The Upstairs Wife

by Rafia Zakaria

  On June 21, 1971, Benazir Bhutto turned twenty-one, a coming-of-age in the impending storm that was her father’s anointment. A few months later, when the summer had released its hold on Karachi and the coiffed wives and tanned sons of Pakistan’s elite had returned from the retreats where they had escaped the tumult of summertime secession, Benazir flew back to the United States to continue her education at Harvard University. When she returned to Pakistan for the winter break, she found her country reduced by half, with her father presiding as prime minister over what remained.

  SEPTEMBER 1971

  The house had not been completed, but its concrete shell testified to its eventual heft, promising to loom securely over the neighbors’ bungalows, offering vantage points into their walled gardens and driveways. The lawn was still a seeded patch of dirt with only aspirations of lushness, the driveway a cement spine between two rows of newly planted palms. There was not yet a front door, only marble steps, newly cut and polished. Inside, the walls had been completed, sectioning off square blocks of the floor into various functions that its owners had deemed crucial to their new lives. For the housewarming they did what they’d seen others of their ilk do on such occasions: they held a reading of the Holy Quran and invited a hundred of their relatives and friends.

  The reading took place on the Friday just before Ramzan was to begin. It was a day whose ferocious heat portended the thirst and hunger of the fast in the days to come. By noon the sun was glaring, and a fine, dry layer of dirt covered everything: settling on the uncovered braids of women scurrying through markets, rising from the spinning wheels of cars and then descending again as a thin film on the fly-encrusted mangoes waiting to be sold. Late afternoon approached, and the sun still refused to blink. Some took cover under the sparse trees, their bodies wrung out like lines of sagging laundry.

  The time for the gathering had been set between the late afternoon Asr prayers and dusk. Two tents had been erected on either side of the future lawn, one for the men and another for the women. When Said inspected the tents at noon, they were tidy and spacious, with carpets covering the earth and white sheets covering the carpets, pulled taut and pristine like a freshly made bed.

  When Surrayya arrived, freshly powdered in a puffy pink sari, she worried about the heat. Would people come? she fretted as she scanned the tents to see if the rugs had been laid properly. To stanch the growing consternation, she took action, ordering ten thick, sturdy blocks of ice and pedestal fans to whirr over them, guaranteeing some semblance of a cool breeze.

  By the time the call for Asr prayers was heard from the mosque, the virgin hosts’ concerns about an unattended event had dissipated. Cars began pulling up to the house, laden with people sopping their foreheads with bunched handkerchiefs and rolled-up shirtsleeves. Into the tents they filtered in long lines, wizened old women in somber saris on the arms of girls in shiny shalwar kamiz, complaining about the uneven ground and the long walk to the tent, expertly scanning all the while the dimensions of the house they had come to see. Soon the tents were swollen, the fans blowing their fabric walls outward like potbellies slung over belts. In the women’s tent, the fans also circulated smells: the sandalwood oil and rosewater dabbed onto sweaty skin, the thin swirls of smoke that rose from the incense sticks planted in the corners, and the freshly fried samosas in the distant corner allotted to the caterers.

  Some of the women read the Quran, holding one of the thin, leather-bound chapters close to their faces, their mouths moving soundlessly as their eyes scanned the lines. Five or six of these serious women attended every Quran reading, whether it was on the occasion of a funeral, a wedding, an illness, or a housewarming. Their gaze never rose from the pages before them, except to pointedly meet the gaze of some other woman who was laughing too loudly for a gathering dedicated to a divine purpose. They sat nearest to the round, wooden table that held the towering volumes of the Holy Quran. When one woman finished a volume she would clear her throat and replace the book on the table, quickly taking the next one, as if in silent competition with the others.

