It was only after all this, after the children were once more settled into the familiar cycle of waking and hurrying to school, and her husband given over to the setting up of meetings and purchases for establishing his new workplace, that Surrayya discovered what would become the harshest revelation she would face as a migrant. The hours between her husband’s departure for work and her children’s return from school were empty. Days that had once seemed too short, crammed as they were with conversations over window ledges and stair landings, lay fallow and featureless. When she heard the woman upstairs yell at her maid as she strung out the laundry, she wondered if she should visit, exchange a friendly cup of tea. When her brothers visited with their wives and children and two chairs were needed, she thought to tell her son to knock at the next-door neighbors and ask for spare ones to borrow. After the thought and before the act, she paused, and did nothing at all. She did not yet know the rules of living among strangers in Karachi, and she did not yet guess that she would be, now and forever, surrounded by them.
SEPTEMBER 6, 1961
Seven hundred miles northwest of Karachi, and just beyond the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the women of the Sulemankhel tribe prepared for their seasonal migration from the high steppes, where they spent the summer months, into the Gomal River valley, where they always spent the winter. Around the fire lit in the corner of a group of tents, shielded as always from the gaze of any wandering tribesmen, daughters, sisters, and wives prepared the morning bread. From a leather skein hung on the frame of the tent, goat milk was emptied into cups to be strained into yogurt and boiled into tea. Dates were laid out on a piece of paper to dry in the sun and then stored under rolled-up tents for the coming winter months. The bells in the folds of their clothes jangled as the women talked and worked. As nomads, the women wore everything they owned on their bodies, ready to move at any moment.
They had been waiting for the winter journey for a long time, and the new moon that marked the journey’s intended start had come and gone. The youngest among them had never known the signs of a missed migration, feeling for the first time the frigid chill of the mountain air against their cheeks. Seven or eight nights ago they had prepared to move as they always did, in the groups of five or six families, each with a male elder, gathering their herds of goats and sheep and rolling up the skins of their tents, their one or two plastic suitcases holding what was most precious: the family’s Quran, the silver bells that brides wore at their weddings, extra ammunition for the rifles the men slung across their shoulders. The mood had been festive then; the women humming songs they always sung as they packed, old rhymes that reached far into the recesses of their history, paeans to a fondness for leaving.
The mood had deflated with the appearance of an elder and his son, their foreheads creased against the sun of a mountain noon. The women receded into the tents and waited. The men gathered outside, their sentences rising and falling then rising again as they parsed the unexpected news.
A few days earlier the Pakistani Army had shut down the borders for the first time, at least insofar as they could remember, and now the Sulemankhel tribe could not migrate to the Gomal River valley that lay on the other side. There was some dispute with the Afghan government, the soldiers told the Sulemankhel men who had ridden out ahead of the tribe. These bearers of bad news stood on hilltops as familiar to the Sulemankhel as the gray sky suspended above. They carried guns, which they pointed to the Afghan side; they said to the tribesmen that the line between the two countries lay between the two mountains and it was their duty to guard it.
On September 6, 1961, the women waited for news they’d been waiting for every day since the border was closed. The elders had a radio, and they had heard from the little boys wandering between the men and the women that on this day the border was expected to be opened as the Afghans and Pakistanis had sorted out their differences. The women prayed as they kneaded the bread, waiting for the order to move. The older boys hung around at the edge of the camp, a sharp, jagged promontory that looked to the road beyond. At midday the men had appeared again, without glad tidings.
The border had not been reopened. Instead there were more soldiers, the Pakistanis in their khaki uniforms and their American guns cocked and ready, the blue-clad Afghans pointing their Soviet rifles across toward Pakistan. After the news came, the women sat in silence, only the eldest among them speaking. They had to decide what needed to be done to survive a winter in the mountains.
