Huddling among their trunks and bags near the entrance to the port, the women peered at Pakistan. It was dusty and brown and lonely, and amid the crowd of people, they could see not one familiar face. No one, it seemed, was there to greet them.
The questions rattled about in Surrayya’s head as her children jostled around her. Had her brother not received the last telegram they had sent before boarding the ship? Should they have waited to hear his response before they had set off? Had she remembered to send the details of their arrival in a letter; could it have been misplaced? Was the lateness a bad sign, an omen for the future and of their fortunes in the new country? Should they not have come at all, she finally asked herself, numbed to realize that of all the possibilities, the one she had least considered was the prospect of being forsaken by her own.
It was a long hour before they could leave behind the fear of having been abandoned on arrival. The minutes filled with embarrassed replies to fellow passengers who came to ask “if they were all right” and blushing refusals to invitations to come over to the houses of almost strangers until “things were sorted out.” Smiles plastered and hearts aflutter, they stood stolid and staring and waiting for their welcome.
It came finally, spotted by Abdullah, who made out the outline of his uncle pushing through the crowd lined up at the far recesses of the Arrivals building, his bald brown pate rising tall from amid the crowd. Their exclamations were louder than they should have been, the shrieks of delight inflected with relief. The entire family clamored around the barely known uncle, still grasping the plastic bags full of gifts and handmade presents that had been thrust into their hands by the last of the friends and relatives who had seen them off in Bombay. Karachi—their chosen city and new home—spread out before them.
MAY 1961
They had expected to fall in love with Karachi, and so they did. In later years, the intimacy of long association would mean that they would never be able to tell whether they loved with a pure passion, unaffected and unforced by the occasion of migration, or because that was the plan and expectation. Whichever it was, in those early days it did not matter. After a few nights spent in the cavernous and silent suburban bungalow of Surrayya’s older brother, who had so unthinkingly played with their delicate emotions in the first hours of their arrival, the family, with their trunks and hopes and fervid new love for a barely known city, found themselves in their first home in Karachi.
They were urban people, and so they chose an apartment deep in the heart of the city. Like much of middle-class India, their adulation of all things British had not been tarnished by the historical fact of Independence. Fourteen years after Partition, obtaining an apartment in a building formerly occupied by the British was still considered good fortune. Having been in the custody of only a handful of inhabitants between the departure of the British and their own arrival in Karachi, my grandparents accepted these dwellings as their personal portion of the spoils of empire.
The Olympic Building on Somerset Street was, like so much else the British had left behind, a vestige of a colonial past that served as a status symbol for the prosperous in the postcolonial present. The apartment itself consisted of four large and airy rooms, with a kitchen and a bathroom at the end of a long hallway. In the decade between the British departure and my grandparents’ arrival, the property had been refitted to the standard of middle-class Muslim modesty. The front door, serving the British as entryway for the entire family, had become the men’s entrance. The back entrance that had once been relegated to household help became the doorway through which the women of the house could enter, leave, or welcome guests without being seen by everyone on the busy street just outside their front door.
This was not the only aspect of the house that pleased Said and Surrayya. Beyond the obvious delights of the sheer number of rooms, which doubled the square footage of their dwelling in Bombay, the high ceilings of their new abode sported an electric ceiling fan. Four rooms independently fanned from above was the very definition of decadently cooled luxury. Their first night in the house, and then the second and then the third, each one of the children and their parents fell asleep to the wondrous motion of the blades in the air and a breeze created at will, just for them, by the mere touch of a button.