  Farthest from the table with the Qurans were the women who only feigned interest in the task. They tittered, kissed, and embraced, then gingerly took a single volume from the pile and retreated to their vantage points on the edges of the tents, where all arrivals and exits could be viewed and recorded for the later prediction of impending marriages, fresh pregnancies, and other newsworthy tidbits. These guardians of virtues and gatherers of gossip opened their volumes between greetings and brief exchanges that could be used to snub or slight. At any Quran reading, these women were never observed completing a chapter, but they promised that they would as soon as they reached home that night.

  Most of the women belonged neither to the inner core of the truly devoted nor to the gossips that lingered on the margins. Those in the middle wished to do a bit of both, dutifully reading a chapter but sparing a moment or two for gossip and a quick scan of the room for eligible young women newly launched on the marriage circuit sometime following a sixteenth or seventeenth birthday. Those with sons approached this latter task with the same religious devotion that others applied to reading the Quran, taking mental notes that could translate into proposals and then marriages and babies. Often they were flanked by helpers, married daughters or daughters-in-law advocating young women who would further their own husbands’ businesses or help with the education of their own sons. The fates of all women were attached to those of other women.

  Aziza Apa sat in the middle watching family and friends flit by, holding the plan she had arrived with close to her heart. She was almost unknown to Said and Surrayya’s family then, but that would change with the plan’s execution. If her location that day had been mapped by a cartographer, it may have been the precise midpoint between the table bearing the Qurans at the center and the fluttering exit to the tent. Hers was an unusual position. Still plump from her fourth pregnancy, she was far too young to belong in the circle of bride-scanning mothers-in-law. These were the ladies who seemed to know the instant a girl turned eighteen and who could recite, over a single cup of tea, her particulars, family history, general disposition, number of siblings, and genealogy.

  But as the only older sister to three motherless, bachelor brothers, Aziza Apa belonged in the ranks of the selectors rather than the selectees by coincidence of her mother’s early death. Indeed, what she may have lacked in years, she made up for in the scrutinizing accuracy with which she could delineate the possibilities and problems of a potential match. She too had come that day to select a bride, for her brother Sohail, her favorite and most loved. She parked herself next to the cabal of future mothers-in-law, and as she scanned a page of the Quran, she listened to them mutter, gathering details about the girls walking by with glasses of water. Aziza Apa was not thirsty, but she motioned to one for a glass. That girl was their hosts’ daughter, Amina.

  NOVEMBER 14, 1971

  The PNS Ghazi had come from America. She was a submarine built decades earlier by steelworkers under the gray, misty skies of the naval shipyard in Kittery, Maine. Back then, in her other life guarding other shores, she had been called something else. But in West Pakistan she was reborn. Her new name, Ghazi, was the Arabic word for “commander,” and she was the first submarine to be commissioned to any South Asian navy, a new Pakistan’s pride and joy, a real bit of the military prowess the new nation believed was crucial for its existence. As a submarine she was not only powerful but also secret, and secret weapons, everyone knows, are the most powerful.

  By November 1971 the battle that had started between the two halves of Pakistan over the election of a prime minister had become a war between Pakistan and India, which viewed Pakistan as provinces lost from its own pre-British wholeness. In Pakistan’s telling it, the Indians were the ones who had sheltered Sheikh Mujib and his supporters and had poured guns and bombs on the passion of jilted East Pakistanis, eventually transforming a political disagreement between two halves of a country into a bat
tle for an independent Bangladesh. As a year full of bad news threatened to deliver yet more, the PNS Ghazi was given a crucial mission. It was to snake into the depths of the Bay of Bengal to do reconnaissance on the Indian naval ship Vikrant. The ultimate mission was to thwart the Indian effort to hack off a chunk of Pakistan.

  The captain of the PNS Ghazi was a fresh-faced commander by the name of Zafar Mohammad Khan, part of the hopeful, young cadre of Pakistani patriots who had risen quickly to the top of the military leadership. He left the familiar lights of Karachi Harbor on November 14, 1971. On the Muslim calendar, it was the twenty-seventh of Ramzan, an especially holy day that falls during the last fasts of the month when the Holy Quran was believed to have been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.

