The Upstairs Wife

by Rafia Zakaria

  To the brave women of Pakistan

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  The Return

  CHAPTER 2

  Birth of a Nation

  CHAPTER 3

  The Scent of Other Cities

  CHAPTER 4

  A Suburban Wedding

  CHAPTER 5

  Half a Wife

  CHAPTER 6

  The Woman in Charge

  CHAPTER 7

  The Graveyards of Karachi

  CHAPTER 8

  Loving and Leaving

  CHAPTER 9

  A Return to the Original

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  DECEMBER 27, 2007

  It was a mild winter evening whose spring-like bloom had inspired many to leave their barred windows ajar. Through the metal screen, the sounds of children playing, of distant hawkers and car horns and the smells of exhaust fumes and the neighbor’s cooking all wafted in. My mother, grandmother, and I kept an uncomfortable vigil in our living room by the telephone. We had spent the afternoon in prayer, because my aunt’s husband, Uncle Sohail, had been rushed to the hospital earlier that day after suffering a sudden stroke. Engrossed thus, we had not thought to turn on the television or check the news.

  Benazir Bhutto, herself a daughter of Karachi and a fixture on the city’s political scene, was the freest woman we knew. A few days earlier she had returned to Pakistan after a six-year exile. All week Pakistan’s news channels had been covering news of a rally she was to address that evening in Rawalpindi. It must have been just a little after 6 p.m. when the telephone rang through the stillness of the sitting room. It is almost dusk, I remember thinking; soon we will hear the call to prayer.

  And then, as I picked up the receiver to the old, gray phone, the world slowed. My father was on the other end of the line, calling from the hospital. My mother and grandmother stared at me. “Do you know what has happened?” he asked, his voice rising above the voices of a crowd in the background. “No,” I replied, my own voice faltering under the gaze of the two women who waited with me. “Is he okay?” I asked into the wail of ambulance sirens on the other end. “Do you know she has died?” my father answered with a question. “Is he okay?” I asked again. It took him a minute to sort through the collision of questions. My uncle had survived his emergency surgery, he told me. And then, as if it were more important, he added, “Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in Rawalpindi.”

  A single moment birthed twin confusions. Uncle Sohail had lived and Benazir Bhutto had died. The complexities of each defied singular emotion; I could not celebrate the continuation of my uncle’s life or mourn the cessation of Benazir’s. In the moments after I hung up the phone, we said nothing. We had been praying for him to live, for his life to be spared, but were these prayers different from the ones we said decades ago when my grandmother and aunt coined elusive bargains with God to grant my aunt children? Did our sympathy for his present catastrophe erase the memories of his past culpabilities? My mother, grandmother, and I laid out our rugs to say the dusk prayer, as we had done thousands of times before. In the familiar rhythms of our rising and falling prayers, of mouthing verses that had fallen from our lips so many times before, we buried these questions.

  Around us the city devolved into riots. It was rush hour when the news broke and angry mobs blocked all the exits of the main highways. Thousands of vehicles caught in traffic were set on fire or simply demolished with crowbars and sticks. My cousins and friends who were caught in the frenzy left their cars and walked to nearby houses for shelter. My father was stranded in the hospital with my aunt while my uncle remained in recovery. Karachi burned for days as news channels played the tape of Benazir’s assassination over and over again, a red circle marking her attacker and her last flailing moments. For one odd, brief, and singular moment, the catastrophes of my family and my country had come together, showing me how they were woven together, knotted and inextricable, inside and outside, male and female, no longer separate.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Return

  DECEMBER 1986

  It is the most ordinary of days that enclose tragedy within their sealed lips: after years of neat, regular morsels, dutifully swallowed, that singular, bitter bite. And so that December morning had been forgettable until Aunt Amina appeared unexpectedly at our breakfast table, her tear-sodden face hung like an incongruous portrait between the toast and the tea.

