wore the ring. Not because it was precious or particularly pretty – instead, it was its coarseness that appealed to her. It was tight and slightly pinched her skin too. It was this discomfort that reminded her not to go back to her old life of domesticity, whenever a client proposed.

  Qari had turned out to be a mean man, tight-fisted and insecure. He professed Wahabism, but Radha had decided he was just miserly. He kept her hand-to-mouth and, after about six months of desperation, Radha ran back home, sending him a Qula notice through her younger brother. She had feared that he would not divorce her easily, but he did. As quietly and as unceremoniously as he had proposed to her.

  In the car, she wiped the mist off the windowpane, avoiding the driver’s gaze, and thought back to how she had willingly started wearing the hijab to please the Qari. She touched her hair now, stroked its softness, aware that the driver was likely getting a hard-on in the front seat. Then she gently brought her hand down, resting it under her chin. With the other hand, she adjusted a stray lock, tossing it back over her plump shoulders, knowing fully well the devastation she was unleashing in the front seat.

  The car halted and she felt the driver’s eyes on her again. Now he really did have her full attention. To convey this, she met his eyes in the mirror. The honking around them grew louder as their eyes locked and the car remained unmoving. Without breaking the grid-locked gaze, and unbeknown to the boy, Radha’s free hand reached for her mobile. It was only when she said, ‘Jee, Chaudry Sahib, we are almost there,’ that he stepped on the gas and they were on their way once again. He did not dare glance at her through the rear-view mirror for the rest of the journey.

  Radha smiled. It had taken a long time, but she knew how to take care of herself now. And of others. She knew how to put these men in their place. A triumphant smile lit up her face as she looked out the misty car window.

  In less than five minutes, the car turned into one of the most affluent streets in the city. They stopped outside giant black gates which had ‘Chaudry’ written on them in gaudy golden lett
ering. One honk and the gates trembled opened by invisible hands. Velvety red roses lined the circular driveway as they drove their way up. The flower pots, stained a garish silver and encrusted with semi-precious gems, never failed to bring the expression ‘vulgar display of wealth’ to her mind, and now, as they passed cages full of exotic birds and one that housed a sorry-looking tiger, Radha couldn’t help but feel a rising discomfort. Bubbles were rising in the pit of her stomach and it was all she could do to stay still till the car finally stopped at the doorway. Two marble lions with crystals for eyes sat at the entrance and as Radha was about to get off, she quelled all her doubts and turned to the driver. He was staring straight ahead, as if they had never met.

  ‘You!’ she snapped her fingers. ‘My name is Radha, okay? You don’t mess with me. Nobody messes

  with Radha.’

  The boy looked stonily ahead. Satisfied, she slammed the car door behind her.

  But, despite the confidence pumping through her veins at this small victory, she felt the usual hesitation as she entered Chaudry Sahib’s house. The walls seemed to be laughing at her false bravado, teasing her painted words, taunting her humble beginnings. Or perhaps they were warning her, she thought as goose bumps dimpled her flesh. A sense of foreboding hung in the air, or maybe, Radha consoled herself, it was the scent of expensive tobacco. She forced herself to smile as she took tentative steps forward, a strange force gripping her shoulders, as if pulling her back. She reached a large, carved wooden door, which seemed dark and ominous, much in tune with the heaviness weighing down the air around her. Radha’s sheer sari, her glittery nail polish and glossed lips seemed grossly out of place in the melancholy grey of Chaudry Sahib’s house. Like a new bride in a graveyard, Radha thought, swallowing the lump that had formed in her throat.