I still didn’t believe that black magic had any effect on a person’s life. I had studied the Quran diligently as a child, so I knew the scriptures forbade the practice of magic. There are many verses in the Quran to protect us from the magic and evil forces, but we must recite them with strong faith in God. Being a Muslim, we should not believe in magic, it was just another superstitious way of dealing with life’s difficulties and to gain anything, it was practiced by ignorant people.
CHAPTER 10
Pretending to Smile
MY LIFE AND MY WORK began to settle into a stable routine. The relaxed pace allowed me to regroup mentally. Finally, having respect as a physician, and living in peace and tranquility with my son and family, began to bring some comfort to my heart. The debilitating depression began to lift, but I still found it difficult to smile.
Erfun’s parents came to meet me at my father’s house; they were going to Mecca to perform Hajj. They were crying about my divorce and saying, God gave them such a wonderful daughter-in-law, and they’ve lost her. They were ashamed for their misbehavior, and asked forgiveness from me. I forgave them.
One day while working in my Rimpa office, a woman I had never met came in. She appeared older than me and was dressed casually in a shalwar kameez without the white lab coat the doctors and medical staff usually wore, so I didn’t recognize her as part of the staff. My helper introduced her as Dr. Sheela, the physician who had transferred from Sui Gas in Balochistan, where she had worked for many years. She seemed interested in talking, so I invited her into my office.
She glanced around as if she were appraising everything. I offered her some coffee, but she demurred. We chatted a bit, and then she remarked that I appeared to be having an easy day. I sat, taking a break, and enjoying a cup of coffee at my desk, while my support staff handled the phone and the paperwork. I could relax between patients. For all she knew, I had been sitting here all day with nothing much to do, which hadn’t been the case.
She made a point of noting that my office was a dream compared to hers. Downstairs, in Units A and B, where she treated the clerical and technical staff and their families, she had long lines with demanding patients and a lot of shouting and noise.
“Like a fish market,” she said with a disgusted sneer.
I was surprised at her attitude. I thought she had preferred to work in the A and B Units. That’s why I was sent to Unit C. Why was she now complaining?
She went on to tell me about how she had joined the company many years before in Balochistan, where she had treated many of the company’s executives and staff. Many of them had become her friends. When she applied for a transfer to Karachi, the only opening they had offered was for Units A and B. Even the interview was set up for her, the understanding was that she would take a post in Units A and B regardless of the interview results.
Since she wanted to transfer to Karachi, she had resigned her position with the understanding she would take up a post to work in Units A and B on the first floor of the same building I worked in. Evidently, because she had resigned her position before taking her new assignment in Karachi, she had lost her seniority.
I, on the other hand, had earned the top marks in the exam and had persuaded management that I was the most qualified applicant. I also believed my son’s prayers were not in vain. Now I understood that God must have been watching over me, because my position in Unit C had been a healing experience after the horrible years of my marriage.
Unit C was very orderly and organized. There were seventeen physicians, and I was the only female doctor amongst them. All the medical assistants were male. It was the custom of the party in power to appoint their own members, often without any interview process. All of the doctors I worked with had been selected during Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government through his People’s Party, or subsequently during Benazir Bhutto’s tenure as Prime Minister. They were all Sindhi because Dr. Uqali was Sindhi.
At the time, I was the only exception.
I knew that Dr. Sheela had lobbied hard for the approval for her transfer for the opportunity to work in Karachi instead of the backwaters of Balochistan. The position in Units A and B in Karachi must be better than Balochistan, but not better than Unit C.
After she left, I felt confused. Her visit hadn’t been amiable. She didn’t seem interested in getting to know me as a fellow doctor, but instead had tried to weasel information out of me. She seemed motivated more out of jealousy than any sense of collegial cooperation. My intuition told me that she harbored a growing resentment that she had to work so hard with difficult patients and trying surroundings, while I seemed at ease with patient care.
I didn’t acknowledge any of her observations, even though I sympathized with her. If Unit C was quieter, I needed those quiet moments between patients to allow me to relax from the stress of what I had endured for the last six years. Overall, I thought her visit strange. She didn’t strike me as sincere in her intentions, whatever they may have been. But after a while, I thought nothing of her visit.
Mother suddenly fell ill. She was diagnosed with cancer, and she began to deteriorate rapidly. I knew that with the right treatment, patients with her diagnosis could survive. There were always new therapies available, so I went to meet with her oncologists. When I spoke with her doctors about their treatment plan, they told me that in her case it was their opinion that there was very little they could do for her.
She had lost her will to survive, and no longer wished to fight the disease. I could see it in her eyes. She was not only sad, but disappointed in how my marriage had turned out. She had always told me she felt my pain, and she knew I was suffering. I was no longer joyful and outgoing as I had been as a child and as a student. All the happiness in my life had gone missing. I had become quiet and reserved. She would tell me the best thing I could do was to open up and talk about what Erfun had done, and what I had experienced. But it would be too painful to complain and whine about Erfun to her. She was the only one who always had my best interests at heart, and I didn’t want to do anything that would cause her more grief than she already carried.
