The Upstairs Wife

by Rafia Zakaria

  By 1988 the Afghan mujahideen would prevail, having been fueled in part by the boys sent from Karachi, from places of refuge and reinvention just like Madrassa Jamia Binoria. The Soviet Army, so far superior in arms and armor, in numbers and structures, would fully retreat from Afghanistan over the next year. The supply chain that sent the jihadis, however, remained intact. The destitute boys were raised on piety and produced for war. With the ending of one war, their turbaned teachers guessed, another would begin, and so the constant stream of pious fighters kept making their way from the southern city of Karachi to the battlefield of the day.

  DECEMBER 18, 1987

  One year after Uncle Sohail took a second wife, another strange wedding took place in Karachi. Like so many others, the marriage was arranged. Like so many others, it brought together a pretty bride with an unsmiling groom. But unlike so many others, this one was watched on television by all of Pakistan, a nation captivated by the bride, who, as the daughter of an executed prime minister, attracted a special kind of attention.

  In the week of December 18, 1987, Benazir Bhutto wed Asif Ali Zardari before a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people. Every corner of the city echoed with the sounds of the celebrations. Gunshots were fired into the air by bands of Pakistan People’s Party supporters, riding in open truck beds, shooting theirs guns into the air, and yelling, “Long live Bhutto!” at every intersection. They were young, wiry Baloch men from the slums around the Lyari River wearing tight T-shirts and stonewashed jeans, and even darker men from the interior of Sindh, heads topped with mirrored caps, one shoulder slung with burgundy and black patterns of their ajrak scarves and the other with a rifle. Not that the guns were scary—we saw plenty of those on the shoulders of the military men who had ruled us for the past decade (even our Pakistan Studies textbooks included helpful lists of the different sorts of guns). It was something about the men themselves, their cheers bearing something primal, something wild suddenly set loose in the city. We were used to the artificial order and the façade of contentment. Benazir’s supporters, these voices of democracy, sounded to us like the voices of anarchy.

  In the middle of all this was the bride, one unlike any I had ever seen before. She was not young, she was not coy, she was not shy, and she was not demure. She was not dressed in the heavy finery of a bride, in brocade thick with gold and silver or flanked on either side by the women who would help her walk, eyes downcast, into the guardianship of her husband. Around her neck and on her fingers were only a few jewels, not the scores of necklaces and bangles and rings with which families showed the largesse of what they were giving and what they were taking. Benazir looked like only a bare shadow of a bride. Her neck bore only a single necklace, many of her fingers were bare, and her wrists were festooned not in gold but in glass, the red, green, and black of the Pakistan People’s Party. Her head was covered, but she sat up straight, looking not down at her hennaed hands, a prescription given to most in that role, but ahead, at something distant and impalpable. Every now and then she would turn to look at her groom, who sat nearly a foot apart on his own straight-backed chair. Partly festooned and partly simple, acquiescing but rebellious, happy but hesitant, she was something between bride and warrior, and to the eleven-year-old me, it was simply confusing.

  Her groom seemed as much a mismatch as her mien. If Benazir looked like a woman enduring a part, the man she was marrying looked like a scion of tradition reveling in his role. The most notable thing about him was his turban, a multistoried creation of cream-colored cloth that towered above his head, announcing his firm grip on all sorts of hereditary claims. He was a landlord from interior Sindh, and like Benazir, the scion of a feudal family, which came complete with serfs and vassals and hundreds and hundreds of acres of Pakistan. Above his lip curled a moustache that showed no courtesy to Western fashion or clean-shaven sophistication. He looked like many Pakistani men ached to look, like a man who had never made a cup of tea or had ever bowed to another man.

  The wedding carried on for days, as was expected in Pakistan. There were public and private celebrations. One of the public ones took place in Lyari, amid the tanneries and smoky factories where the inhabitants of the slum went to work. The wedding of their leader was to be a celebration for them, and by all accounts it was. Trucks laden with giant metal pots of biryani, the festive rice and mutton served at all weddings, parked behind the tent, doling out as much as any attendee could carry in the plastic bags and on the plates they brought with them. Inside the tent loudspeakers blared songs of praise for Benazir and Asif, and folksingers from Sindh clambered up and down the stage set in the middle, singing and cheering and dancing into the night, as the couple calmly watched over the proceedings.

  But if one Karachi slum celebrated, another mourned the return of the woman whose father they blamed for dividing their country, their villages, and even their families in half. In Orangi, the large, teeming slum on the other side of Karachi, life for hundreds of thousands of refugees was still as brutal and precarious as it had been when they arrived sixteen years earlier on the heels of the creation of Bangladesh. Benazir’s father’s pronouncement that no more of those who had stayed loyal to a united Pakistan could be taken into Karachi still echoed in their ears. With those words, their neighbors and relatives had been labeled traitors to the new Bangladesh and doomed to live in camps where they awaited their repatriation. Amid the gunshots and sounds of revelry, the people of Orangi remained cowering and quiet in their tin-roofed hovels, the smells of the open sewers and the smoke of the cooking fires hanging uncertainly all around them.

  What I did not know then and what stoked the skepticism of the adults around me, exhausted by the disruptions that had overtaken the city, was that all these celebrations were really election rallies. Benazir’s public wedding was a display of power. If she wore glass bangles, it was to convince the hordes of poor Lyari factory workers and landless peasants that she was like them, not rich but wronged, her father hanged by a general, her youth spent in jails. If she sat on her wedding dais stolid and decidedly unabashed, it was to demonstrate a point not to the man next to her but to the ones watching from afar. In her manner was a message to General Zia ul Haque, the man who still ruled Pakistan, that she was a woman undeterred and unafraid. That even after watching her father being taken to the gallows and witnessing his killer anointed as an absolute ruler, she remained courageous. If she did not look like a typical bride, it was because a powerful bride who wished to lead a country had never before been seen in Pakistan. The only thing that could not be explained then was the man she had chosen as her groom.

