My mother knew her mother-in-law’s words were at best a test; so, having been seasoned at the game, she replied, “See, here is the calendar. Just tell me in the next week when you would like to go and we will go.” Surrayya slowly walked up to the calendar in the corner, making a great show at poring over the dates. “How about next Thursday?” she suggested deftly. My mother, confident a mere second ago, was now stumped and bowled, like an end line batsman in cricket who has not been expecting the ball to come so fast or spinning so uncontrollably. I watched her make assessments: whether to state the reason she would rather not go on Thursday, whether to mention her weekly visit to her own mother, which my grandmother always viewed as a betrayal, a too-close bond with a family not anymore her own, or whether to say nothing. As she paused before responding, the kitchen door banged as the maid left for the day, shouting, “Mistresses, I am leaving. Good-bye.” Her steps receded out toward the gate. By the time it clanged shut my mother had a response: “You are right, it is already too late in the summer for ordering the uniforms. But we will go next Tuesday. . . . It is in the middle of the week, and there will be less traffic.”
She had almost won. By the time the conference was adjourned and we had piled into the car for the five minute drive to our other grandmother’s house, it was half past three, a whole hour later than our usual departure. We would have only an hour to visit and play before leaving at five o’clock amid the chorus of remonstrations to stay just a bit longer. Not that we would ever give in; that lesson, too, had been learned years ago when my father arrived home promptly at five thirty and found that his wife was not there waiting for him.
JULY 1987
She was everywhere, but I did not know her name. By some unwritten rule, no one in our house was permitted to say aloud the name of Uncle Sohail’s new wife. Despite this omission her nameless presence was woven into our lives in those early days, from the pause that would follow if aimless conversation accidentally veered close to some detail that required a mention of her, to the task of deflecting questions from all those who knew the details but wished to hear them from the mouths of those nearest the drama. We all developed strategies for survival, forming stoic responses for all occasions, terse nods and blank-faced smiles that could cover up anything.
To satisfy my own curiosity, I became adept at excavating details of the latest slight from insinuations of Uncle Sohail’s recurring unfairness. When we paid our customary visit to Aunt Amina’s house on the first or second day of Eid, when, according to the division of days, Uncle Sohail was Aunt Amina’s husband, I conducted swift investigations of the site of ruin. While Aunt Amina chatted with my parents and served the glasses of chilled orange soda and shami kebabs she always reserved for us on Eid, I roamed through the apartment, looking for clues that would reveal the details of her life as half a wife, crumbs of evidence that busted the myth that not much had changed.
Aunt Amina’s house smelled of sugar and butter, and the smell was strongest near the kitchen. This had not changed; the smell was still there, a bit fainter perhaps but unmistakable over the pots and pans arranged carefully on the marble shelves, on the towels that hung beside the washbasin. There I would stand by the mop bucket and peer through the windows into the courtyard below, into the world of the other wife. I would stand and listen for an echo of some spoken sentence or accidental glimpse into the world of this unnamed, unseen other woman. The courtyard looked just as it did when Aunt Amina lived there, before she had moved upstairs. The edges of its terracotta tiles were a bit more weathered, or there may have been more potted plants concealing the cracks along the wall. The clothesline was still there, sad and sagging as if weighted down by clothes for one person too many, groaning to bear more than it could possibly hold. This was the only tangible evidence of the second wife, the tunics and pants and scarves that had no right to be there, but remained nevertheless.
Every time I saw these pieces of clothing, I judged her with a secret ferocity that may have been too small to annihilate the woman herself but still burned within me with piercing indignation. If the tunic was red, I imagined the woman aglow with raging flames, tempting Uncle Sohail into new transgressions against my sweet and unassuming aunt. If it was purple, I imagined it as the darkness inspired by Satan, who had tempted her to invade another woman’s home and take for herself a man who was already a husband. The lurid colors affirmed for me our family’s superiority over this interloping woman, our muted palette of pastels and neutrals standing in stark contrast to the crude and aggressive shades of the other wife’s clothes hanging on the line. In my child’s mind, bright colors became persistently coarse and unapologetic, evidence that the woman’s heart was surely made of stone, ever reveling in her victory over my aunt, who preferred the quiet beige or the unassuming ivory.
As the months passed, Aunt Amina’s tight-lipped distraction yielded and a slow trickle of complaints began to flow in her daily phone calls to my grandmother or in unexpected lone visits on weekday afternoons. She always came during weeks when he was gone, the portion of the rotation that belonged to the other wife. In those fallow weeks Aunt Amina had no reason to wake in the morning, no breakfast to prepare or shirt buttons to sew. With a bitterness that accompanied her anguished voice like an aftertaste, she talked about the confused moments of waking up alone for the first time in a life spent surrounded by people.
Another time she spoke of preparing a curry, chopping the onions and heating the oil and realizing just as she was putting in the teaspoons of cumin and coriander and turmeric that there was no reason to make dinner that day, just like there was no reason to leave the bed in the morning, or to wash her face, or to change the clothes she had worn to sleep. The front room where the television was kept needed no straightening up and would remain cold and empty the rest of the day. At the end of these stories she laughed a laugh that was also new, a hollow, mirthless cackle that gave me the chills whether it came through a phone line or the partially closed door of my grandparents’ bedroom.
