The Upstairs Wife

by Rafia Zakaria

  It was not feasible to postpone the election, the fiery foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto insisted to General Yahya Khan, the military man who had vowed to oversee Pakistan’s return to democracy. The date for the election had been set before the cyclone, he reminded him, and nature could not be allowed to thwart the progress of democracy. It was not fair, after all, to deprive people of their chance to choose leaders, especially after they have been rendered so powerless before the vagaries of nature. In the dry comfort of West Pakistan, Bhutto’s newly formed Pakistan People’s Party was riding the crest of his political ascent, turning out thousands of supporters and covering Karachi in their green, red, and black. The Pakistan People’s Party was ready for people to vote, and their leader had the ear of the general who would decide when voting would take place.

  The votes cast in East Pakistan may have been soaked with water falling from eyes or rising up from the sea, but they were cast nevertheless. According to estimates, more than three-quarters of the voters were still without shelter, food, or medicine; they were wracked with the cholera and malaria that surged in the wake of the cyclone and unsure of where they would go after they cast their vote. Nevertheless, they had rescued their blurred identification cards and dried them in the sun as they sat on the wreckage of legless tables and broken beds. However bereft, the voters of East Pakistan voted, pressing their ink-stained thumbs onto the ballots. When elections were held on December 7, 1971, thirty-one million East Pakistanis went to the polls to choose 169 members of Pakistan’s Parliament.

  When the results were tabulated, it was these voters who had won. Nearly everyone in East Pakistan had voted for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bengali leader who had given voice to their discontent and talked of an identity all their own, one that did not force another language down their throats, another unconcerned leader over their heads. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had failed to win a single seat in East Pakistan but had managed a majority in the West. Bhutto’s victory did not matter, though; with 169 seats, Sheikh Mujib had amassed enough of a mandate from his storm-soaked supporters to form a government and rule over both halves of a split country.

  DECEMBER 1970

  Amina was the first of her family to attend college. Every day, between eight or nine in the morning, under her mother’s watchful eye, Amina walked out the door and stepped onto the bus that carried girls from different parts of Karachi to their classes at Khatoon-e-Pakistan Girls College in a different part of the city.

  Surrayya, never having left home alone as a girl, did not know how to say good-bye to an unmarried daughter. Her own formal education had ended when she was deemed too old to attend the neighborhood school reserved for the Muslim girls in the community. After that, Surrayya’s learning had centered on preparing to be a good wife. She had practiced cooking complicated curries, was scolded when she burned spices in oil that was too hot or failed to chop onions thinly or thickly enough. On other days she tended the babies of older cousins, learning to wash their bodies and treat their minor ailments with home remedies. If any idle hours remained, they had been spent embroidering tablecloths, darning her brothers’ socks, and crocheting purses and handkerchiefs.

  So it had been for her mother and her grandmother before her. Even the neighborhood school had been a new experience, borne of the belated Muslim awakening to literacy preached by reformers like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and others, which happened just in time for Amina to go to school. Surrayya’s own mother had not been educated at all, taught simply to write a few words, to count out a dozen tomatoes, or to hand out the right number of coins to the man who washed the bed linen at the laundry ghats outside the city. This wasn’t just the case with women. Surrayya’s grandfather and father had never been to an actual school, having instead been educated by an ustad, or teacher, who taught them Urdu, Persian, and Arabic and how to read Ottoman texts, the Holy Quran, and the exegeses of various Islamic scholars. They had followed in the footsteps of preceding generations, unwilling to let go of the legacy of traditional Muslim scholarship that had flourished for centuries under Mughal rule.

  Cupping their hands around the flickering flames of the Mughal Empire’s melting candles, Muslims came late to the realization that the market for scribes and calligraphers in Persian and Arabic was coming to the end. It was Surrayya’s brothers who first insisted that they needed a Western-style education in a school, and her father realized that his sons were right. Best to teach them the new order from the start, he reasoned, than to rely, as he had, on learning the ways of business and British bureaucracy on the go. The boys would go to a real school, and there was no harm in sending the girls too, at least while they were still little, when the classes were held away from the predatory eyes of boys.