SEPTEMBER 1961
Bohri Bazaar had existed before Partition, but Partition had elevated it to something more. It was the kind of place that could be cultivated only in a city of refugees, who were at once haunted by memories and yet convinced out of necessity that they had arrived at the best of all possible destinations. Narrow stores with dimly lit openings gazed out into winding alleys full of shoppers. At the mouth of each sat men whose fortunes rested on filling the unspoken longings of wandering customers. In this sense, the shopkeepers of Bohri Bazaar were magicians, their art the ability to satisfy the desire for the artifacts of lives left behind—a copper vase for the memory of the flowers that grew profusely in some faraway village, a glass bangle in the hue of an old front door. By 1961 they had perfected their skills: Delhi was in the aluminum pans and Agra in the incense sticks; the villages of Uttar Pradesh lay hidden in the folds of fabric and Hyderabad sat in the spices. No matter what part of India had been left behind, it was contained within Bohri Bazaar and available for a few rupees.
Surrayya was their ideal customer, consuming not simply the wares but the contact, relishing the comfort of a polite exchange, which was still lacking in her new home. And so she came again and again, to buy one thing or to return another, and they began to call out to her with the respectful “Begum Sahiba” reserved for a married woman of means. If she stopped even for a second, merchants began to unfurl sari after sari or lay out elaborately crocheted tablecloths, pristine white cotton for my grandfather’s shirts, dazzling jewel-colored dupattas for Amina and her sisters. From yellowing muslin-wrapped bundles in the inner depths of their stores they produced leather sandals and wooden clogs that my father and grandfather could wear to the mosque every Friday. In the hemming and hawing, the haggling, the disinterest she feigned to shave off some rupees and annas from the price, her stern admonitions to stop a shopkeeper’s goading, Surrayya found something to fill the hours. She grew to love the rush of buying something and making it her own.
In the flush of this romance, she filled her home with piles of brown paper wrapped packages. A white enameled steel cupboard was delivered one morning; a shiny wood coffee table on another. The kitchen that had had only a few heavy copper pots and pans was now filled with stainless-steel lidded pots and storage bins and delicate plates of bone china. A new set of glasses appeared one day, and a set of wooden spoons for stirring pots of lentils on another. Before long, the family found itself eating not at the wooden pallet with stools that stood only a few inches from the ground but around a new dining table fuming with furniture polish that rubbed off under their fingertips until a clean sheet of vinyl was cut to size to cover it. In Pakistan everything was new, and nothing like it had ever been before.
AUGUST 1947
Not all the men who came to the new country relished the possibility of many wives. Pakistan’s first governor, General Mohammad Ali Jinnah, came fleeing the memory of one who had, for just a few moments, lit his solitary life with laughter.
Ruttie Jinnah, the lost love of Pakistan’s creator, was a child of Bombay. Daughter of one of the richest Parsi businessmen in the city, Sir Dinshaw Petit, she met Jinnah, already a middle-aged man, and fell in love with him. To marry him, she defied her family, who thought he was too old, too stern, and too Muslim. He too defied the expectations of many Muslims by not picking a Muslim girl from a Muslim family. For Jinnah, Ruttie left her dilettante freedoms, the whirl of parties and adulation and admirers. She also left the name that her parents had given her, transformin
g from Ruttie, the ravishing girl rebel of Bombay society, to Maryam, the Muslim wife at the side of the leader of the Muslims. He vowed to change his stern and ascetic life and to accommodate the warmth and laughter of his eighteen-year-old bride, who until then had been called “the flower of Bombay.”
They married at the Jama Masjid in Bombay in 1918. All the talk around them was about solidarity, of the need of Hindus and Muslims and Parsis and all those living under the yoke of British colonialism to unite under the vast and shady umbrella of a shared anticolonialism. The solidarity did not shelter them. Ruttie’s father refused to speak to his daughter after her marriage. In Jinnah’s camp, the secretly disgruntled spread rumors that the leader of the Muslims had not had a Muslim marriage at all, but a civil ceremony in a court where there was no Muslim kazi and no Quran.
