SEPTEMBER 1987
The inhabitants of the suburban neighborhood in which we lived had built their mansions with the utmost care. Every detail, from the shade of marble floor to the type of flowers in their gardens to the hues of their bedroom curtains had been agonized over and considered at length. Each detail was important. The mansions were, after all, the realizations of dreams, and the transformation of what was wished for into what existed would determine the contentment of years to come.
Despite the painstaking care in the construction and decoration of the houses, there had been one instance of collective neglect; one crucial issue had been forgotten. None of them, not a single one, had considered how the consequences of large living would be discarded. None of the houses had a means for disposing of the trash that collected in their many waste bins and in reeking piles outside their kitchens.
This omission would not have been of particular note to us had it not been for our proximity to what was ultimately deemed to be the solution. Next to our house was a small square of empty land, one that had remained unoccupied even as houses sprang up all along the lane. Empty and unclaimed, it was this plot of land that became, for our neighbors, the answer to the problem of garbage, and for us a taunting nemesis.
The mountains of trash, testaments to just how well everyone was doing and how much they were eating, would grow. Fetid and fuming, the stench would rise, reeking far beyond the retaining walls around the square plot of land. Then, just as quietly as they came to dump their rubbish, these neighbors would light the trash on fire. The smoke from the burning trash would settle over our garden, wilt the brightly colored leaves of plants that my mother tended daily, and eclipse the otherwise heady scents of jasmine and gardenia. The acrid smoke of burning rubber and plastic and paper and fruit stung our eyes and seeped into our throats and put everyone in a terrible mood.
No one knew who owned this empty plot of land; inquiries had yielded only bits and pieces of a story—several owners, a court case, bureaucratic holdups and such, but no explanation of the mystery of how, in such a crowded city, this choice corner of land that faced a busy and increasingly important street could remain so resolutely vacant. Then one night, in the darkness of the ebbing summer when no one was paying attention, someone came with a scythe and cut down all the thorny bushes that had taken over the enclosed plot. A few of the bushes remained, the more compliant and shorter ones that hung about the edges, and in the middle two date palms laden with the ripe golden fruit that grows only in the desert.
There was much speculation the morning after this nocturnal beautification; perhaps all the complicated issues of the property dispute had been sorted out, my father and mother guessed, perhaps the plot finally was to be claimed by its rightful owners. Maybe now the owners would begin to fend off the piles of trash, and we could avoid the spires of chemical smoke that descended directly into our house following every garbage bonfire.
A fortnight later, when the Afghan men first arrived, everyone thought they were builders, laborers hired to erect whatever house the suddenly engaged owners of the empty plot had in mind. It was not unusual for construction workers, many of them migrants from Afghanistan, to live on the site while they were digging foundations and aligning concrete bricks. We saw them everywhere in Karachi, building banks and hospitals and houses, adding new floors and repairing crumbling ones, the dark browns and grays and blacks of their tunics the same colors as their cold country to the north, which had been at war for nearly as long as I had been alive. They were refugees, but the city tolerated them as long as they had a purpose, which usually involved building or selling something.
When they first came, they brought very little, a few dusty bedrolls tied up with rope and carried on their backs with thin, mangy pillows stuffed between. I watched them from an upstairs window that looked over the plot. There were four of them, one old and leathery faced, exuding weariness with each slow movement. Two others were middle-aged, with dark, unruly beards that curved down their chins; they looked always vigilant, their heads continually turning to look over their shoulders, their eyes darting here and then there in quick, expert scans. The fourth was just a little boy of six or eight. He was one of the ruddy-faced, sharp-featured children who plied Karachi’s trash heaps with giant parchment bags to fill with bottles and paper.
Behind the windows, I was as good as veiled, the height of the higher floor and the layers of glass and concrete and metal allowing me to indulge my curiosity and comfortably inspect their lives, faces, and intentions. After the bedrolls on the first day came tarps and posts. The morning after that there was a shelter, sprouting out of the darkness as if it had been there all along, its tarp roof neatly stretched over the posts, its two sides the perimeter walls of the empty plot. Inside they had put their bedrolls and a beat-up aluminum trunk. Outside, the old man had set up a kitchen, a blackened pot on a pyramid of firewood, its handle holding a single chipped light-blue cup.
In two or three days, the encampment had become a settlement, with its own rhythm and movements. It seemed untouched by the roar of traffic or the disapproving gazes coming from the big houses all around it. Sometimes I watched the three older men as they sat talking in the morning, shoulders hunched and legs crossed on a pallet they had woven from the leaves of the date palms. I could not hear them, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to decipher the Pashto they spoke. During the day the little boy was gone, filling his tarp bag with bottles and cans like all the other Afghan boys wandering over the border and then down to Karachi. I wondered if one of the three men was his father or maybe his brother. The old man either stayed in the shelter or came outside to tinker with pieces of wood or stare vacantly into visions only he could see. At dusk, he lit the fire, stoking the sticks until a small orange glow appeared under the pot and a thin snake of smoke rose into the sky.