We heard almost nothing from her on the days he was there. These were, at least in the beginning, the days when old rhythms were restored and past meanings affirmed. She had a reason to wake and a face to gaze on, an arm to squeeze. There were reasons to bathe and occasions to touch, share a thought, or air a complaint. His presence was a reprieve from silence. No longer was she at the mercy of the television and its ramblings over the budget or the floods, empty words that invaded the grief-stricken, empty house around her.
His appearance represented the return of life, the force and fervor that fuels its persistence. On the days he returned waiting had a meaning. Three o’clock meant she should have dinner planned and be heading off to bathe and change out of the clothes she had cooked in. By four she should have pulled the laundry off the clothesline, ironed his clothes for the next day. By five, it was almost time for him to return, when the tea should be poured into the thermos, awaiting his step on the stairs. She was free from the familiar, worn outpourings of her own mind.
But even when she had him, she felt that she had him less than the other woman. After the nights he spent in her bed and ate at her table, the world that lay beyond the house and where he would return in the morning was one he shared only with his new wife. Then he would go to work, where they had met and, it was assumed, had fallen in love. The most wondrous of mornings following the most affectionate of breakfasts could be spoiled with this remembrance that came just before the sharp sting of his departure. With his receding steps came the vision of them settling in to their seats in the car, his glance at the other wife, perhaps the apology he offered every morning for having spent the night with another woman, the woman who was his duty but perhaps never his love.
JULY 13, 1987
They said the bomb had been hidden in a leather briefcase and left on the first landing of a crowded stairway in an even more crowded building. No one knew for sure; the charred hull left behind refused to give up that secret, silent and re
solute in its burned-out desolation. It stood dark and skeletal, like an unclothed corpse staring unbelievingly at the life that continued after its own death: the cars that still honked and the people that gaped and the shops that reopened.
On July 14, 1987, on my father’s fortieth birthday and one month before Pakistan commemorated the same anniversary, two bombs rocked Bohri Bazaar, the merchant relic from the city’s early days as a magnet for migrants. The blasts tore through the winding bazaar’s busy central artery and killed more than thirty people in an instant of conflagration. Hundreds more were injured as shards of brick and wood and glass propelled through the market.
After the blasts came the fire. Within minutes it coursed through one, then two, and then three buildings, hungry flames melting flesh and bringing down structures with impossible speed and ferocity. One building housed a restaurant, where minutes earlier women and children had been enjoying chilled sodas and plates of hot samosas. Within seconds they were all consumed by fire, along with dozens of vendors and their wooden carts of fragrant mangoes. Their sweetness, which on ordinary days could cover up so many varieties of unpleasant odors, failed to cover the stench of death.
My father brought the news home from work. He had heard the sound of the blasts miles away as he was preparing to leave for the day. The windows in his fifth-floor office on the outskirts of Saddar had shaken and threatened to shatter. Dozens of his colleagues, bored in the late-afternoon lassitude of the office, had started screaming and rushing for the dank stairwells where others stood smoking and chatting, oblivious. Everyone had rushed out, each with his own reasons for urgency. Some murmured about an aerial attack from India, others yelled that it was an earthquake, others less inventive or dramatic blamed a blown-up transformer on the roof of the building. Once outside, everyone milled about, bursting with the tense energy of an uncertain moment.
Within minutes Abdullah Haroon Road, the busy street that lay in front of the office building, was crammed with cars, each with five or six or even seven men squeezed inside, expectant but unmoving, their drivers honking and cursing out their windows. They still did not know where the sounds had come from. They wanted to be home at once. It took four hours for my father to make the usual half-hour journey home that night, and he arrived in time for the nine o’clock news. It did not mention the blasts at all, only that the president, General Zia ul Haque, would be visiting Karachi the next day.
The morning paper reported the details of the Bohri Bazaar blasts, the first of their kind in Karachi, now a city of eight million. One shop destroyed in the fires after the explosion was Liberty Uniforms. We read the news sitting around the same kitchen table where a few days ago my grandmother and mother had settled on a date for uniform shopping. It was Tuesday, the day we had planned to go.
AUGUST 1987
Of all the schemes hatched in post-Partition Pakistan, the plans for the Housing Societies proved to be one of the most ingenious. Their imprint would stay on the city long after the financiers and bureaucrats who thought it up were dead and gone. The scheme capitalized on a basic fear that germinated and flowered in every migrant heart in the city. Everyone who could afford the dream of building a house worried about who would build the one next to it, where they would come from, and whether they would be adequately respectable. Having come from villages deep inside India or dense urban communities in Delhi or Bombay where the Kokanis of Jama Masjid had lived for centuries, the immigrants to Pakistan had never endured proximity to strangers. The idea of slicing up suburban Karachi into craggy squares to be populated by the newly moneyed émigrés, who wished to stick together rather than be lost among strangers, was bound to make money, and it did. Previously scattered throughout the city, Gujaratis from Kathiawar, Kokanis from Bombay, and Memons from Cutch reconvened in the Housing Societies, with new money allowing them to gobble up the allotted plots or half plots and building on them the haphazard dream houses that had nested in their heads since they began their journey to Pakistan.
