At nine thirty my mother finally came out of the room, her face puffy. We sat on the kitchen table, chastened by the oddity of the moment. Then she retrieved a frying pan from the pantry and some eggs from the refrigerator. With two quick thwacks she cracked the shells on the edge of the marble counter and into the sizzle of the pan. She slid the eggs, sunny-side up, each saddled by a slice of white bread, onto two plates. Then she sat between us at the teak table, and told us why Aunt Amina had returned. Uncle Sohail was getting married again to a new wife, a woman whom he had met at work. According to our Muslim custom, he was supposed to ask Aunt Amina for her permission. He had done so, but she had refused to give it. Uncle Sohail had said he would marry his new fiancée anyway, and so she had left and come back to our house.
DECEMBER 1986
All cities by the sea follow the same gradations of wealth. Those neighborhoods farthest from the ocean are the most replete with yearning: they are the unrequited lovers who know the sea is there but cannot see it, hear it, or smell it in their inland banishment. It was in one of these recesses, settled by need rather than desire, that the trouble started. Traced on a map, and there were few accurate ones of Karachi then, it would be the point where the low arid plains rising from the sea are suddenly accosted by a pair of jagged hills, a final barrier against the desert that lies beyond and appropriately named the Dividing Hills.
In the early hours of the dawn on December 14, 1986, in a slum colony at the foot of those hills, hundreds of armed men slipped from Toyota trucks into the cold, dusty lanes, their faces and heads wrapped in black bandannas, machine guns slung over their shoulders. They crept into the modest houses, squat installations of one or two rooms teeming with sleeping families curled under quilts and covers. Mothers and children and fathers and grandfathers all woke to a storm of strangers and bullets.
The assassins weaved in and out of the houses of factory workers and vegetable sellers, day laborers and stone masons. They were bound in death by their common origins as refugees from India, the trailing wreckage of Partition. The gunmen went from Qasba Colony to Aligarh Colony, named after the university town too deep in India to be given to Pakistan. When they didn’t go into homes they went into shops, armed with Kalashnikovs, gifts of the Russians, smuggled across another border. They knew the unmarked paths well and had an ordered plan of mayhem, some invisible checklist that told them who was to be killed and who spared. Their mission lasted for hours, and when they were done it was past midday, a day’s work of bloodshed accomplished with diligence, leaving piles of bodies strewn on the streets and across doorways.
According to the newspapers the next day, fifty people had been killed in the massacre in Qasba Colony on that winter day. Written in the sedate, edgeless prose of newspapermen who had now endured nearly seven years of martial law, the story said only that “an unprecedented massacre of innocent civilians took place in Qasba Colony, Aligarh Colony and Orangi sector 1-D.” It noted that the marauders had been armed with “Kalashnikovs and 7mm rifles.”
The clues to who the men might be and why they had come were in the newspaper the day before. On December 13, 1986, the newspaper had reported the culmination of a large operation in the slum of Sohrab Goth on the other side of the Dividing Hills. Situated on the banks of the Lyari River, and at the edge of Karachi, Sohrab Goth was an island of Pashtuns crammed with Afghan refugees and Pashtun migrants. Its network of hovels and shanty shops were growing a reputation as a transit hub in the international drug trade in heroin.
The operation had been aimed at cleaning out Sohrab Goth of its heroin and its weapons. Despite days of searching and seizing, the newspaper article reported the operation had had little success. All the looking had produced only a single Kalashnikov, sixty-five kilos of heroin, and a tremendous, raging desire for vengeance in the hearts of the Pashtuns who lived there. It was revenge that came to Qasba Colony on December 14, 1986, revenge with its face swathed in black bandannas and revenge armed with the Kalashnikovs the police had been unable to find. The massacre in Qasba Colony, unprecedented in 1986, would be the first in multiepisodic saga of vengeance, of massacres that would pile one atop another until it would be hard to tell them apart.
