The tenants followed the arrangement for six days, hoarding water one by one for each day of war, emptying buckets and bowls to wash in the hours when the filling schedules of other apartments made their taps run dry. The schedule they had put in place so skewed the system that there was no way to tell whether the water supply was ever really interrupted—whether after the first announcement of war, after news of air raids, or during rumors of a ceasefire. They stuck to their plan, convinced of its necessity.
On September 12, 1965, another radio broadcast announced that the war was over. A whole twenty-four hours later, on September 13, the lady on the top floor decided that the news of peace was true. She drained the unused buckets and bottles of water she had stored overnight into the sink and decided not to refill them, and the building was restored to the plenty of peacetime.
JULY 8, 1967
Mohammad Ali Jinnah had come to Karachi in 1947 with a woman who would be acceptable to the new nation. His sister, Fatima Jinnah, had at that point kept house for her brother for years; after he was gone, she would become the first to contest elections for the country’s highest office. A trained dentist and an educated woman at a time when few Indian Muslim women were, Fatima Jinnah had reveled in the role of “Mother of the Republic,” never balking at the contradiction that she had not ever married or borne any children of her own. Perhaps it had not mattered as much then, or perhaps people accepted that her child was really Pakistan, the country her brother had wrought from the British. Her demure presence at the elbow of her brother was acceptable to all, even in the contentious moments that preceded Pakistan’s birth: her clothes were modest enough to please the mullahs yet sophisticated enough to reassure those who swore by secularism. It was Fatima Jinnah, in pastel tunics and flared floor-length skirts, who presided over state functions at which her brother and the new country required a hostess. It was Fatima Jinnah who tended to the dying Jinnah when he took to his bed one year after Pakistan was born. It was her face, wan and worn, that flashed on news clips across the world at the founder’s death.
Two decades later, in 1967, Fatima Jinnah had been pushed to the margins of the city she had presided over in its first days as Pakistan’s capital. No longer the sister of the governor general, she lived all alone at the edge of Karachi in a red stone palace near the sea. From here she would make her last heroic effort, contesting elections against the military general Ayub Khan. This woman who was running for office against men could not, however, command the support of other powerful women. When Hamida Bogra’s women had begun their campaign against polygamous husbands, they had deliberately chosen to ignore Fatima Jinnah. The virginal spinster sister of the dead founder was of no use to them. How could she, never having been married, understand the fury of a betrayed wife? That sentiment was one reason for their exclusion; the robust other reasons were political. Fatima Jinnah’s rival for the position of governor general of Pakistan was General Ayub Khan, the military man who was the father of Mrs. Bogra’s friend Nasim Aurangzeb, one of the chief campaigners against polygamy in the new Pakistan.
So the backs of the women who championed women’s rights remained turned to the woman who was Pakistan’s first female candidate for governor general. They remained averted after she lost to the general and after he signed into law legislation that required men to receive permission from their existing wives before marrying another. So Fatima Jinnah, alive but forgotten, receded further and further from the political consciousness of the country her brother had founded. No one seemed to know or care when or why she moved to Mohatta Palace and shut herself up alone in its twenty-four rooms.
The palace had its own story. Its eerie pink domes and elaborately carved terraces were a remembrance of Shivrattan Mohatta, the Hindu businessman who had lived there before Partition took it from him. The palace had been his summer home at a time when the Arabian Sea, not yet pushed back by land reclamations, crashed its turbulent waves before the palace’s front lawn.
In 1947 Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs requisitioned Mohatta Palace. When Shivrattan Mohatta had wept, no one had listened. When at a state function for Karachi businessmen, the homeless magnate managed to get a minute next to Jinnah, he used it to intercede for his house. He received no sympathy; the founder had himself given up too much. “It is a matter of state,” he simply said before walking off.
Nearly twenty years from the day Jinnah uttered those words, his sister found herself in a similar position of wanting. The Pakistan she had heralded at the side of her brother as an independent, democratic, and progressive republic for the subcontinent’s Muslims was ruled by a military dictator and rife with ethnic enmities. The spats with India, in 1948 and again in 1965, fomented an attitude of permanent siege that justified routine suspensions of the law and an unquestioning worship of the military. The generals hated her because she touted democracy, and the mullahs now denounced her because she, once merely the sister of a leader, had had the audacity to try to be one herself.
Made incongruous by the country’s new reality that had erupted around her, Fatima Jinnah became a relic and a recluse. By the summer of 1967, the woman who had for decades led the most public of lives, instrumental in the ideological contest against the British and fervent in her political maneuvering and visions of Pakistan’s future, shut herself up in the quaint palace hoping perhaps to disappear among its looping porches and porticoes. If anyone in Karachi noticed her absence, they said nothing at all about it. Every night she locked herself in the second-story bedroom she had chosen in Mohatta Palace. Every morning when she awoke, she dropped the key from the balcony upstairs so that her attendant below could retrieve it and bring her morning tea.