The days passed and the men stayed. Others in the neighborhood had noticed their idle presence. The Punjabi family that lived across the street with young daughters about the same age as me became uncomfortable. Day after day the ground stood unbroken, construction implements were nowhere in sight, and neither was a foreman. One Saturday the father of the Punjabi girls showed up at our house to speak to my father. It was the first time the men had spoken of anything other than who dumped trash and who lit the fires. In those hostile chats my father had insisted he take responsibility, pointing out again and again that the crates of mangoes, the old tires, and the empty boxes were all things we had seen his family use. The neighbor refused every time, walking off in an enraged huff.
This conversation was different, the low voices and hushed tones an invitation to collusion. Clearly it was a matter of far greater import than the production and conflagration of trash. The Punjabi man was concerned about the men who overnight had deposited themselves in our midst. He had spoken to neighbor after neighbor, knocked on this door and that, and nobody had an answer. To get to the bottom of it, he had gone to the office of Karachi Municipal Corporation, where he had a friend in high places. Through his friend he had learned that there was no building project and no new resolution over whatever property squabble ailed the empty plot. The men were simply squatters, taking advantage of the quiet neighborhood to occupy a piece of land that had never belonged to them. With his hands in pockets of his green safari suit, the Punjabi neighbor pursed his lips into a thin line and delivered his conclusion. “We are all respectable people. We cannot allow this to happen . . . Our women are here alone during the day. Who knows about these men and what they might do?”
By the afternoon of the following day, the men were gone. I never discovered the details of their eviction, whether terse words were spoken or a few hundred rupees pressed into their palms, whether there had been any threats of calling the police or simply a polite request that they make their exit. They had taken everything they brought—the tarp, the poles, the bedrolls, and the trunk. The pot with its battered cup was there no longer. A small circular
spot of soot marked where they had made their fire, the lone remnant of their stay.
For a few days the plot remained silent and empty and clean. In the middle of the second week, a pile of rubbish was flung over the wall and into the plot. In the days that followed, the trash returned, piles of cardboard cartons, dead plants, broken toys heaping to greater and greater heights. Almost one month later, it was set on fire and the smoke, noxious and dark, billowed up into our house. We held our breath for as long as we could and said nothing at all.
NOVEMBER 1987
Aunt Amina had never mentioned celebrating her wedding anniversary. Perhaps as the first and second years of marriage sidled past into unmomentous anniversaries, and as the years became chastisements for the progeny that refused to appear, failing to transform them from a couple into a family, she gave up celebrating the day. It may have been too much work to remind Uncle Sohail to summon the ebullience the day seemed to require. So in recent years she had skipped it over, choosing as the day dawned and died to treat it like any ordinary day.
Now the anniversary mattered, because it fell during a week that belonged to the other wife. The day was hers, Aunt Amina fumed, and ignoring it now would signal an acceptance of the injustice that had become her life, a license to the two of them to deny her even more of what was rightfully hers. This prospect fueled her for many days, through the listless mornings and the silent evenings when she stood at her kitchen window, killing herself slowly with the sounds of their voices from the courtyard below. She imagined that at one time they might have considered her feelings, maybe forgoing an opportunity to mock her. But as the months passed they talked freely, laughed freely, teased freely, oblivious of the woman upstairs. The sounds may have been nothing or something or anything, but wafting into the silence upstairs they were always intimate and always conspiratorial; every squeal was one of delight, every groan proof of pleasure, every creak of the bed a reminder of their contentment.
Tormented as she was by the sea of passion she felt surging downstairs, retaking even a single day represented a victory, a salve for her wounds. She thought for long hours into the night when she should tell him that the date, December 31, was a few weeks away, preceded by a week that belonged to her, then occurring during one that didn’t, and then followed by another that did. Was it better to wait until the last minute, when they had made plans for the last day of the year? Would a sudden revelation that would leave her enemy alone on a day that she had looked forward to be more gratifying? Or should she simply tell him now, explain the reason with a stoic calm she was aching to perfect, one that immediately indicted and reminded him that he had forgotten the date, forgotten her, failed miserably in his duty to be perfectly just.
In the end victory was far more delectable than she had imagined. The next week when Uncle Sohail returned to her, he came with a request. She could see it in the awkward bend of his elbows as he rested them on the dinner table; she could see it settle like a film on his eyes. Uncle Sohail ladled curry over his rice, settled a chicken leg over it all, and started to speak. “You hate to travel, Amina,” he reminded her, slyly beginning with a past recrimination, a long-ago trip to Lahore that Aunt Amina had turned down because it conflicted with an appointment with a renowned fertility specialist. Then he cleared his throat and dived in: the bank where he worked wanted him and another employee to make a trip to Islamabad. Of course, with all his responsibilities at home, he did not want to go, but his bosses were insisting. In the smallest of voices he added, “You know she has never been to Islamabad, and the trip comes in her week.” Emboldened by having blurted it out, he went on and on: they would be gone only two days, from December 30 until January 1, and only if it was all right with Amina, and perhaps she could spend the days in her parents’ home?