Their new abode sat on Somerset Road, which in turn lay in the downtown Saddar neighborhood, the pulsing heart of young Karachi. Like the building in which they now lived, and the street on which it stood, Saddar had been an idea coined by the British, and for the hundred or so years they remained there, it existed to serve them. Then called Saddar Bazaar, its grid was laid out by town planners imported from Britain. Shops and cafés lined busy thoroughfares punctuated by rows of quiet streets, forming neat rectangles on carefully drawn maps. Saddar Bazaar made good, orderly sense to colonists set to tame all that was circular about India and its mess of unmarked lanes and alleys. At the center of Saddar’s commercial district, laid out in clean lines and in square blocks, stood fancy shops selling goods from Britain to harried memsahibs trying to replicate the joys of home while their husbands civilized the natives of the subcontinent. Beyond the commercial area were quieter streets, some with parks and gardens for recreation, others reserved for the commodious bungalows housing the subcontinent’s white sahibs.
With the departure of the British, Saddar had been claimed by the best of Pakistan. The country’s first government offices had been located there, and the founder himself, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had lived in the neighborhood. The shops and cafés and bookstores and libraries had thrived and still glittered at night. Saddar was still where everyone wanted to be and everyone wanted to go. It was the playground of the wealthy in Pakistan’s largest city; it pulsed with life, with political debate and poetry competitions. It had hustle and bustle, sophistication and civility.
Beyond Saddar was another Karachi. This Karachi had grown furtively from the seed of long-ago fishing villages alongside its younger, heftier twin. On the same tramline that ran all the way from Keamari Port (where their ship had docked) to Saddar was the red line, which had, in colonial times, divided the European quarter of the city from the native quarter. Two dried-up springs marking two forgotten gates to two long-destroyed forts, marked the border between the two quarters, Kharadar and Meethadar.
There were no straight lines in this other quarter, no grids or demarcations indicating where one could sell and where one could live. Instead, curvaceous porches rose suddenly from squat hovels and women sold garlands of roses and chrysanthemums and jasmine from the barred windows of their bedrooms. The clanging bells of Hindu temples rang through the air and the stench of drying fish from the port mixed with the incense lit at the shrine of a Sufi saint.
It made sense that they had chosen to live in Saddar and not where the natives had lived, for the people of Kharadar and Meethadar would not have been able to understand the logic of the migrants. Those who packed up and left India baffled them; they viewed new borders and new countries with the skepticism of those who have lived through many such constructions. Likewise, my newly arrived grandparents could not possibly relate to the natives, to the city’s history before the British; for it was the British, after all, who brought them together in this strange place that was now home.
JULY 15, 1961
The trouble had begun in the 1950s, when Mohammad Ali Bogra, the prime minister of Pakistan, fell in love with his secretary. No one begrudged the boss, balding and middle aged, his dalliance. He was, after all, a powerful man, adept at making the right impression. When he spoke, it was with just enough British vowels pinned to his Bengali consonants to announce his class, and with just enough stately reserve to proclaim his pedigree. When he put on his neatly tailored suits he added a carefully chosen tiepin or a curious boutonniere: the hint of nonconformity that would lend him an air of (utterly unthreatening) eccentricity.
It could have been predicted—even expected—that such a master of aesthetic arithmetic would wish to sample the best of w
hat was available beyond amenities like cigars and wine. The secretary he romanced was the young Aliya Saadi, selected by the discerning Mr. Bogra while he served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States before he became prime minister.
Despite his savvy with suits, accent, and politics, in the matters of the heart Mohammad Ali Bogra made a miscalculation. In adding up the delights his new companion could offer, and in glibly remembering that he, as a Muslim and as prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, was allowed four such companions, he left out an essential digit. Absent in his calculations were the measures of fury the woman he had already wed would unleash on him. This woman, Mr. Bogra’s first wife, initiated his undoing by elevating his second wife to the centerpiece of her new campaign for women’s rights in Pakistan.
Hamida Bogra was a formidable woman who, until being spurned, had spent her time making her own calculations of the most privileged sort and had given birth to two healthy sons. She could pass days selecting just the right hue of pink or orange to be worn to the Governor General’s Ball held every spring or deciding on the theme for the annual gala of the Ladies Welfare Association. The leather-bound calendar she carried in an ever-changing round of shiny purses was dotted with meetings and fund-raisers and raffles and teas, all for the benefit of rural villagers, hapless refugees, and poor, widowed women. On any given day she rushed from the opening of a health center in the midst of hovels to a prize-awarding ceremony at a school built for the daughters of the poor, to a fund-raiser at the mayor’s mansion. It was a busy life, but the one expected of the first lady of a new country who took her responsibilities as the exemplary Pakistani woman very seriously.