On the morning of July 9, 1967, no key dropped from the bedroom balcony. No one minded and no one cared. The gardener let himself in and watered the lawns, not giving the old woman a second thought when he didn’t see her. Noon passed and then also the afternoon. It was evening when the washerwoman who did Fatima Jinnah’s laundry finally called on a neighbor with her worries about the mistress. It was near dusk by the time a locksmith was called and the door opened. Inside her bedroom, Fatima Jinnah lay cold, having passed away hours before she was found.
She left behind a small poodle, a goat, and a duck. A funeral was held on the grounds of Mohatta Palace the next morning. Hundreds of mourners—dignitaries and bureaucrats and politicians and their wives—came and sighed and waited to be photographed. Karachi in July was brutally hot, so fiery that even the electric fans and the nearby ocean could not alleviate the heat under the tents. By early evening, everyone was gone. At dusk on July 9, 1967, Mohatta Palace was shuttered up and left to the stray gulls and thorny bushes. It would remain that way for decades, with all who wanted it unsure of the strength of their claim, or of its wisdom, and whether it must be bought from the distant descendants of the Jinnahs, the government of Pakistan, or even the descendants of the Mohattas, now scattered somewhere across the border in India. It could have been given to Dina, the daughter of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. But she had stayed in India after the birth of Pakistan, stayed an Indian and then married a non-Muslim against her father’s wishes. Under the inheritance calculations of the laws of the Islamic Republic, she was not entitled to what either her father or her aunt left behind.
CHAPTER 4
A Suburban Wedding
NOVEMBER 13, 1970
In the decades after Partition, East Pakistan was dotted with rice paddies and jute fields, its lush fecundity itself a rebellion against the craggy plains of its western twin. The two deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers meet here after having watered India and before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. They made East Pakistan the food bowl that fed the famished of the West in the decades after Partition. West Pakistanis—in Lahore and Karachi and Faisalabad—were happy enough to eat the rice and weave the cotton and jute in their newly built factories. But in their desert-fringed, mountain-topped part of Pakistan, they could not picture with any accu
racy the life of the farmer who trudged waist deep in standing water, harvesting the slivers of grain they cooked in their pots. The darker, smaller Bengali was to many an alien. Bengalis spoke a different language: neither the brash Punjabi that echoed through the barracks of Pakistan’s growing army nor the pedigreed Urdu, peppered with Persian and Arabic, that was spoken by the bureaucrats and industrialists fattened from the spoils of Partition.
The fishermen of Karachi looked out on a different sea, the Arabian Sea that led westward to Mecca and to the Western world. When the dawn came rolling off the silvery gray waters in the morning chill of November 13, 1970, they set out in their boats as usual, their gazes averted from the unseen, unknown, other half of their country, which they had been told existed across the vast Indian peninsula in the middle. In tattered red and blue sweaters they climbed on the hulls of boats and dinghies hung with nets and trinkets, murmuring the centuries-old prayer and chewing on tobacco that always remained tucked in the pockets of their cheeks. They looked at the movement of the water to decide where the fish would be, deducing their daily earnings. Shouts of exasperation inevitably followed when the drawn-up nets carried less in their folds than they had hoped.
As the sun melted the mist that settled over the sea, the bulbous dome of the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi could be seen from a sandy hill that rose over the ocean. The saint had arrived on an Arab trading ship centuries before there was a city or a country, but every fisherman on the shores of Karachi looked to him for protection. For as long as Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s dome cast its shadow on Karachi’s shoreline, the city, they believed, would be saved from the anger of the sea.
East Pakistan had no such protection. The water simply licked Bhola Island’s shore at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal, taunting sleeping fishermen families with the secret knowledge of coming devastation. They did not wake, so they did not know. That November morning in 1970 Cyclone Bhola hit them hard. Minutes earlier the Pakistan Meteorological Department, its staff stunned by the frantic beeping of instruments nearly always silent, had issued a warning, but for the fishermen sleeping in the reed huts, it was too late.
The giant tidal wave spawned by the storm swept over the fishermen and their families and the rice paddies and the general stores and neighborhood schools and mosques. It carried away beds and fishing boats and brides and brothers. In its first landfall, the cyclone swallowed an entire island. Continuing to the shores of East Pakistan, Cyclone Bhola hit the port of Chittagong, its inhabitants awake but just as unprepared. The living now knowingly waited for their end; mothers clutching babies and helpless fathers clambering onto low rooftops.
Before it receded, Cyclone Bhola swallowed more than half a million people, drawing them into the depths of the sea before it spit them out onto the devastated shores. There was little communication or news about those engulfed. The Times of India, the largest newspaper close to the affected region, did not report the disaster until November 15, 1970, a full two days after the cyclone first hit. Its report simply stated that on the night of November 12 a twenty-foot-high storm surge had hit the island of Bhola off the coast of East Pakistan. Two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds had destroyed anything that the storm failed to swallow. Bhola Island, Hatiya Island, and many other small pieces of Pakistan existed no more. The news of the disaster and its hundreds of thousands of casualties was not published in West Pakistan until three whole days and three whole nights after the disaster.