By the time she began her chemotherapy, one month after her diagnosis, she had become a shell of the vibrant, beautiful woman who had brought me into this world and nurtured all of my dreams and aspirations. She did not survive her first chemotherapy treatment.
The day before she died, as I sat by her bedside, she turned to me. “If you had shared with me what you had suffered in Erfun’s house, I would have more hope to live.”
I turned my face from her and tried to hide my tears. My heart felt ready to burst with the pain she must be feeling for me. I wanted to tell her the truth, but those days in Erfun’s home had confused me emotionally, filling me with feelings of doubt—perhaps I had been wrong in the way I had responded to him. Maybe I was responsible for the collapse of my marriage, and so I had earned these consequences I was facing. As much as I tried to explain my feelings to her, I couldn’t bring myself to talk about what Erfun had done to me. The hurt was so deep that merely thinking about all those chilling episodes made me weak inside. I knew my silence was slowly killing her, and I was helpless to take another path.
It was impossible for me to shake the evil words of Erfun, his wicked sister, shameless mistress, and callous parents. Those words had become part of me. Despite all the kindness from Dr. Soofia, who constantly told me that Erfun didn’t deserve me and that I was an exceptional woman, I could not easily undo the four years of mental and physical torture.
After I pulled myself together, Mother held my hand and said she had something important she wanted to tell me. Her voice was low and breathless as she slowly articulated her words.
As I knew, when I was born and during my childhood, she had a series of horrible dreams. She believed God had given her portents of evil things that would happen to me as an adult. She was convinced I would face many difficulties in my life, and no one would help me. She wanted to protect me. But n
ow she regretted allowing me to stay isolated during my childhood and teen years, when I should have learned to trust others. She allowed me to hide from the world behind my books and my intellectual efforts, and submerge myself in my own imaginary world, a world which would always be beautiful and peaceful. Instead, she should have prepared me to deal with the adversity of a practical life and to understand how to deal with people better.
Even now, after my divorce, she believed I was too innocent to deal effectively with the true intentions of a culture that favors hypocrites and exhibitionists. Even after all I had been through, I was naïve about the world. Grief over what had happened to me had become a drag on her life.
She pleaded with me to marry a good man, a man who would protect me, care for me, and bring me happiness. She did not want to die thinking that I would be unhappy living alone my entire life. Her soul would not be at rest if she died thinking I would never find happiness. Listening to her explain her fears, I could not control the tears running from my eyes.
She then went on to suggest a few men from our immediate and extended family who she thought would be good matches for me. She especially insisted I consider her brother’s son, who was a doctor in Punjab and who had always wanted to marry me. We were the same age and had known each other since childhood. But I feared if I moved to Punjab, Taimoor’s education would be compromised.
My heart was breaking during the entire conversation, to think that I had caused her so much grief on top of what I had experienced. I did not want her to pass with so many regrets.
I took her feeble hand. “Mother, I promise, when I am ready, I will marry a good man. But right now, I can’t.” The entire experience with Erfun was still too raw for me to think of loving another man again. Especially since my father’s advice to me was that I should give up my son, so a new husband would not have the burden of raising another man’s child. I could not bear to consider that option.
She smiled wanly. Cancer had emaciated her—her cheeks were sunken, and the glow of life in her eyes that had once been so bright flickered. She sighed, and she looked at peace.
She died the next day.
I went through the motions of the Islamic funeral rites in a state of disbelief. Though I was burying my mother, the only person who had loved me without any reservations, I could not accept her death. As her enshrouded body passed before me, a new sense of aloneness came over me. At the cemetery surrounded by my brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts who had traveled from Punjab, and my father, I stood among them, but alone. Mother had been my bulwark against the cruel world. She had tried her entire life to protect me, but as diligent as she had been, what she feared for my life had come to pass. What did my future hold if there was not one person who could at least try to protect me?
I stood rigid and unsmiling in the midst of my grieving family, fearing that if I moved, I would break open. But as long as I remained quiet, I was dry-eyed and stoic.
At the gravesite, my father, in a moment of tenderness, tried to hug me. I shrugged away from him. He had always helped me, but when I needed him most to deal with my evil husband, he refused me. And now he wanted me to give up Taimoor, the only good thing in my life. I could not hug him now.
I must have shocked my staid and steady father because when I moved away from him, my always composed father began to wail. But I could not comfort his cries.
On the third day of our grieving at Soyam, our maid came to me.
“Baji, your mother always cried for you, worried about you living with your in-laws. She was always waiting for you and watching the door, expecting your visit. She loved you.”
Overcome by emotion, I fled to my room and closed the door. I could not hold back the tears. I threw myself on my bed, and my grief overwhelmed me. I was alone now, and I would have to make my way the best I could. And pray that God will watch over me.