The men who survived that first massacre of Qasba Colony, who picked up the bodies and bathed them and wrapped them in makeshift shrouds and buried them inside hurriedly dug graves, told many stories of that day. Now lifting a shirt and now rolling up a sleeve they would show the mark of where a bullet had entered, and where it had left. Not all the people had died of bullets, some insisted; some had been poisoned, told to drink glasses of water in which their tormentors had mixed some mysterious and lethal chemical. Many hundreds had died, many more than the fifty the newspapers would admit; the widows and mothers added them up as they recounted the men’s tales.
APRIL 1986
Another woman had also returned to her father’s house that year under very different circumstances. On April 10, 1986, Benazir Bhutto, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the prime minister executed in 1979, not long after I was born, had returned to Karachi after seven years of self-imposed exile. In a city and country that had become used to the ordered repression of martial law, of news broadcasts revolving around the daily doings of General Zia ul Haque, her return meant things were about to change.
The young Benazir wanted to return specifically on April 4, 1986, the seventh anniversary of her father’s execution by hanging in a dark cell of a Rawalpindi jail. Her original plans had been thwarted by the military government, who believed it would deflate the drama of her return. Undeterred, the clear-eyed and dewy-skinned Benazir arrived instead on April 10, greeted by hordes of her party workers. The jubilant procession that began at the airport passed down Sharea-Faisal, the main artery that ran through the city, all the way to 70 Clifton, her father’s stately mansion, which was to be her headquarters. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, the young Benazir arrived in Pakistan still unmarried, wearing a traditional shalwar kamiz, her striking features marking no hesitation and no discomfort at the throngs of men pushing and jostling all around her. She did not yet cover her head.
We learned of Benazir’s return from the Urdu broadcast of the BBC in London, a new source beyond the reaches of the military government censors. To catch the signal, the weather had to be clear and the radio outside. A westerly wind meant we received the Persian broadcast, and if we were too deep inside the concrete walls of our house, we gathered only static. We did manage to catch BBC Urdu that night, and gather from it the details of a procession that had been only blocks away from our house. Hundreds of thousands had turned out, the voice from London said, cheering not simply a welcome to their leader but also death to dictatorship, to General Zia. A few days later came an even bigger event, a huge rally held in Lahore at the Minar-e-Pakistan, the tower where the leaders of the Muslim League had signed a resolution committing to the creation of Pakistan. Now their revolutionary legacy was being claimed by a new leader, a woman.
The Pakistan that Benazir returned to had changed particularly in regard to its treatment of women, who had borne the weight of an Islamization campaign intended to legitimize the rule of a military dictator. In the five years that Benazir had been gone, hobnobbing with world leaders and sharpening the oratorical and political skills she would need, General Zia ul Haque had passed law after law designed to cut women out of public life and disable them in private. In the name of Shariat (the word used in official Pakistani records), one ordinance reduced them to half of men when testifying in court, another put them at risk of prosecution for adultery or fornication if they did not provide four witnesses when filing a complaint for rape.
But such inconveniences seemed far away from the world Benazir inhabited. Her first days back in Pakistan probably began and ended with her holding court for party advisors and workers at 70 Clifton, the loyalists eager to resurrect her dead father’s legacy in her, thus enabling their own return to power. When she wa
s not in Karachi, she went deep into Sindh to her father’s ancestral lands in Larkana, hundreds of thousands of acres of cotton and sugarcane and mango orchards that had been in the Bhutto family before Pakistan was a reality. Here she met with the poor, dark sharecroppers who worked the land and worshiped their landlords, and now their landlord’s daughter.
The military government of General Zia ul Haque, perhaps too secure in its longevity, perhaps secretly anxious about the crowds that young Benazir could command, watched and waited, interfering only now and then, denying a license for a rally, spiriting away a party worker. Perhaps they underestimated the power of the fragile-looking Benazir, laughed at the bravado she affected in her speeches, wrote off the turnout at her rallies to curiosity, the exotic appeal of watching a woman deliver a spirited speech, an entertaining diversion that would never translate into any real change, any actual threat to their stranglehold on the country. Against their calculations, whatever they may have been, were the chants of Benazir’s supporters. “Zia must go!” shouted the crowds at her rallies. “Zia must go,” responded Benazir, smiling and waving and chanting at the people she was certain she could lead.