Arriving in this milieu of beneficence, news of her husband’s second marriage was a terrible blow. It floored her, leaving scores of school openings and clinic commemorations without a guest of honor, photo opportunities, or a flower bouquet recipient. When the details of her husband’s philandering and her own demotion emerged, they gouged even more flesh from the deep wound of her public betrayal. That the woman was white, like the imported white wives of Mughal kings past, lent the affair an ever more hoary form of subservience. If Bogra was any example, the other new Muslim rulers of Pakistan, for all their pretensions of sophistication and urbanity, their bowties and boutonnieres, were now exposed as no different from the harem-hoarding rajahs of empires past.
After the pain came the anger that sparked the campaign for women’s rights and set in motion the legislation that would redefine the terms of marriage for women all over Pakistan. Mrs. Bogra declared war against Mr. Bogra and all Pakistani men, who now, new arrivals in a Muslim country, believed that they had suddenly been given a license to marry, in accordance with Quranic injunction, one or two or three or even four women.
Fueled by her fury, the spurned Mrs. Bogra became the martial Mrs. Bogra. As the most famous wife in Pakistan, she gathered around her the wives and daughters and sisters of ministers and ambassadors and army generals and industrialists. They met in drawing rooms of distinction, and over tea in delicate cups of bone china, served by the most silent of servants, they developed their battle plans. In the tragedy of Mrs. Bogra their own vulnerabilities were suddenly exposed, their status as grande dames presiding over the drawing rooms of the country had been put in jeopardy by the alarming prospect of their men picking new wives from among the secretaries and shopgirls and air hostesses of the working world. If India threatened their borders, the women agreed, polygamy threatened their marriages. An Islamic Republic could not be allowed to be a Republic of men, men who could secretly wed again and again and yet again.
Despite the pain of her public abandonment, Mrs. Bogra was astute in her selection of allies, a skill that proved crucial to her eventual success. As her second-in-command she chose a woman as indomitable as herself and just as desirous to see the men of Pakistan put in their place. Begum Raana Liaquat Ali Khan was the wife of a slain prime minister, shot brutally at a public rally two years into Pakistan’s existence. As a famous widow known for her floor-sweeping skirts, she already commanded the helm of the All Pakistan Women’s Association. Flush with idealism and cash and without a husband to thwart her agenda, Raana Liaquat Ali Khan became Mrs. Bogra’s most stalwart supporter, and the All Pakistan Women’s Association made advocating a ban on polygamy its fervent cause. Her second choice was just as momentous: Nasim Aurangzeb, the daughter of Pakistan’s joint chief of army staff, the gruff and stern General Ayub Khan. If Raana Liaquat Ali Khan owed her power to a husband now gone, Nasim owed hers to a father who was just emerging as Pakistan’s newest strongman.
The women started with the obvious: a boycott of all state functions at which the new, white first lady was invited. At the dinner parties to welcome foreign diplomats, the opening of a national university, the inauguration of a new wing of the Pakistan Secretariat, the presence of the interloping new Mrs. Bogra would mean the absence of all the other wives and daughters and mothers. They were the hostesses of Pakistan’s elite gatherings, and they correctly calculated that without them the men would be left without the oil to grease their rusty conversations and the twittering laughter for their bumbled jokes. They would be forced, the ladies reasoned, to acknowledge Mr. Bogra’s wrongdoing, and by extension the evils of polygamy. The social boycott would be the first step in their efforts to ban polygamy.