It was not the censures of others that did them in, but perhaps the difficulty of making a life together in times too tumultuous for the ordinary rituals of intimacy. At first it was just as it should be. She moved in and changed the décor of his dour bachelor quarters. He tried to be home earlier and to indulge her little whims. But before long he was taken by the demands of leadership, by the drama of driving out the British colonialists, by concerns larger than the world of two that she wished to inhabit. The bloom on the new Maryam began to fade and with it the marriage began to wither. The birth of a child could not save it; Pakistan and Ruttie both seemed to want all of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and perhaps Mohammad Ali Jinnah believed that Ruttie would still be there after he had won Pakistan.
She was not. Her decline, borne of her loss of love, her betrayal at the hands of the man who had chosen the task of making a country over making a marriage was not only a metaphor. Like the flower unthinkingly plucked, loneliness drooped around Mrs. Jinnah. In private there may have been entreaties and arguments, pleas for help and promises to do better. In public there was only a parting. In September 1922, Ruttie Jinnah packed her bags and her baby and set out for London. She returned to India and to Bombay eventually, but it was the first of many endings to their relationship. By September 1927 the couple lived apart.
Love could not overcome. The death of her marriage became death itself for Ruttie Jinnah. Unable to wrest the only man she wanted from his political commitments, the girl who had all her life been feted and fretted over, coveted and coddled, whose wit and charm and beauty were all legendary, fell ill.
It is said that when the end was close, both men who had abandoned her returned to her bedside. Her father, who had refused to see her when she married Jinnah, forgave his daughter and supported her in her last days as an ailing recluse locked up at the Taj Hotel in Bombay. Her husband, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, wept at her bedside when he saw her life slipping away, when he realized it was too late to save her. In her last letter to him she wrote,
When one has been as near to the reality of Life (which after all is Death) as I have been dearest, one only remembers the beautiful and tender moments and all the rest becomes a half veiled mist of unrealities. Try and remember me beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon . . . . Darling I love you—I love you—and had I loved you just a little less I might have remained with you—only after one has created a very beautiful blossom one does not drag it through the mire. The higher you set your ideal the lower it falls. I have loved you my darling as it is given to few men to be loved. I only beseech you that the tragedy which commenced in love should also end with it. . . .
Ruttie Jinnah died on February 20, 1929. She was buried in one of Bombay’s Muslim cemeteries. It was here that Mohammad Ali Jinnah visited her in August 1947, in the days before he left for Karachi, the last days he would ever spend in Bombay. Here at the grave of the woman he had lost, for the sake of the country he had to create, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was said to have wept. One year later, he too would lie dying, far away in newborn Pakistan. In September 1948, almost twenty years after the death of Ruttie Jinnah, he too would be gone.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah had gained a country but lost his love. He was buried in the center of Karachi, and over his grave a pristine white mausoleum of marble was built. Its unblemished dome could be seen far and wide. Mohammad Ali Jinnah came to Pakistan to die, and in death, he belonged to Pakistan. The children of Pakistan learned a lot about him, about his education, his political acumen, his strategic prowess; but we never ever learned about his (non-Muslim) wife, about the woman he had loved.
SEPTEMBER 1965
Surrayya, Said, and their children found out about the war from the evening transmission of Radio Pakistan. All three sisters, still wearing their blue and white school uniforms, sat cross-legged on the floor. Each word General Ayub Khan said on the radio echoed three times: once from the neighbor’s radio upstairs, another time from the watchman’s radio outside, and finally from the radio sitting stolidly before them, its top protectively covered by a dust cloth embroidered with flowers. The echo made the general’s words, already clipped and terse, even more ominous; their commanding weight making the sisters’ already-frightened faces even more sober. It was hot, but they threw their arms around one another, drawing together against some invisible invasion.
Indian forces had attacked Pakistan early that morning, General Ayub told them, nearly making it into Lahore, the capital of Punjab. “The situation was dire, and the Pakistanis had to unite,” he admonished from the radio, as if the girls’ squabbles over sharing hairclips and shoes were directly responsible for the Indian advance. By the time he got to the end, exhorting the “forces of faith to rally and defeat the Indian Army,” they were reduced and diminished, it seemed, to half their bony size.