JANUARY 1987
I had never known that a man could have two wives. I had never been to a second wedding or met a second wife. In the days after the revelation, the idea swirled in my head, expanding into a sensational epic of injustice. Every night, under the blue flowered quilt my grandmother had made just for me, I tried to imagine what a wedding would be like for a man who already had a wife. Frustrated by my limited experience, the mysterious “other” wife erupted dark and powerful and witchlike in my head. Bedecked in bridal finery and cunning, she cast a spell that sentenced Aunt Amina to a solitary chamber under a curse of silence. With his first wife gone, she tricked her new husband into believing that she was a better wife and that his old wife was dead, or disappeared.
At this point, my imagination stalled. Should the spell be lifted so that the first wife, the good one, could be restored to her prince? Or should I wish for a different prince altogether, one who would rescue the first wife and show the duped husband the consequences of his mistake? It was confusing and it did not seem right, and I would fall asleep vexed.
When I awoke the questions and the unfinished story were still there. Aunt Amina’s home, where I had been an occasional visitor, became in my head the setting for these tortures. It was built in the old style, with four or five rooms arranged around a central courtyard beckoning in sea breezes and banishing cooking smells. Over a year ago, Uncle Sohail had begun construction on a set of rooms that would sit atop the original four: a new apartment with a brand new kitchen and a bathroom with a shower, not the bucket and cup we used to pour water over our heads. The bottom floor, where Aunt Amina had moved as a new bride, would be rented out, he said, and they would be moving up to the new wing. As the builders marched in and brick was laid upon brick, a feckless Aunt Amina failed to suspect that the extra hearth was to destroy her own.
The man was a liar, and all of us his victims. The bottom floor was for a new wife, the unknown woman whose shadow had darkened our home and Aunt Amina’s life. I imagined Uncle Sohail trussed up to receive his new bride: Would he wear a suit or a sherwani? Would there be a henna ceremony, with women singing in circles, playing the dhol and tambourine, laughing and teasing the new bride? Would there be a reception, I wondered? Was a second marriage just like the first in mirth and merriment?
I tried to mold my visions into coherence, into a single story and hoped for an ending. I was thwarted by childhood and the awkwardness of knowing what I was not supposed to know, what I had gathered from whispered conversations behind closed doors. With great stores of confused compassion, I circled around Aunt Amina, trying out rehearsed jokes or hugging her effusively or pouring out long monologues about some escapade known to all in the fifth grade: I understood incompletely, but felt fully. The second marriage, I had learned one evening as my mother sat chatting with one of her sisters, had been championed by many of our friends and relatives, their betrayals gouging my grandparents’ wounded hearts.
One day a visiting older lady assessed my aunt’s dejection and rendered her verdict before us all: Aunt Amina owed her husband gratitude, our guest announced between sips of the rose drink we had served. The children of the new wife would brighten her life, Aunt Amina was told; she had no right to weep and make it out to be such a tragedy. Another afternoon, another neighbor said what may have been on the minds of most of our visitors that winter of 1986: “At least he is not leaving you,” she said with her good-byes. “At least you will still be his wife.”
These visiting oracles had only bit roles in Aunt Amina’s saga of torment. The chief villain’s role was played by Aziza Apa, Uncle Sohail’s older sister. This was the same tall, domineering woman who had arrived at my grandparents’ doorstep a decade ago, singing the praises of her youngest brother, begging my grandparents for Aunt Amina as his bride. She had sat on the fancy sofas in her silky red shalwar kamiz, the silver and gold boxes of sweets arranged in a towering pile before her. She had choreographed her conversation to allay every fear my grandparents nursed about marrying off their daughter. Their samosas, she said, were just like they had been in Bombay, not the overfilled Pakistani kind you got in Karachi bakeries. Every few sentences she lapsed into the Kokani dialect my grandparents spoke, nursing their nostalgia, kneading what had been a transient acquaintance in the lanes and alleys of the old neighborhood in Bombay into a full-fledged filial bond. By the end of that afternoon, as Aunt Amina and her sisters listened from the adjoining bedroom, Uncle Sohail, who was expected to be just the first of her would-be suitors, had become the only man her parents ever wanted as a husband for their eldest daughter.