When Prime Minister Bogra’s government fell in 1959, the women in the drawing rooms did not shed any tears for lost Pakistani democracy. The fall of a polygamist, even if it came at the expense of a downed democracy, was, all agreed, paramount. Indeed, thanks to their efforts the issue of polygamy was now being investigated by a specially appointed committee. One by one Mrs. Bogra and her allies worked on its members, cajoling them with cakes and conversation in their tastefully appointed drawing rooms. A first wife should not find out about her husband’s marriage through gossip, they said, nodding seriously as they told the sordid tale of just how suddenly their dear friend had learned of her own husband’s betrayal. The law must respect the rights of wives, their power to say no to a husband wanting another.
Their audience was not entirely convinced. The permission for polygamy was, after all, provided in the Quran they told the women. A complete ban would not really be possible; it would anger too many Muslim men who had sacrificed so much to be a part of the Muslim state. In response the women argued that the country belonged not simply to Muslim men but also to Muslim women. Muslim women, they asserted, required security in their marriages, safety against interlopers, and a future that guaranteed their children freedom from abandonment by wandering fathers secretly in search of ever-younger wives. And so the conversations went back and forth and around in circles for one whole year and then two.
In 1961, two years after the ex-prime minister had taken his second wife, General Ayub Khan, the father of Nasim Ayub Khan, became governor general of Pakistan. It was through the military man’s election that the campaigning women were finally delivered a victory. The report of the Rashid Commission, whose perspectives the women had tried so hard to influence, was wrought into legislation under the title of the Muslim Family Law Ordinance, Pakistan’s first law on the procedures of marriage and divorce. Polygamy could not be forbidden—even the commission had not dared recommend that—but a marriage to a second woman would require permission from the first; and divorce, still unilaterally the prerogative of Pakistani men, had to be registered with the government. The Muslim Family Law Ordinance of 1961 was delivered to General Ayub Khan, the president of Pakistan, by a procession of chanting, victorious women. At the head of the crowd of women was the president’s daughter Nasim, who handed over the proposed ordinance to her father, who then promptly signed it into law.
AUGUST 1961
Inside the apartment on Somerset Street, as their parents unpacked, the children hid behind trunks and peered behind the shutters searching for more surprises. As they jumped and slid and yelped, adorning themselves with scrapes and bruises,
the grown-ups dusted and arranged the possessions of their old life in their new one. Here is where they discovered one of the first surprises of their reborn existence: the objects of their past didn’t work in their present. Tables were too small and tablecloths did not fit; jars that sat just right on old shelves gaped discontentedly from their new perches; pictures looked too small on walls and windows too big against the apologetic daintiness of old curtains.
Unsettled, they looked to food to evoke the soothing familiarity of home. Surrayya, who was now mistress of a four-burner stove and a kitchen in an entirely separate room, set off for the venerable market she had heard about back in Bombay with a red plastic basket in hand and this objective in mind.
Teeming with fruit sellers and bird trappers and butchers whose storefronts were strung with bloody carcasses, the Empress Market drew her in with the same magnetic power it once had over the disbelieving wives of the officers of the East India Company. Surrayya’s homesick spirits rose as her plastic basket grew heavier. From rugged, bearded Pashtuns she bought paper cones filled with pine nuts and dried apricots. From dark-skinned Baloch Sidis she bought the freshest red chilies to be ground into the fieriest of fish curries. In plastic bags knotted at the top she carted back creamy pounds of yogurt and butter. There was not only plenty to buy, it was also so inexpensive that she calculated she could buy all she could possibly want and spend only half the rupees she would have in Bombay.
Their first meal of fish and rice was a triumph, the flavors of Bombay replicated with a most satisfactory exactness. The smell of saffron rose from the kitchen, flowed through the home, and filled the pores of the floors and the walls they were trying so hard to colonize into familiarity. The clang of pots and pans did a bit more, adding a comforting cacophony to the morning, afternoon, and evening hours. The first few days were busy with such discoveries, and what time was left in each day was filled with the necessary rites of their new Pakistani citizenship: filling out forms to enroll the children in schools, obtaining identity cards, and registering their new and permanent address.
The Upstairs Wife Page 5