  The day had begun, as always, with crows and cars and clattering cooking pans from the neighbor’s kitchen sounding together in the morning chorus. There had been the same hurried washing of face and hands, eyes screwed against the sting of soap; the same squabbles with my brother over this or that; the frantic search for the homework book.

  It must have been around seven thirty when we descended into the kitchen, the humming, brimming heart of our house, and there we found the silence. My aunt Amina—puller of cheeks, maker of treats—had been thrust into the middle of our morning like a cold, sharp jab. She sat at the far end of the teak table, her wilted head drooping into a teacup. It was the pale yellow one, ornate and delicate, and a present from my father to my mother, cupped in his hands all the way back to Karachi from a business trip to Thailand. I had never seen anyone else drink from it.

  Aunt Amina had been absent from the breakfast table of her father’s home, which was also her brother Abdullah’s and our father’s home for nearly eleven years. A dangler on the edges of adult conversations, I knew, even at ten years old, that married women did not come back to spend the night at their parents’ home. A bride’s departure from her father’s house was the beating heart of every marriage ceremony: the severing of one life and the start of another was commemorated in every wedding song I had ever sung and every nuptial ritual I had ever seen. At the rukhsati (leave taking), the bride, laden with gold and garlands, said her final good-bye to each one of her family members. It was a weeping finale to weeks of wedding celebrations, drawing into its cathartic fold all the married women in attendance. At every wedding, they cried with the bride and for the bride and for themselves and the homes and lives they had left behind.

  I had seen Aunt Amina’s wedding only in pictures, its details shut within the photo album that my grandmother Surrayya kept in the deep shelves of her metal wardrobe. In it sat Aunt Amina and her husband, Uncle Sohail, as bride and bridegroom, arranged next to relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins, all in their wedding finery. The bride had worn a gold and red sari, its fabric so stiff that it angled at every fold, making a tent-like point in the middle of her head. The elderly women who supervised the dressing of brides in those days had taken away the glasses she always wore. In the few pictures in which she did look up at the camera, Aunt Amina looked as she probably felt: a bit blind.

  On our way to school that morning, stuck in the back of the little brown hatchback in which my mother ferried us, I squirmed with questions. Our daily journey was a long one, threading from the suburban streets of our neighborhood in the southeast of the city to the deeper, denser heart of Karachi’s smog-smeared downtown. Well-tended villas standing guard over manicured lawns slowly gave way to grimy apartment buildings teetering over shuttered shops.

  The point of demarcation between the familiar Karachi, of home and friends and nearly clean streets, and the darker, grumpier heart of the city was the mazar of the Quaid-e-Azam, Pakistan’s founder, who died on September 11, 1948, when the country was just a year old. The mausoleum’s white dome rose up pristine and commanding from its park of scrubby trees and bushes just as we turned from Shaheed-e-Millat Road onto M. A. Jinnah Road, named after the founder himself. I had been inside just once, for a school trip in
the second grade. Under the cavernous atrium of the dome, we stood on the side of the pink marble tomb, thirty girls in a dutiful line. Solemn and serious, I had imagined the man whose staring face was on the rupee lying just under the carved stone: a stern, male Snow White.

  After the Mazar, the traffic broke from the hesitant outings of suburban housewives gathering up tomatoes and potatoes and the right cuts of meat to the frenzy of men in pursuit, fueled by the fever of an urban hunt that began every dawn. There were buses with working men hanging from their sides, chauffeurs toting executives, and rickshaws and donkey carts ferrying all the rest. Those who lived here in the old parts of the city lived in tenements, crawling out every morning into the crowded streets, cramped from nights spent squeezed in small, airless rooms. Beyond the Mazar lay the Karachi of crude realities; of heroin addicts who sat crouched under blankets on the medians, of newly arrived farmers who tried to sell live chickens to harried clerks on their way to work, of street urchins that pressed their dirty, snot-crusted faces against car windows, looking into other lives.