The words rattled inside the girls’ heads. Outside, the honking tramcars and carts had also paused. Even the busiest of businessmen and hawkers and bus conductors were huddling around sidewalk radios to confirm if the talk of war had been true, if the Indian Army was indeed poised to take back Pakistan, if their world truly stood at the brink of destruction. And then in an instant, the moment of silence was gone and the city erupted once again. The call to prayer, a minute late, rose up as always from the first, the second, and then the third mosque. The hum of traffic resumed, returning the vibration that filtered in from the street to its usual cadences. The children who lived a few floors above them rushed down the stairs shouting “It’s war!” with the same enthusiasm they called out for the ice seller, who sometimes also hawked sticks of ice cream.
News of the war had actually been pulsing through the rhythms of the girls’ day. That morning the headmistress of Amina’s school, a portly lady who wore her glasses on a silver chain and had at all times of the day a balled-up handkerchief in her cleavage, had appeared at the morning assembly with even more than her usual air of pedantic gravity. Placing her dangling glasses on her nose, she had surveyed the sea of white-scarved girls with the solemnity of one whose belief in the inevitability of ruin had been vindicated by disaster. “The country is in crisis, girls,” she told the scrubbed faces before her. “The future of the nation is in jeopardy.” For the remainder of the announcement, the glasses were removed. The girls heard only the first few words of “the school will be closed” announcement; the rest was lost in the din of the young being swept into an unexpected holiday.
At home, battle had been underway all day. The building on Somerset Street had four tenants. Those in the ground floor apartment were last in line for the water that flowed from the rooftop tank and into the taps. Until that day the arrangement had been unexamined, an acceptance borne of plenty. A night of war talk was enough to gut this neighborly tolerance. The trouble started at the top. On that airy floor lived a mother of six, who, tormented by the helplessness of inactivity before great crisis, decided that she must hoard water for her little ones. It was, she convinced herself, a requirement for survival in wartime.
She started early, gathering every receptacle she could find, filling pots and pans and plastic buckets and ceramic bowls and china teapots. It took a while fo
r the consequences of her plans to trickle down. At around ten o’clock, when my grandmother was getting ready to start a pot of rice, she opened the large faucet in her kitchen sink. It responded with a stony silence. She stood for a while before the dry tap, considering if this was an aberration, a delay, or some kind of air-blocked pipe.
By the time the girls returned from school at noon, the water war had settled into a begrudging truce. Mr. DeSouza, a man old enough to get the angry housewives to listen, even if he was unable to convince them that water would not suddenly stop at the beginning of war, had intervened when the women’s squabbling threatened to interrupt the one o’clock news broadcast. The women, each now convinced that storing water for their children was absolutely necessary, insisted on a system. Mr. DeSouza devised it and put it into place.
It was decided that when the tank was full again, one family at a time would be allowed to fill their buckets while the others waited. Because the bottom flat had had no water since the morning, it was first. When Amina walked in after being sent home from school, it was precisely when the tank on the roof had filled again and the taps flowed flush. Within seconds, the girls were drafted into the task of amassing water for war. The first step was to collect every container capable of holding it, buckets and glasses and pitchers and jugs and carafes and bottles. Each sister manned a faucet, and Surrayya stood before the kitchen sink. With her shouted orders the filling began.
By dusk, when the announcement of war was broadcast on Radio Pakistan by General Ayub Khan, buckets, pots, bowls, and trunks full of water were everywhere. They were lined up and down the hallway, the red bucket for washing clothes, the green tubs that had once held potatoes and onions, even the pink bucket that was a bathtub for the family dolls. The counters and shelves lining the other rooms held bowls of water big and small, bottles of all shapes and sizes, all full to the brim and standing ready for the time their last drops would be cherished after the dry days of war.
The Upstairs Wife Page 6