NOVEMBER 1970
The plot of land on which the house would be built was purchased in November 1970. It was a neat, rectangular slice of Karachi gravel, sand, and rock topped by some stray, sulking trees. An outline had been set by a decisive chalk stripe, the four corners of the lot punctuated with little red flags like the kind used to mark open sewers on other city streets. “Make sure you have all the papers,” Surrayya would say to Said every time he went to meet with the land broker, for the first or the second or the tenth meeting. There was a meeting to look at the land survey, a meeting to discuss the price, a meeting with the clerk at the recorder’s office, a meeting with the city council’s representative to discuss the tax liability.
At each meeting, two or three wads of paper would be solemnly entrusted to Said. They detailed the location of the land by its physical markers, the dimensions and descriptions written in Urdu and English and authenticated by seals in various inks. There were also maps printed on carbon paper, filigrees of purple ink with red circles around the names of owners. There were bank statements that showed the transactions by which the surveyor had been paid and receipts for the construction, electrical, and plumbing permits.
A special shelf in the white metal armoire kept in the living room was dedicated to these papers. The piles grew taller, the files grew fatter, and new files were purchased for new papers. On the evening after each meeting, as the bubbles of curry began to rise in the kitchen pots and the headlights of cars began flashing into the living room windows as darkness fell, Said would carefully lay out the papers he had collected that day. A place would be found in the correct file—the bank file, the registration file, the tax file, or the extra file—for the new sheets he had carried home under his arm. Each sheet, new or old, sang its own song of reassurance that the house was more than just an idea. He kept two copies of each document: a copy of the original, and then a copy of the copy. If one paper was lost, there would be another and yet another, and together they would avert the catastrophe of lost houses.
The land was part of a “Co-operative Housing Society” where all the migrants who had made it were headed to build dream homes. Just like the shopkeepers of Bohri Bazaar, who knew to appeal to the homesick hearts of their customers, some enterprising developers in Karachi had devised the idea of selling plots of land to communities of migrants craving togetherness. Karachi’s surfeit of undeveloped land was enough to allow each little gaggle of migrants from Delhi or Kathiawar or Gujarat to purchase a piece as a cooperative. The cooperative structure of limiting the purchasers to members of the community insured that only migrants from their own Indian corner would live around them.
Thus the glue that had once held them together as Muslims living in a Hindu land would again keep them together as Gujaratis or Memons living in a Muslim land. It was a winning mix of ownership and exclusivity, the definition of having it all: the promise of migration without the loss of community. The Kokanis from around the Jama Masjid in Bombay and adjoining villages eagerly bought into the project. In the housing society was the possibility of recreating the old ways in the new land, living again without boundaries between homes, where all neighbors were cousins or aunts, and all that was mine was also yours.
When dinner was done and while the girls were putting the dishes away or retreating to their rooms, Said would bring out the papers and show them to his wife. Chewing on the fennel seeds she always kept at her bedside, would look them over again with him, her mouth and mind churning in synchrony. Together they pored over the inky details like children rapt by the designs of a kaleidoscope. Neither had ever owned a house or even lived in one not shared with many others. To give his wife an idea of the numbers, the grand dimensions of the rooms drawn neatly on the plans, Said would add his explanations, multiplying the dimensions of their bedroom or living room, “Two times this” or “Five times that,” to help her imagine just how much roomier the future was going to be.
Not used to having choices, they agonized over each one. There were so many: the color of the stucco, the shades of the interior paint, whether to have attached bathrooms for every bedroom or just more bedrooms with common bathrooms. Should there be mosaics on the marble floors or just plain polished marble, one faucet with two handles or two faucets with one handle each? The dilemmas were numerous. Sometimes the answers would be gathered from the memories of past longings—the house Said had passed on the street on his way to work in Bombay or one Surrayya had seen in a movie when she was sixteen. To this they added the imperatives of outdoing or at lea
st matching the grand houses of Surrayya’s brothers, with their sweeping staircases, marble porches, and commodious servants’ quarters.
Their neighborhood’s fall from grace in Said and Surrayya’s dazzled eyes began the second the plot for the suburban house was purchased. The din that rose from the streets every morning in their first years in Karachi, so reminiscent of the sounds they had left behind, was now a source of agitation. The crowds had got out of control, they insisted to each other, and the streets reeked of rubbish. No sudden siren, no stench of rotting fruit, no overflowing trash bin escaped their notice. As they prepared to leave Karachi, the couple ladled the burdens of a million failures on Saddar, just as they had taught themselves to loathe Bombay in the months before they left it forever.
DECEMBER 7, 1970
One month of sunrises had failed to dry the sodden earth of East Pakistan, leaving millions crouching in damp, sea-soaked shanties or simply gaping at the sky. On December 7, 1970, one month after Cyclone Bhola killed nearly five hundred thousand, elections were held in East and West Pakistan. Up for election were all the members of Parliament; the leader whose party won the most seats would be the next prime minister of Pakistan. It was also the first time women were voting.
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