  As we entered this Karachi the easy, smiling contours of my mother’s face pulled tight and then even tighter. She had fought for this, learning to drive just so she could take us to school, to the best schools, insisting that it could be done and that she could do it. For this she had sat awkwardly between my father and my grandfather, arguing her case against their objections. For this she had tolerated our crying chorus, every Monday and Wednesday, when the instructor from the driving school showed up at the door at 9:00 a.m. sharp. For this, she had tolerated the weeks and months of my grandfather Said, insisting that he, who could not himself drive, must nevertheless accompany her on every trip, because a woman, even one with a driver’s license, could not be trusted to drive alone. Her battle to be permitted to drive had not been an easy one.

  Five years had passed and now she was allowed to drive alone and without my father or grandfather correcting the timing of her turns, the certainty of her navigation. But despite her victory, the descent into this other Karachi, the sweaty, angry, male Karachi, was still my mother’s daily test.

  Because children never pick the right moment to burst in, I blurted out a question that appeared on the periphery of my mind: “Is Uncle Sohail dead?” My twin brother, Zaid, turned around to glare. I wanted an answer, and so I asked again: “Is Uncle Sohail dead?”

  My mother did not respond when the light turned green, or at the next light, or as we descended even deeper into the city, onto roads flagged by beggars and hawkers and aimless men hanging around corners. She was quiet as we drove past the row of cinemas, the Capri, the Nishat, the Regal, the Star, past the bloody face of Sylvester Stallone, the jutting hips of a Punjabi actress stilled in midgyration. We passed the electronics market with its unlit neon signs (Hitachi, Sanyo, Toshiba) exposing their wiry entrails.

  It was only as our car pulled up before my brother’s school that my mother spoke. “No, Uncle Sohail is not dead,” she said in the tiny moment before the gates would shut and leave my brother punished for being tardy. “He is not dead, but it would have been better if he were.”

  These words, my mild-mannered mother’s wishes for a man’s death, tumbled out behind us, stumbling into our lunch boxes and schoolbooks. I carried them into my classroom, where I took in a lesson on the Indus River valley, where I completed a test on fractions. I said them to myself in recess as I tried to swap my jam sandwich for a carton of fruit juice: “He is not dead, but it would have been better if he were.”

  Aunt Amina was there when we returned home from school that day and the one after. She stayed as one December day flowed into another and everyone dragged out their shawls and sweaters to bundle up against the barest bit of cold. She was there and not there, a diminished Aunt Amina, an approximation of the witty woman whose jokes and inflected barbs spiked up casual afternoon chats and whose cuddles had infused me with warmth for as long as I could remember. The woman I saw had been wrung out like the washing that hung outside the kitchen window: twisted, drained, and turned to squeeze out every drop of spirit.

  Morning and night, she lay curled up on the bed in my grandmother’s room, under a blue woolen shawl, toying fringe and fabric and grief between thumb and forefinger. When the calls to prayer unfurled from the minarets, she rose from the bed, following my grandmother in her ablutions as the sounds from the first, the second, and then the third neighborhood mosque rippled through the morning, the afternoon, the tepid dusk, and finally the night. Mother and daughter washed their faces and arms to their elbows, swished the water around their mouths, and rinsed their feet and ankles to purify themselves for prayer. Before the window that faced the mango tree in the backyard, they laid down their prayer mats. Side by side they repeated the rituals that sectioned our daily lives into five portions. And then to bed Aunt Amina returned.