  Putting a daughter on a bus felt premature to Surrayya. Each morning brought a new fear to her collection of trepidations, each one more dismal than before. What if the bus driver—the only man on the bus—decided to abscond with all the girls, selling them off to strange men who bought and sold young girls? Or, what if the driver lost control of the bus, scattering its precious virgin cargo in the midst of a world full of men? As the bus drove down streets and lanes she did not know, her visions became darker still. She muttered prayer after prayer and ended each one with an invocation that her daughter Amina be returned pure and untouched.

  MARCH 24, 1971—DHAKA UNIVERSITY

  In 1971 Dhaka was the capital city of East Pakistan, and Rokeya Hall towered over the flat campus of Dhaka University. It was named after Begum Rokeya Hussain, a woman who had been one of the first Indian women to write a story in English. Her work, “Sultana’s Dream,” told of a world where men and not women were sequestered. In 1971 the female students of Dhaka University lived in Rokeya Hall still separated from the men, but farther along than Rokeya had been in their quest for an education. Drawn from single-car villages along silt-filled rivers, from almost-cities in the distant north of East Pakistan, these girls with dark braids dangling down their backs marched in and out of Rokeya Hall all day. Some rushed to class, some to mail letters, others to make short, scratchy phone calls home from the main campus office, exchanging details of arrivals and departures with parents far away.

  Behind the girls was a long spool of history that explained how they had managed to come so far without slipping into the dark, unmarriageable place that lay beyond respectability. Its central pillar was that young women had been coming to Dhaka University for a very long time. The first had come in the early 1920s. In 1938 university officials decided that boarding facilities were necessary for the girls whose parents were committed enough to higher education to send them to Dhaka University. In these special quarters, they imagined, the girls could stay on campus under the care of female teachers who would be hired based on their ability to properly oversee their female charges and provide reassuring support to worried parents. It took awhile for the idea to catch on, so when it was first set up, Rokeya Hall housed only twelve women. Over the years, as the cause of Muslim women’s education gained popularity, its population swelled. Ambitious Bengali families began to send their daughters to Dhaka University, having been assured that the rules and regulations placed a complete ban on male visitors, and that the vigilance of the floor wardens, along with the supportive presence of other girls from respectable families, would maintain the separation.

  In the days leading to Sheikh Mujib’s victory, Dhaka University had been transformed into the focal point of a nationalist insurgency that sought an independent Bangladesh. Student groups held rallies in dormitories and fiery-faced faculty and Bengali intellectuals gave political speeches in lecture halls that resonated deeply with the angry hearts of the young born after Partition. Like a well-knitted glove, this revolution fit every contour of their discontent, transforming them into rebels with its promises of change and self-realization. Young women discarded the languid, boy-shy veneer they initially brought to campus, replacing it with the martial resolve of warriors. On floors littered with pamp
hlets they took turns marching in line, and in step, their dark hair tucked away as if dispensing with the luxuries of peacetime. Instead of rifles the girls carried sticks, their cries of “Joy Bangla” (“Long live the Bangla nation”) echoing through the open windows of lecture halls and cafeterias. It was a cry for freedom in the native Bengali of East Pakistan.

  Almost all were Muslim girls, complete in their devotion to the Mukti Bahini, or the Chattra League, and its freedom cause. Not that there weren’t individuals who remained concerned about the respectability of girls marching in streets, of long nights of rallies, of the closeness to the boys with whom they sang songs for independence, and plastered walls and posters and posts. But those weren’t the women who came to Rokeya Hall in those years. Rokeya Hall was home to the bravest and most rebellious, and all of them wanted independence and the creation of Bangladesh.

  On the night of March 24, 1971, Rokeya Hall was suddenly silent, standing dark and severe against the rise of the smoke that engulfed it. Nearly all the girls had left for safer places as the news of an operation by the Pakistani military reached campus. Ordered to do so by their bosses in West Pakistan, the Pakistani military were out to capture Bengali nationalists they believed were hiding on the Dhaka University campus. Warned of the coming raid, the girls of Rokeya Hall had left as if they would return, trailing smells of the coconut oil that they used to smooth the braids and knots of their hair and the tea they made in the middle of the night.