When his mouth fell still, Aunt Amina crumpled. She screamed, she wept, she writhed. She fell from her chair and lay on the floor, she cursed him this torture and begged him for death. In her hysteria he lifted her up and took her to the bed. Amid the tears she spit accusations collected in her silent weeks. If he did not care for the marriage that came first, the wife he had claimed first, he should kill her now. Somewhere in the wetness of her unraveling she told him that he had forgotten the date of their marriage, the day he had brought her to this godforsaken house where she was a prisoner, waiting and watching as he lavished his love on someone else. She could not bear it anymore. If he wished to leave her alone on that day for his new bride, he might as well kill her.
Through the fog of her collapse, Aunt Amina heard him say no, say he was sorry, say that there would be no trip to Islamabad, that she would not have to endure the agony of an anniversary spent abandoned. He had made a mistake, she was right, the day was theirs and theirs alone, he would spend it with her and they would be together. When her sobs subsided and she began to lapse into sleep, he asked for permission to go downstairs and explain the situation, and Aunt Amina, lulled by exhaustion, granted it to him.
NOVEMBER 1987
The purpose of a marriage was a child. The purpose of bearing children was to eventually bear a male child. The purpose of a male child was to be an heir. According to Islamic doctrine, a child was only yours if it was related by blood, borne of your body or nursed at your breast. Boys born to a family were forbidden to marry girls born of the same mother or nursed by the same mother. Girls who were born to a family could appear unveiled before their fathers and before the boys born of the same mother or nursed by their mother. When there could not be a blood relation, there had to be a nursing relation. A child not yours by blood or by nursing, could never really be yours and could not inherit from his father. You could not, per the strictest interpretation of Islamic doctrine, appear before him unveiled. There was nothing forbidding an adoptive mother from marrying her son or an adoptive father from marrying his daughter. What was not forbidden was possible, and to prevent such deviant occurrences in the land of the pure, there were few adoptions.
There were many destitute children. They poured into Karachi every day. Some came with the droves of migrant families, clutching the hands of mothers who would be domestics, sweeping the floors and washing the clothes in wealthy or even modest homes. Others trailed behind fathers who would be stone masons or vegetable sellers or rickshaw drivers. The parents hoped they could convince an old village friend or a relation who had migrated years ago to give them a loan. Their children would work with them, becoming the boys who bagged vegetables for the customer, the girls who took care of the babies while their mothers wrung out the laundry. They came from villages all over Pakistan, their parents fleeing debts or disputes over bits of land too divided between siblings and generations to yield a living.
Some of these children ended up in a set of buildings at the edge of Karachi, where the city ended and the factories began. The buildings belonged to Madrassa Jamia Binoria, a huge complex stretching over more than twelve acres. The madrassa had been established in the late 1970s, and a decade had passed since the money from Arab sheikhs and wealthy benefactors, who expiated their commercial sins by sponsoring religious education for the children of the poor, had started to pour in. Other donors gave less frequently, but there were enough of them to sustain thousands of boys, ages five to eighteen, in the madrassa.
In a city where survival was tenuous, Madrassa Jamia Binoria presented the certainty of being fed and clothed and educated in the faith. It also presented the opportunity to remake your identity. In a city where ethnicities stuck together, whether in slums or housing societies, where one’s last name and dialect set up a customized set of obstacles, Jamia Binoria refused to discriminate and took in everyone. If Muhajirs and Pashtuns were fighting over who controlled the transportation system of Karachi, or if Punjabis used their dominance over the police force of the city to boss around everyone else, the purveyors of Jamia Binoria largely ignored these disputes. The boy sent over from Bahawalpur sat next to the orphan from Peshawar, their direction always aligned toward Mecc
a, and the ethnic mess of the city around them far from their instruction.
Madrassa Binoria was also into politics at a grander, more global scale. In the decade since it had been founded, it had, through a propitious collusion of politics and geography, entered the midst of a conflict that would be a global focal point into the next century. It was to Jamia Binoria that Afghani visitors from Kandahar and Kabul came in the late 1980s, and they did not come for tours through its shining halls or photo opportunities with children rocking back and forth as they memorized the Quran. They came for recruits. Ten years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it was Pakistani madrassas like Jamia Binoria, swelling with boys raised on piety and eager to defend Islam, that began to supply the insurgency fighting off the Soviet Army.
The best boys from Binoria, young men raised on a strict daily schedule that began and ended with prayer, whose breaks provided opportunities for instruction in Arabic, whose role models were the Holy Prophet and his companions in Medina, all aspired to be selected for jihad. Then, led by veterans of jihad who came to recruit them, they would head north to the Khyber Pass. There, on the vast, unmarked border between the two countries, they slipped into Afghanistan and to a camp that was expecting them. At Camp Yawar, in the craggy, steep hills filled with caves, they learned everything a guerilla needed to know: basic wiring to hook up explosives, the transformation of glass bottles into grenades, and the common chemical components of fertilizers and bombs. The training was hands-on, and progress through the course meant entry into an actual battlefield. To graduate was to enter the fight and aim a rocket at an outpost chock full of Soviet soldiers.
The Upstairs Wife Page 12