The waiting began the second they left. The uncertainty was as difficult to bear as the visit itself had been to orchestrate. On Wednesday, the day after their visit, there was no word, but all agreed that a hasty response would indicate a lack of adequate seriousness about the matter under consideration. On Thursday, the expectation was that the answer would come on Friday, auspicious and holy. But Friday came, and the morning was silent. The men went together to the congregational prayer, and the usual meal of fish curry and rice and vegetables followed, but the absence of casual conversation signaled the beginnings of doubt. On Saturday morning a new rationalization emerged that the visit was not all that momentous. The day was young, but it was not too soon to start saying that the family had never been good enough for their daughter in the first place.
On Saturday evening, an hour before dusk, the telephone rang. Aziza Apa’s voice chimed out clear and excited from the receiver. She wished to come again and formally bring the marriage proposal for Amina. They had been charmed by her quiet beauty; their late mother would have been delighted to have such a bride for her son, and they were sure she would light up his house and fill it with a brood of sons. They had searched and searched, Aziza Apa insisted, as Sohail was very particular in his tastes, but once he had seen Amina, there was no doubt. The second they sat in the car, she told Surrayya that Saturday, Sohail had said, “I have found my bride.”
DECEMBER 14, 1971
It was above all an act of military theater, the first and only public surrender in modern military history. The official ceremony in which Pakistan gave up East Pakistan was held at Ramna Racecourse in Dhaka, and every detail of its orchestration was meant to humiliate. From the crowds of Indian soldiers, who stood leering behind the Pakistani general signing the document to the single, rickety table placed in the middle of the racecourse ground, all the visuals arranged to insure that the defeated indeed looked as vanquished as they were. The Pakistani general who had been given the task of representing a conquered Pakistan seemed eager to end the ordeal, while the neatly turbaned Indian general seated beside him was deliberately unhurried. Even the land participated in the jeers; the racecourse was where Bangladeshis had celebrated the birth of Pakistan twenty-four years ago, certain then that a single homeland for all the subcontinent’s Muslims was possible. On that same ground Sheikh Mujib had announced the end of that dream and the beginning of the quest for Bangladesh. Now the surrender had to happen on this land that had been three different countries in fewer than three decades.
The Pakistanis’ roles were parts in a play, allowing no deviation from a ceremony that summarized defeat in a single photograph and a single signature. General Abdullah Khan Niazi, the face of Pakistan’s national loss, seemed uninterested in posing for the camera, his tiny eyes focused elsewhere. In the photograph for which the moment was arranged, Indian generals in white, green, and khaki stood shoulder to shoulder behind the table, perhaps unsure that the Pakistani would indeed sign his name, as if his refusal could turn back the course of a war that was already lost. The head of Pakistan’s Eastern Military Command bore no such uncertainties his name on a paper was a formality for a reality he could not deny. The language of surrender was simple: “The Pakistani Eastern command agree to surrender all Pakistani armed forces in Bangladesh to Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, General Officer Commanding in Chief of the Indian and Bangladesh forces in the Eastern Theatre. This surrender includes all Pakistan land, air and naval forces.”
A few days later, another surrender ceremony was held, as if the victors could not sate themselves with this new form of theater that made their victory tangible. This one involved even more Pakistani soldiers, not just the one sitting at a rickety table. This time they were lined up, all still in uniform, in a long queue whose length hinted at the entirety of their twenty-four-thousand-man presence in East Pakistan. On cue, the Indian forces arranging the show told them they must put down their weapons and jog backward, moving backward to convince their foes that they were indeed going home.
Not only the soldiers turned their heels to Karachi that December. In the shadow of defeat were also hundreds of thousands of Bihari Muslims, who had never fought but had doggedly supported the Pakistani dream their fellow citizens had abandoned for Bangladesh. In the drama of Pakistan’s defeat and Bangladesh’s independence, they did not fit, their story too messy to include in the black and white of winning and losing, jogging backward and forward.