  Sometimes she appeared at dinner, sitting on the extra chair brought into the kitchen from the larger table in the formal dining room. She ate little, small morsels of chapati doused in yogurt or rice absently tucked in her mouth, and mechanically swallowed. The conversation was careful, as if the grown-ups had culled it of every controversy before they appeared at the table to act out their parts. The menu almost always included fish, and so my grandfather, who always began the banter, would say something about the fish, its freshness or softness or saltiness, its date of purchase, its breed or its standing before fish of other kinds. If there was no fish, its absence provided a topic in itself. The rest of the cast would then perform their bit roles and walk-ons, adding opinions about the fish, agreements or disagreements or minor digressions. My mother usually contributed some comparisons—how our fish rated next to what her sisters might have served that week at their dinner tables. My father would assist with a comment or two, my grandmother would ask a question about when and how much more fish should be purchased to insure we had plenty. We, the children, were not expected to speak, and so we listened and noted that Aunt Amina never said anything.

  Between meals floated the uncertainty that had colonized our house. The smells in the kitchen, the arrangement of bedrooms, the allotment of affections had all been shaken up by the return of a woman who had been honorably given away in marriage to another family. There was no precedent for it, and so my grandfather, newly retired, did the only thing he knew to do, which was to enlist the advice of others—as many others as he could think of. As the days passed, elders from the tiny transplanted community of Bombay Kokanis, who had migrated to Karachi in the decades after Partition, filtered in and out of our house. The men were led through the black gate, past the tall palms that lined the drive, and through the carved front door. Inside they were seated in the formal living room, with its tall windows opening to the garden beyond. Here, resting on cushions verdant with blooming roses and peonies embroidered by Aunt Amina in the days before her marriage, they debated what was right and what must be done, who had erred and who was wronged, who must submit and on what terms. It was a thorny question: What to do about a woman who had left her husband and returned to her father?

  One afternoon, as I hung around outside the living room windows, ditched by my brother, who had gone off to play cricket in the streets, where I was not allowed, I saw yet another man being led into the formal dining room. A tall column of white and gray, his bearded form was followed by the bowed, respectful heads of my father and grandfather. I remembered him—I remembered his beard, the sharp white triangle, severe and precise, it formed against the brown skin of his face.

  The occasion had been Aunt Amina’s nikah, the signing of the marriage contract that happens just before the wedding reception. It is a solemn legality left to the men, an exchange between the father of the bride, giving her away, and the groom to whose family she would soon belong. But my memory of the man came from a picture in the yellow photo album: the same column-like body, folded between my grandfather and the groom, the same triangular beard, white even then, nearly brushing the paper that
he held up to be signed by father and husband. Aunt Amina was not in the picture: like all brides she had not been present at her nikah. I imagined her busy with the rituals of becoming a bride, with henna on her palms and her bridal finery laid out at her feet, her hair getting tamed and teased for the reception that evening, anxious and excited and never knowing the exact moment when the marriage contract was signed and sealed and she had become a wife.

  Now the men sat surrounded by a terse silence. I watched them unnoticed from a side window. When they spoke, they passed between them a long piece of paper, tracing their fingers over one sentence and then another. Again and again they did this: my father, then my grandfather, looking at the paper, reading from the paper, and then looking up at the man with the triangular beard. Their voices were soft and low against serious faces. I could not hear what they said. I did not know, then, that the piece of paper was Aunt Amina’s marriage contract. My father and grandfather were asking the man, the imam who had married them, if she could ask Uncle Sohail for a divorce. Aunt Amina was not in the room that day either.

  If until then the adults had conspired successfully to keep up some façade of regularity, that resolve crumbled the afternoon of the imam’s visit. There was no dinner that day as the grown-ups retreated to my grandparents’ bedroom and did what was almost never done in our house: they shut the door. Except for Zaid and me the rest of the house was empty. Dusk settled in, dimming the corners, chilling the empty kitchen, and hanging heavy over its pots and pans.

  Zaid and I waited, expecting the receding light, the calls to prayer, the dinner hour to draw them from the room into the world where we had been left behind. We sat at the head of the marble stairs at the center of the house, our knees touching, debating whether we should turn on the lights, go to the kitchen, or knock on the door. We floated our guesses as to what was happening. She was getting divorced, I said. She was dying, he said. We had never really liked Uncle Sohail, we agreed, and now we hated him.