They reveled in the joys of living close to their kin once again, making their first Karachi experience of living among strangers seem like a passing penalty. The loud Punjabis from the north and the Sindhis who did not understand Urdu brought on bouts of fear and unease that could now be a thing of the past. Newly reunited, they felt safe, and even if they only barely knew the aunt’s cousin who now lived upstairs or they never spoke to the brother-in-law’s mother who lived next door, they could at last feel the familiarity they so longed for. Enabled by the Housing Society, they were once again in a position to peer into the lives of others. Determined to return to the old norms, they enacted time-tested rituals, pretexts like sending children for a cup of sugar to squirrel out the identity of guests glimpsed slipping in next door, or appearing uninvited at a kitchen door the morning after a night of overheard arguments.
What was best for community, however, was not always best for capital. The rotund, little land broker guiding an at-once eager and hesitant Said pronounced the land in Kokan Society to be a less than ideal investment. Instead, he suggested another Housing Society, not much farther away but more centrally located along the newly constructed main highways of the city. It was a migrant’s compromise between location and relation. Our house would not be in Kokan Society, but near enough for it to be watched and visited and located in the dense circuits through which news and gossip traversed. At the same time, being closer to the airport, to main streets and burgeoning commercial areas, it suggested a faster doubling, even tripling, in value.
When Aunt Amina married, she moved into the heart of Kokan Society, Karachi, where a mishmash of near and far relations from Bombay now resided. Hers was a house among narrow houses along a short lane, the inhabitants of each one staring at the house immediately opposite with the same mix of appraisal and affection. Her house was a single story, but those up and down the lane varied in height, giving the little lane the awkwardness of a group of mismatched cousins pushed together in a hurried family portrait.
When Aunt Amina arrived as a bride, she was heartened by the entwined lives of the people in her neighborhood. In the tentative first days of marriage, it was a constant reminder of all she had to be thankful for. When she nodded sympathetically to the complaints of the second cousin who lived next door, listened to the travails of sharing a kitchen with three other sisters-in-law and their five children, she felt an even greater love for her own tidy kitchen, untouched as it was by the manipulation of pushy mothers- and sisters-in-law. When a plate of still sizzling samosas arrived at her front door in the hands of some cousin’s ten-year-old boy, she was quick to return the gesture with a plate of kebabs sent back on the same plate a few days later. In those early days, the weekday silence of her own little house felt like a refuge, the calls and visits of neighbors a garnish on the lovely delicacy that was her own home.
The blush and bloom of those first honeymoon months had faded long before there was a new wife. The rhythm of life for the women who lived next door and down the street was dictated by the predictable phases of being: from daughter to wife to mother. Within a few months of her marriage, Shabana, the complaining cousin next door, sported a ripening belly that strained at the seams of the fitted tunics in her dowry. Six months passed and Amina’s own belly remained the same; her period arrived every month like a red flag of failure. Her mother counseled patience and prayer. The birth of Shabana’s baby, a son, was feted by boxes of sweets distributed to every family in the neighborhood. A year passed and Surrayya gave her a bottle of herbs to take every morning on an empty stomach with a glass of warm water. She took them for a month until they were gone, swallowing them fast to escape their bitterness. Still, her period arrived on time, and there was no baby.
In those later years, when Shabana or any of the neighborhood women visited her, they came to console themselves. The silence of Aunt Amina’s house, the pictures of smiling children cut from calendars and pasted on the walls, the toyless tidiness of the drawing room
sofas, which had been a rebuke to their own haphazard lives of nursing and pregnancy, now empowered them, reminders to all that their own offspring were a blessing and bounty; their flabby bellies and bloated bodies were battle scars of the truly blessed. Under their scrutiny Aunt Amina receded deeper into her house, collecting their slights even as she directed her own desperation into visits to doctors and healers and holy men. When she was in the middle of a cure there was hope, and when there was hope she said hello—to Shabana, her mother, or any woman in the neighborhood. When hope faltered, she receded, refusing to answer doorbells, averting her eyes in the short steps between car and doorway so as not to face another pitying gaze.
With the arrival of the second wife the eyes of neighbors focused with rejuvenated fervor on Aunt Amina’s newly enlarged house. In the evening, the women watched the lights turning on upstairs or downstairs; the men watched the comings and goings of Uncle Sohail, whether he ascended or descended the stairs between his two women, propounding at length about his dutiful virility. The oddity of the household, the only one on the lane where two women shared one man, provided a safe conversation topic at their own dinner tables, a reprieve from nagging concerns about jobs and money and traffic and schools. “Is Sohail upstairs or downstairs tonight?” always managed to draw a laugh from the most harried of housewives, the most overworked of husbands. Thus the newly recreated neighborhood of stragglers from Bombay, reunited on one short lane of houses in Karachi, had found a juicy drama that was reliable fodder for casual gossip.
The Upstairs Wife Page 11