  A sliver or two of light still emanated from rooms deep inside the building. Of the nearly eight hundred girls who filtered in and out of the doors and up and down the corridors of Rokeya Hall, only seven remained, all casualties of unforeseen circumstances or misunderstood plans. They huddled now with the ten or so hostel staff in the little house of their provost Begum Akhtar Imam. The woman who had clasped their parents’ hands, telling them she would take care of each and every one like her own, now sheltered the girls in her home just a few steps away from the Hall. At dusk, when the phones of the university went dead, they knew the soldiers would come soon, and as evening descended into night they could hear them, the gruff droning of their jeeps, the clanking of bayonets growing closer and closer to the thin walls behind which they sat.

  It was late evening when they finally arrived. The men in khaki from the Pakistan Army had already been to Rokeya Hall, hoping for a bounty of virgin spoils. They had ravished the empty rooms, turning over the beds and stripping the cupboards and roughly pushing the tables and chairs against the walls. When they arrived at the door of the provost, they came with the rage of men denied and duped. They fired through the gate and shattered the frail lock on the front door and the glass on the windows. At the entrance to the house they confronted Begum Akhtar Imam, their guns cocked and ready. The girls hid in the back rooms of the house and heard the men say, “Where are the girls?” once, twice, and then a third time. “The girls are gone,” Begum Akhtar replied, “the girls are all gone.” They left without coming inside.

  It was not over. A few hours later another storm of khaki prowling the dark campus appeared at the house of the provost. This second time she could not keep them from flooding the house with their guns and gazes. They went through the kitchen, the drawing room, and the bedrooms, lining up against the wall the women they found. They asked for guns they could not find, for the rifles and mortars and bayonets they had been told would be hidden there, under beds and behind crying women. When they found none, they grew angrier, breaking the leg of a chair here, smashing the surface of a tea table there. The soles of their boots crunched on the porcelain splinters of fallen teacups and kicked shards of plywood. “Where are the women,” they asked again, “the hundreds of women of Rokeya Hall?” No one answered them, and they continued to smash and break. Again and again they did this, until finally some beneficent order from their superior, or perhaps a vague premonition of dawn in the silent sky, took them away. All the women survived that night, and as soon as they could, the seven girls from Rokeya Hall were sent back to their families.

  APRIL 1971

  The dangers invoked by her mother settled before Amina’s eyes like a glass lens between her and the city. As the bus wove through Karachi streets she saw the men waiting for the girls. These were the crude village men, in gray or white or black tunics of the villages to the north, their eyes drinking up the girls’ fresh faces, unable to stop themselves from rolling out their tongues. She could see them swarming the bus, trying to get inside.

  It was not only rough-hewn peasants and migrant workers who longed for the bus full of college girls as a respite from their woman-deprived existence on city sidewalks and dusty construction sites. Some of the better-equipped hunters, who poured out from tidy houses or glared from the windows of cars along the route, employed more evolved strategies. Wearing crisp shirts ironed by the women in their family, they craned their necks to catch a girl’s glance and blow an unwanted kiss. These predators looked just like the brothers and fathers and cousins the girls knew, some with fashionably shaggy hair, wide collars, and flared pant bottoms; others with only urgent desire; all of them wanting what was inside.

  It took several months of bus trips between home and college before Amina figured out that not all these encounters were accidental. After a while she saw that the man who waited on Monday and Wednesday outside the Paras Medical Store always carried in his pocket a yellow envelope. She saw it again, in the lap of the girl who sat three rows behind her, its mouth torn open. The blue Toyota that appeared after they passed by the intersection of Zebunissa Street was always driven by the same man and watched for by the same girl, their eyes singling each other out in the crowds. Evil, she decided then, was this hunger the men carried, and the pretensions of the girls who relished their power to sate it.