These living casualties of war, who had already propelled themselves from one home in the Indian province of Bihar to the independent East Pakistan, now staggered to Karachi. There, in the craggy northwestern edge of another strange city, far from the ocean they had heard it bordered, and in lanes already puddled with refuse, they founded Orangi Town, a slum that would in the following decades become one of the largest in the world. In its unpaved lanes and open sewers, the people who had been discarded by two countries set up shanties and pinned them with nostalgic names—Usmanabad and Ghaziabad and Hanifabad—harkening back to India or East Pakistan or Bangladesh, a first, a second, or a third migration. They kept coming, with bedrolls and broken trunks filled with carefully wrapped copies of the Holy Quran and bridal gowns and deeds to land they would never see again. They kept coming, until Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the new prime minister of Pakistan who lived by the sea, said they could come no more, that Karachi was full and had no more room for the migrants of defeat.
CHAPTER 5
Half a Wife
APRIL 1987
The window of the upstairs bedroom from which Amina first saw Sohail became mine. I shared the room with my brother, but the window was mine alone, as only one of us felt compelled to look outside. Not permitted to roam the streets like my brother, the window was my avenue to the world beyond our house. The bedroom was on the second story where we lived with my mother and father, in a house divided between the upstairs and the downstairs, the young and the old, the past and the present. The question of whether they were really two houses in one or a single house shared by two was complicated, and the verdict depended entirely on whom you asked.
If you wished to say that we were one, a single family dispersed across two floors, you could point to the fact that there was no separate entrance and no separate kitchen. These were the hubs of any Pakistani household’s existence, and sharing them implied that the important decisions about who came and went, and what was eaten when and who prepared it, were decided collaboratively by amiable consultation between the upper and lower worlds. Those who believed in the one household theory insisted that neither upstairs nor downstairs was a separate realm; it was simply a matter of space. One should not, after all, assume that boundaries between one realm and the other meant a lack of domestic harmony.
Those who believed we were separate had a more circumstantial case. Its crux was a single fact: my grandmother, Surrayya, no matter how urgent the matter, how fast she needed to know if my father would be coming home for dinner, or how eagerly she wished to tell him that his cousin had called from India, or how insistently she needed my mother to come down and attend to something in the kitchen, never ever went upstairs. There was a landing on the staircase between the two floors, and here, as if held back by some invisible but ever-present border, she would stop. Her last outpost was a square space of marble, measuring not more than three square feet; for everyone else a place to pause on an ascent or a descent, but for her a destination. My mother had decorated it with a floor vase, a blue and white creation my father had carried back from a business trip. At first the vase was filled with dried up brown reeds bought in a hurry from one of the hawkers who stood in a line by Clifton Beach. Later, it held a flamboyant sheaf of peacock feathers, obtained after much effort, from a friend who frequently traveled abroad.
I was raised, therefore, with the rules of separation, boundaries and half lives; my grandmother’s refusal to ascend and my mother’s descent into the shared space of the kitchen, all of which entailed
a web of complicated obligations. There were things, my mother instructed me, that could be said upstairs but were not to be repeated downstairs; while my grandmother served snacks that she insisted must be eaten downstairs and not mentioned upstairs. Even the gardens were sliced into halves. The portion at the front of the house was verdant, with a lawn watered painstakingly by an ancient gardener and flowers that blossomed and perfumed with the time of day, gardenias in the morning and jasmine at night. These were the objects guests saw upon entering the black gate of the compound. At the back was my mother’s “kitchen garden,” which consisted of the tamarind tree, the still-baby coconut palms, the mango tree, and the lemon trees. If the front represented all that the family had wanted before their arrival in Pakistan, the back was an attempt to coax from Karachi’s sandy soil the remembered flavors and fruits that had been left behind. Once the coconut palms grew tall, once the buds on the mango trees blossomed into fruit, once the lemon trees began to flower, the best of both worlds, the cherished and the accomplished, would be realized.