  Around Karachi the mosques were lit up and crowded with men deep into the night, their white, gray, and blue backs swaying with the rhythm of Quranic verses read aloud. It was time for Taraweeh prayers, an extra set offered only during Ramzan after the compulsory Isha prayers, and often stretching deep into the night as the faithful took stock of the year, asking for forgiveness for the sins accumulated over its course. If the imams standing on pulpits did not know the details of the fighting, they had been assured of the villainy of the secessionists; they didn’t need to be convinced of the meddlesome malice of India. From loudspeakers that bellowed out over hundreds of hunched men, from marble-floored mosques in newly sprung suburbs to the bamboo-matted floors of the one on Manora Island far out to sea, they asked Pakistanis to pray for the victory of their troops against India, against the traitors who wished to divide and destroy Pakistan.

  So secret was Captain Khan’s mission, and so pressing the threat of interception, that he had been instructed not to open the orders until the submarine was well on its way toward the Bay of Bengal. The Ghazi had only recently been equipped by the Turkish Navy to lay mines deep under the surface of the peaceful sea. The first days of the mission went well, the ninety-three crew members following the rigid rhythms they had learned in training, waking and sleeping and praying while Captain Khan charted the coordinates with the precision he was famous for. On November 16, 1971, two days and nights after it had descended into the ocean, the PNS Ghazi was reported to be four hundred miles off the coast of Bombay. Later that day it reported coordinates off the coast of Sri Lanka, very close to its destination. Finally, on November 20, 1971, it entered the silent waters of the Bay of Bengal.

  The envelope detailing their mission to plant mines throughout the bay had by then been opened. With the bay teeming with explosive mines, the Indian Navy Ship Vikrant would not stand a chance. Once India was weakened, the Bengalis wishing for secession from Pakistan would have no allies, thus preserving the territorial integrity of Pakistan. This, at least, was the tale told to the crew.

  But the crew of the PNS Ghazi knew only half the story. While they silently scoured the ocean looking for Indian warships, the Indians were planning their own attack on Karachi. By December 4, 1971, Indian ships waited, just out of radar range but close enough to see through their scopes the unassuming tumult of a day in Karachi Harbor, the fishing trawlers emptying their catch, cargo containers being lifted on and off the berths of merchant ships, the call to prayer booming across the harbor and over the sea.

  The Indians had planned to attack Karachi at night while the city slept and the military entrusted with guarding them could not respond as effectively. A night attack would stun everyone, from the fishermen and the businessmen to the politicians and the pilots. The Pakistani Air Force would not be able to immediately arm their planes and bombard Indian cities in retaliation.

  At 11:30 p.m., the Indian naval ships eyeing the shores of Karachi finally launched their missiles, aiming them at the city’s Keamari Harbor and warships stationed off the coast of Pakistani naval bases. The explosions could be heard deep inside the city, waking groggy men and bleary-eyed children. Only a few could see the fires that erupted from the oil tankers and warships that had been hit, spewing clouds of black smoke that dissipated into the night sky. Servicemen from the navy ship Khyber, having been pummeled by the missile, plunged into the sea to their deaths. Karachi was under attack.

  At nearly the same time on the other side of the Indian Peninsula, the wearied crew of the PNS Ghazi, now nearly two weeks into their sojourn in the cramped, metal capsule, still searched for its target knowing nothing of the attack on Karachi. Theirs had been a long silence, tense and all-encompassing. They had looked so long and wanted so badly to accost their target that they began to believe what they may have otherwise questioned. The short bursts of commands filtering over the static of their radio controls must be coming from the elusive Vikrant. They must be close, they began to think. They had to be close, they argued. But suddenly amid this confusion came an explosion. Investigators would not be able to detect the origin of the explosion until its scraps floated to the surface several hours later. One such piece bore the crucial clue, the fading words “USS Diablo,” a name from the past life of the destroyed submarine. It was the PNS Ghazi.