  MAY 1971

  The road leading up to 70 Clifton Road in Karachi had, even in 1971, some of the oldest trees to be found in the city. They provided a wide umbrella of shade to the avenue through which many notables, from Mohammad Ali Jinnah to British officers of old, had passed. In 1971, the end of Clifton Road marked the edge of Karachi, bordered by a wide promenade called the Jehangir Kothari Parade, built and gifted to the city decades ago by a Parsi trader who was in love with the salty freshness of the nearby ocean. This was the city dweller’s sea, glimpsed through arches and colonnades, a respectable distance from the uncertain tides and eager ocean winds. On Sundays, families thronged the gazebos and overlooks, the screams of delighted children and territorial gulls mixing with the smoke rising from carts selling roasted corn.

  The Bhuttos lived by the ocean, in a large mansion with strong walls that fortified them against the vagaries of a city that was home by necessity. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the ambitious scion of a feudal Sindhi family whose thousands of rolling acres in interior Sindh stretched over mango orchards, sugarcane fields, and anything else that could be grown in Pakistan. His wife was the daughter of a Persian émigré who had left Iran for Bombay. Nusrat Bhutto was pretty and fair skinned, with a tittering laugh and a charming mien that enabled her to land a husband on the rise. With his grandiose hospitality and her flitting grace, they moved with ease among princes and politicians from around the world, charming anyone they needed to. In Karachi, they presided over a vast house whose many rooms held, at any given time, bunches of aunts and cousins visiting from the villages or from schools in London or America or Switzerland. They were attended to by retinues of servants, uniformed men with curled moustaches who appeared soundlessly the moment a drink needed to be replenished, before the need had actually crossed the minds of their masters.

  A year earlier the Bhuttos had sent their daughter Benazir away to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the summer of 1971 they welcomed her back to spend the summer with the family. Unlike other landed Pakistanis who never summered in Karachi—its heat and dust too exacting for those who could afford Alpine chalets and Mediterranean retreats—the Bhuttos stayed on through the sweltering
months. As their friends were whisked away on Swissair flights to Zurich and London and Lausanne, the Bhuttos remained at 70 Clifton, held at home by the dictates of a unique political necessity.

  Benazir stayed with the whole family at the grand house by the sea that could not keep the heat of Karachi at bay. That summer, as the unmoving warm air weighed on the imported silk drapery and the smoke-filled study where Bhutto held court with his advisors, Benazir could have watched her father at work. It had been almost six months since the December elections, six months since Sheikh Mujib and his party had won the majority of seats in Pakistan’s Parliament. According to Pakistani law, this meant that then president General Yahya Khan could invite Sheikh Mujib to form a majority government in Islamabad. His party members would then be able to elect him as leader of Parliament, making him the first prime minister to hail from East Pakistan. Six months had passed, and the invitation from the president had not come.

  If Mujibur Rahman did not become prime minister, Benazir’s father would ascend instead. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s most persuasive victory had come earlier that year. It was rumored that in March it was he who had convinced General Yahya Khan, the overseer of Pakistan’s transition to democracy, to order military operations against the Bangla secessionists. This latter option, he had argued, was better than to ask Sheikh Mujib to form a coalition to create a united Pakistan’s democratic government. It was allegedly at Bhutto’s home that General Yahya Khan had given the orders to initiate the operation.

  Within hours, the Pakistani military had poured into the streets and villages of East Pakistan, rounding up insurgents and anyone who looked threatening—and many others who didn’t. There was war in East Pakistan, and that summer its intensity had reached a frenetic pitch. But only bits and pieces of it reached the faraway public of West Pakistan. Thousands had already been killed by that summer, their bodies bayoneted and filled with bullets and dumped in mass graves by Pakistani soldiers egged on by their superiors. Pakistan had been won for Muslims, but it had now splintered in two. To motivate the soldiers, the generals told them that those fighting for independence were forsaking Pakistan, the Muslim country for which they had fought so ardently only decades earlier. If they didn’t stand their ground against the insurgents, they simply were not Muslim.