Losing Mother only filled me with more regrets that I had not listened to my father. I should have told him about Erfun’s threat to kidnap my sister if I didn’t agree to marry him. Now I see that he would have protected me against Erfun. I should never have told my father I loved Erfun. I hadn’t understood Erfun’s true motivations for marrying me, and the truth of it was that I didn’t even understand my own feelings. I sifted around in my mind for clues. Why couldn’t I see Erfun for who he was—a womanizing alcoholic who didn’t truly love me? How could I be so naïve? For my mother to blame herself for what had happened to me with Erfun troubled me. She was the only person who knew the depths of what I had suffered from him.
After a time of mourning, I realized I had taken off a full month from work to care for Mother during her illness. When the week was completed, I returned to work, carrying sadness with me.
One day, Dr. Uqali, who was always pleasant to me, called me into his office. He expressed condolences for the death of my mother.
“I know you are very sad over your mother’s death. But, Dr. Raana, you need to begin to live again. You have always been very quiet since you joined the company, but now you look sad, too. You have to begin to smile again. You are like my daughter. It’s very difficult to see you so sad.”
He told me that patients were complaining about me, saying that I had been rude to them. They thought I was well-mannered and considerate, that I diagnosed them well, and treated them correctly, but I never smiled.
I listened to what he had to say. “I don’t know how to smile anymore.”
“If you practice smiling, it will be much easier for you.”
“Practice?”
“Yes, then in time, you will feel better, and life will be easier. Force yourself to smile, and soon it will come easily.”
I knew he was right, but it was very challenging to me because I had become very cynical about people and their intentions. In time, I did begin to smile again. I learned I could pretend to smile, but that didn’t mean I was happy.
One day Javed Khan, the manager of the medical department called me into his office to tell me that Dr. Sheela, the doctor whom I had met a few months before, had requested to be transferred to Unit C. That would mean I would be moved to Units A and B. I had an excellent job with pleasant surroundings, and I didn’t want to lose it. But Dr. Sheela was well-connected, and had started lobbying for the transfer as soon as she saw my clinic. She had lots of opportunities for lobbying during my one-month absence.
The sense that I was somehow being cheated out of something I truly loved came over me. I knew this new change would affect me, but I just didn’t know how much.
CHAPTER 11
Second Wife
A FEW MONTHS AFTER I JOINED Sui Gas, when I was at work, Nashad, a colleague I had worked with at Fon Hospital two years prior, showed up on my parents’ doorstep with all her luggage. When my mother answered the door, Nashad began to cry, claiming she had nowhere to turn. Her parents’ home had become too difficult for her to live in. She was a Muslim, like her father. He was married, for a second time, to a Christian nurse, and she had remained a Christian with her husband’s permission. With the second wife a Christian and the first wife a Muslim, Nashad’s home had become a nightmare. She decided to move out, and I was the only one she could think of that would help, although we had only ever been colleagues, not friends.
My mother was too kind to turn her away. When I arrived home that day, Nashad had already moved into our house. She stayed for three months.
She wasn’t interested in working; rather, she was on the hunt for a wealthy husband. When she moved in, she was separated from her Agha Khani husband, a very wealthy married businessman from Islamabad. She had carried on an affair with him and eventually had married him. When he visited Karachi from Islamabad, they would stay in a hotel. Her neighbors believed that she was more of a mistress than a second wife. Now the two of them were separated, and would likely divorce.
Because she refused to work and her husband wouldn’t support her, her financial situation had become dire. She wanted to divorce him, and
find a more suitable husband, one that would support the lifestyle she imagined she was entitled to. Because of her financial situation, she was constantly borrowing money with a promise she would pay me back.
One day my brother Rasikh told me that I had to make her move out. Her family was well-off and lived in a large home not far from ours. He was upset by her behavior, staying out late, arriving home in the early morning, and then sleeping all day.
I confronted her, but she cried that she had nowhere to go. She would leave once she found a husband. When her search became futile, she began pestering me to go with her to a magician.
In Pakistan, if a family doesn’t make a match for a women, or if she doesn’t meet a man through work or school, a single women can seek a religious solution. She can pray and recite certain verses in the Quran, in the belief the repetition will attract a nice partner. Many times very decent women spend all their lives patiently waiting for a man who never appears, and they end up living isolated and lonely lives.
For others, there is no other alternative but to use a magician to woo a man—either married or unmarried—into falling in love with you. It is a sordid superstition forbidden in Islam, but often practiced out of despair for the lack of alternatives.
I told Nashad that I didn’t believe in magic, and refused to accompany her. The entire experience with Shesta was still fresh in my mind. But she persisted, threatening that if I didn’t go with her, she would convert to Christianity. When she realized I didn’t care if she became a Christian or not, she began crying. As distasteful as her conversion would be, I should have let her become a Christian and forced her to leave our home. I reluctantly agreed to accompany her.
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