I had become an expert in divisions, having witnessed the slicing up of Aunt Amina’s marriage so determinedly into what was intended to be equal parts. Since her silent departure into the unusually cold Karachi winter, Aunt Amina herself seemed suddenly reduced by half. Some of it was evident in the ordinary details of her visits, some of which featured Uncle Sohail and others did not. Instead of every Saturday, she came every other Saturday. Instead of every Tuesday she came every other Tuesday. Her visits grew shorter, lapsing into good-byes shortly after hellos, cups of tea gulped instead of sipped. She appeared distracted, always watching not those she had come to see but passing objects like the report card I brought to show off or the new creases on my grandmother’s forehead. Sometimes, she spoke at great length about trivial affairs—her recovery from a cold a week ago or the latest soap opera to preoccupy the women of Karachi on Mondays. At other times she would catch herself midsentence answering a question that she clearly misheard.
On the occasions when he accompanied her, Aunt Amina’s full attention was bestowed only on her husband, his every expression and comment. In the silences when questions were dropped or forgotten, she looked at her watch, as if recording time and measuring it against some other standard whose details we did not know. She had never worn a watch before, but she did now: the task of measurement was suddenly central to her life. If before, conversation had meandered, covering concerns and foibles and gossip, now it was simply allowed to lapse, my grandparents’ embarrassment colliding with their daughter’s distracted sadness. I did not know then the metrics of blame and responsibility and suffering that preoccupied the orchestrators and beneficiaries of arranged marriage. During those first days Uncle Sohail remained silent, his small teeth grinning under the moustache he had grown. He had taken to emitting ebullient “heh, heh, hehs” or jaunty “ahems” to punctuate an awkward pause.
The visits were only one portion of Aunt Amina’s divided life. The arrangement when one man had to be shared by two women was methodical, inspired by the Quranic prescription that asked every man taking more than one woman to do so only if he could do “perfect justice” between them. In the case of Aunt Amina and Uncle Sohail it meant his time was divided into blocks of single weeks, which belonged to one and then to the other wife. On one Saturday afternoon, he accompanied Aunt Amina to visit her parents, on the following Saturday afternoon he accompanied his new wife to her parents. And so it went, every Eid and every deed, every birthday and every breath was thus divided to accomplish the perfect justice recommended by the Holy Quran.
Aunt Amina, newly deposed, had to insure she was getting her due, and during her visits my grandparents and her other allies watched for clues and gathered evidence. Was he being fair, dutiful, just? Was he the same man? He wore the same clothes, carried the newspaper under his armpit in just the same way and asked every now and then for an extra teaspoon of sugar in his tea. But was he the same man who had so earnestly promised my grandparents that he would treat their daughter like a queen? What was once ritual and even pleasurable was now an obligation, the poison of paranoia gushing through every comment and every gesture, accompanied by the unspoken question on everyone’s mind: Is this how it worked with his other wife, his other family? This possibility of replication poisoned everything.
JULY 1987
Sometime in May, after the school year had ended but before schoolboys became brave back-alley cricketers and girls were conscripted into chopping in steaming kitchens, every schoolchild in Karachi would be handed a sheet of paper. These terse circulars contained the nuts and bolts of what we would need to know for our return to school in August. Among the items would be information on fee increases, teacher and classroom assignments, textbooks and exercise books designated for each course, and the place where new school uniforms could be purchased to accommodate our elongating bodies.
Our uniforms had to be purchased at one place to insure that all students’ outfits would look identical as opposed to merely similar. Liberty Uniforms was the only authorized uniform shop for students of the Mama Parsi Girls Secondary School and the BVS Parsi Boys School. Only they could sell the A-line, belted white dress I wore to school and the white shalwars the older girls wore underneath the dresses to cover their legs. They also carried the correct style of Mary Janes that all the girls aged five to sixteen wore day in and day out and the tight-laced boots with which the boys kicked up the dust in their all-boys courtyard. Only at Liberty could my brother find pants exactly the right shade of khaki, and all these selections were monitored by the prefects who stood every morning at the school entrance, inspecting the white-collared shirt with the colored badge of light blue on the breast pocket for authenticity.