  DECEMBER 10, 1971

  The marriage proposal for Amina came just a few days after Eid ul Fitr, a muted celebration that year because it fell in the middle of a war. It was her first marriage proposal and was bestowed with the requisite aplomb, which was met in turn by girlish giddiness. Her head filled with clouds, and her arms and legs seeming to float as if disconnected from her torso. She bumped into doors and stubbed her toes on table legs. As she stood in the window of her new room or peeled potatoes in the kitchen, dreams swirled in her head. Visions of life with Sohail, the man who wanted her to be his bride, who had chosen her over all other girls, unspooled like reels of film. He would be the one to rescue her from what now seemed an unbearably long childhood.

  Amina had seen him only once, on the day he had come with his sister and a sister-in-law, a lanky man flanked by two shorter women. Surrayya had offered only perfunctory explanations about why Amina, the eldest daughter, who was always shielded from the eyes of unrelated men, would suddenly be allowed to appear before one. They were not necessary, for like all young girls growing up in Pakistan at the time, she knew exactly why. Knowing all this, Amina stepped into the spotlight of the drawing room at the front of the house. The choreography was too well rehearsed in her fantasies and too often discussed in giggly conversations with engaged college friends for her not to know what to expect. Even so, she pretended, eager to spare her mother, who in one moment started to fawn and fuss, to suggest this outfit over that one, and then lapsed just as suddenly into nonchalance, the possibility of embarrassment ahead. It was as if she had to restrain herself in case things went nowhere, in case her daughter was rejected. Then everyone would want to believe that the episode had not happened, or had been nothing special after all.

  The conundrum of doing enough while also behaving as though nothing was unusual hung over all the preparations for the visit. It was not that Surrayya, as a sister and a once would-be bride herself, was a stranger to the suspense of selection that had to be endured. But that had been in Bombay, where intertwined alleys and jammed-together apartments left few opportunities for strangers. Everyone was a relation of some kind, and it was the sisters and mothers who delivered proposals for girls whom suitors and future mothers-in-law had watched as they walked to school or stood next to their mothers buying lemons and tomatoes from the vegetable carts. In that arrangement there was less mystery and little risk. A familiar cast of characters played predictable roles of intermediaries and eggers-on, eager to jump in and arrange the scenes that would lead to a wedding.

  In Karachi it was all up to Surrayya. As the mistress of the house and the mother of daughters she had to set the stage, write the script, and execute the finale that would insure a proposal. Every sofa and table and chair had to be a part of the tableau; the novelty of wealth and allegiance to old tastes evoked the promise of Karachi and paid homage to a shared past of Kokanis from Bombay. There were a hundred decisions to
make. The milk sherbet with nuts and raisins that they had served to the aunts and cousins who filtered in and out to exchange Eid greetings did not seem special enough for the occasion. A cream cake was ordered from the bakery, but when it arrived it appeared too grand, its flounced top suggesting a celebration, or worse, a sense of desperation. At three o’clock Surrayya made the final call on a plain pound cake and vegetable samosas, a combination quietly signaling both sophistication and hospitality.

  From her bedroom window, Amina saw Sohail arrive. She could see little more than the top of his head, reassuringly dark and with no indication of baldness, which some of her other friends had to endure in their husbands. She exhaled with relief as the procession passed by the garden and disappeared inside the house. He was not old, and he was not fat, she observed with a measure of relief. In this, two of her most pressing requirements in a husband had already been met. Satisfied, she took off her glasses and applied makeup on the bridge of her nose. She did not want him to know she was nearsighted; a wife with glasses was not what most men wished for in a bride.

  It was over fast, achingly fast. When Amina entered, she was given the task of pouring tea into the delicate cups arranged on the table. It was Surrayya who handed the cup to Sohail; being permitted to see a young woman before he agreed to marry her was one thing, an accidental touch in handing over a teacup was out of the question. Amina would not remember much of the conversation. She could not bear to look up at him, and so she satisfied herself with a careful examination of his hands. By the time the visit was over, she had decided they were exquisite, with long, brown tapered fingers.