But just as Aziza Apa had been the architect of the marriage, she had also constructed the cracks and crevices that would leave it flailing. In the teatime conversations of earlier years, when Aunt Amina had visited in the dead heat of the afternoon, a transformed Aziza Apa had been revealed. The jolly woman who brought gifts and lavished praise had vanished once the new bride had been installed in her brother’s home. The new Aunt Aziza expected complete submission from her youngest brother’s wife and daily devotion, which spanned from a morning phone call to ask after her health to a full meal cooked and sent to her home every Friday. On Sundays all the wives of her brothers were expected to pay homage to their matriarch, digest her evaluations of their lives, praise her children, and often even clean her house. No detail was too private: for years Aziza Apa had been inquiring every month, before all gathered, whether Aunt Amina was pregnant.
It was Aziza Apa who had passed the verdict on Uncle Sohail’s marriage, pulling all her clan on the side of her darling Sohail, whose wife had denied him not just the son he deserved but any progeny at all. “You are barren,” she had reminded Aunt Amina. “You should be thankful that he is a good enough man to still keep you at all.” Her words had echoed loud and deep; suddenly everyone in the community saw clearly that Uncle Sohail was the self-denying hero whose good-heartedness led him to keep a wife who could not fulfill her duty. Many had exacting broods of children, whose pressing needs grated on their lives; denouncing the barren woman elevated them, made their sacrifices of lost sleep and interrupted meals and mountains of soiled clothes a gift to be cherished.
In our house, on the sideboard of the formal dining room by the tray holding the car keys, invitations for weddings began to pile up as they did every winter. It was the season. There they lay, proof of the celebrations that continued unabated in the lives of others. Every day brought a few more: fat, festive envelopes promising feasts at hotels, or thin frugal ones threaded with gold lettering begging our respectable presence at smaller venues. Neither made it out of their resting places. Weddings—the days and weeks of rituals preceding them and the parties held after them—are the fairy-lit center of Karachi’s social life, events that mark for women points of respite from their otherwise secl
uded lives of cooking for the in-laws and yelling at children. They are where the prosperity of a cousin’s blooming business or the extra pounds on a sister-in-law can be witnessed, old scores settled and new gripes gobbled up between mouthfuls of grease and spice. That December many yearned for us to appear at one celebration or another so that, between compliments for the bride and congratulations for the groom, my mother or grandmother could be asked: “How is Amina . . . ? We heard her husband is marrying again and that she has returned to your house.” As they threw out the words, they could watch our faces, gauge in the glint of our eyes and the turn of our heads the extent of our embarrassment. With this measure, they could mark the boundary between their conformity and our scandal, the degree of our banishment, which defined, after all, their own belonging.
We did not go to any weddings that year. Instead we prayed: special prayers for hard times that went beyond the customary five apportioned to ordinary times. One Friday morning I came down to see my grandmother washing and wiping the silver tray that was kept in the cabinet with our best china. From the recesses of the same cabinet, she then removed sixteen silver cups, each with its rim pulled out into a point. They were oil lamps, precious cargo that had been wrapped in the family’s best clothes, packed in one of the trunks that had brought their Indian lives to Pakistan two decades earlier. They were used in a Sufi ritual carried out for generations by my grandfather and his family, followers of a saint who had lived and preached long ago in Baghdad.
After Asr prayers that day, the furniture in the formal dining room was pushed to the walls and the thick black and burgundy rug laid out on the floor. On top of this, a clean, starched white sheet reserved for just this ritual was laid out. On a low table by the wall in a space usually occupied by a vase there sat a tray of sixteen oil lamps, each with a red silken thread twisted into a peeping wick. These would be lit at dusk to represent the happiness and joy we prayed for.
The Upstairs Wife Page 2