Liberty Uniforms was located in Bohri Bazaar, the outdoor market whose winding alleys had looped their arms so protectively around my lost grandmother when she arrived in Karachi decades before. The bazaar had grown with the city, its lanes becoming ever more crowded and its depths nearly impenetrable by the increasing number of shops crammed into the same space. People jostled against each other in a way alien to us; the almost accidental brushes of strange hands and bodies never happened in our expansive suburb. We could not understand our grandmother’s excitement at being greeted by name by some small, wizened man sitting on a low stool outside a tube-like store lined with aluminum plates and cups and pots and pans. Everything here, except the uniforms, you could buy elsewhere, my mother complained, in bigger, better stores near our house. In these new stores that smelled of fresh plastic and had wide entrances flanked by whirring fans you didn’t have to socialize with the shopkeeper before you counted out your rupees: you could get what you needed, fast, and then be on your way. Bohri Bazaar emitted a memorable stench of rotting fruit, open sewers, frying oil, and manure from the horse carts that still plied the narrow alleys around it. Walking in it required extreme vigilance; a slight distraction could mean a sandal-footed dip into fetid water, a plunge into the fresh purging of some tired horse or donkey, or a stumble over a jutting stone.
As July sidled into its second week that year of Aunt Amina’s return, we were once again readying ourselves for the ritual of purchasing uniforms for the new school year. The ladies of the upstairs and the downstairs set the date and time of the outing. That year they conferred about it in the afternoon, after lunch, in the middle ground of the kitchen they shared. My mother was in a hurry as it was a Thursday and the day she visited her own mother and sisters, who lived just a few blocks from our house. They would be waiting for her—her own mother presiding over the tea tray and her younger sisters and their children. Full of anticipation, my mother rushed as she dished out the portions of leftovers allotted to the woman who did the dishes and laundry. She snapped at me to put away the condiments—the mango pickle and yogurt bowls—telling me to hurry if I wanted to see my cousins.
My grandmother shuffled in, her slow steps a rejection of our own purposeful tempo. As she settled i
nto the chair where she had eaten a nearly silent lunch a half hour before, my mother’s wide, smiling mouth gathered into an uncertain tightness, as if pulled by a drawstring.
On this afternoon, when we were supposed to visit our other grandmother, she sat down to begin a conversation. “The children’s uniforms have to be bought,” my grandmother began, using the needs of her grandchildren to segue into the discussion she hoped to begin with my mother. Standing at my mother’s side I could see her shoulders rise and fall as she calculated the cost of this conversation—the delay in our departure and the disappointment of her own mother who was waiting for her. Hot, hurried, and stalled, we listened. “July is almost in its second week, and we should go soon,” she exhorted, as if my mother had plainly forgotten the task herself. “We should set a date now,” she concluded, glancing at the calendar hanging over the tea trolley that stood in the corner. It had a picture of the Holy Mosque in Mecca, the same picture for every month.
Having been her daughter-in-law for a decade, my mother knew that this conversation was merely a formality for a decision already made. She knew better than to suggest a date, which would have been perceived as bossy and disrespectful. She was also aware of the implicit facts of the matter: that it was she who would drive, and that it was her children whose uniforms were being purchased. But resolution could not be rushed, and there were more steps and turns to the dance between the women. “You should tell me when you would like to go,” my mother said, having weighed all these considerations in the minutes that had passed. “No, no,” my grandmother responded. “Why should I select a date? . . . I am just saying, for the children . . . if we are late they will not have any left . . . it is nothing to me when we go . . . I am just an old woman,” she sighed. “Of course, if we go I would like to get one or two things . . . but I am not important. You are so busy. You tell me and I will be ready.”
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