  DECEMBER 31, 1987

  So many years ago, on the first anniversary of Aunt Amina and Uncle Sohail’s marriage, my grandparents had thrown a big party for them. The house seemed full of weddings and festivities in those days. My second aunt was newly engaged and my grandparents were in search of a suitable wife for their only son, my father. A large party had made sense; the in-laws of two of the daughters could be wowed and entertained, and new ones solicited for the yet unmarried son. The cool December air carrying the scent of the flower garden would make its way into the hearts of would-be mothers-in-law.

  Aziza Apa had been a prominent guest at that first anniversary, taking on the role of the mother and father that Uncle Sohail did not have. It was she who fed the couple their first bites of cake, standing between them, the roles of mother-in-law and father-in-law coalescing into her single person. The moment was memorialized in a photograph, displayed for years in our sitting room.

  On the day of his thirteenth anniversary, Uncle Sohail came upstairs for breakfast with Aunt Amina. It had been agreed that the entire day and the next morning would belong to her, carved out of the week that otherwise belonged to the other wife. There had been some complications in coming up with the arrangement, as Aunt Amina had insisted that she wake up with him on the day of their anniversary. He reminded her that they had not woken up together on their wedding day, so spending
the one night together would more accurately recall the memory of that day. She had agreed, if reluctantly, and now she awaited him, listening to the slightest rustle of his step. He arrived adequately groggy eyed, his stale breath testifying that he had stayed true to his word and ascended the stairs as soon as he had risen. She heard his noises in the bathroom as she waited for the tea to come to a boil and fidgeted with the omelet she had prepared. Should she have squeezed out a few oranges, she wondered, as she heard the toilet flush and the water in the sink start to run? No, orange juice would seem apologetic, and she wanted to keep the balance of power as it was. He owed her this day; it was her right.

  He seemed happy as he ate breakfast, and she decided to be content. They had not yet decided what they would do that evening. She had so focused on winning that day, on relishing his presence upstairs and the delicious thought of the loneliness downstairs that she had not given much thought to the details of celebration. He spoke first and with a firmness that she remembered from before her demotion. “We will be going to Aziza Apa’s tonight,” he announced, puncturing her hopefulness. “Be ready by six o’clock. I will sound the horn from downstairs.”

  The day passed in swells of turbulent emotions. As Sohail and the new wife left for the day, she felt only despair. By lunchtime, a meal she usually didn’t eat, she felt a bit better, and better still when her mother called to ask after her. Surrayya, by now expertly delicate in her inquiries, did not mention the anniversary. Amina told her mother that she was to go to her in-laws’ that evening, and Surrayya helpfully counseled her that it was a mark of importance that Aziza Apa had invited her. To everyone else in the family—Sohail’s brothers and their nosy wives—it would show that Amina was still important, that their marriage was deserving of commemoration, that she was still equal as one wife of two, a permanent part of their family.

  Aunt Amina stretched that meager dose of reassurance, but by five o’clock its solace had dwindled, replaced by new sorrows and uncertainties. The recriminations that had angered her that morning, the feeling of being cheated, returned with full force as she put on a blue silk shalwar kamiz. Her doubts lingered as she sprayed her neck with perfume and slid on the eight gold bangles her mother had given her for her wedding thirteen years ago. By the time she stood by the window a whole fifteen minutes earlier than necessary, she felt that the fate of spending the evening with Aziza Apa, the woman who had played such a crucial role in her devastation, was as terrible as having to spend it alone.

  When she sat down next to him in the car, she could feel the seat’s warmth underneath her clothes. From the upstairs window she had watched him wait to press the horn until the second wife got out of the car, and the woman had dawdled, saying words Aunt Amina could not hear upstairs. After she heard the first-floor door slammed resolutely shut, she had dawdled herself, to prove she had not waited. When she turned her face to his, he seemed happy, but her nagging doubts prevented her from smiling as well. Was he happy to be with her, or because of those recent moments with the other woman, whom he really loved? She just couldn’t know for sure, so she decided to simply reply to his questions; she was fine, she had a good day, happy anniversary.

  The traffic thickened as they flowed into the main artery that connected the eastern part of Karachi to the dense suburb of Gulshan-e-Iqbal to the north, as bankers, electricians, plumbers, and shop clerks all tried to make it home to their high rises and little bungalows for the night. Aziza Apa had only recently moved there, the bounty of her husband’s employment in Dubai having finally yielded enough to move her and her four children from a fifth floor walk-up and land them in a house of their own. With her own parents-in-law dead and gone, and with her husband laboring on an oil rig in the Persian Gulf for most of the year, Aziza Apa spent her time there organizing the lives of her brothers and their wives.

  Cars and motorcycles jostled closer and closer to their little car as they passed Hassan Square, expertly shirking off the beggars who pressed their grimy hands against the glass, begging as they had been taught by the men who ruled the gangs to which they belonged. Uncle Sohail yelled at one of them, a ten-year-old urchin wiping a dirty cloth over their already clean windshield. “Bastard,” he hissed, breaking the silence they had chosen. Past Hassan Square the traffic thinned as they entered a part of Karachi that was far enough away to be still uncrowded. They passed the little park that she remembered as being just five minutes from Aziza Apa’s new house. It was empty except for a few men crouched in a corner, under a blanket. Addicted to heroin smuggled from Afghanistan, they were part of the landscape, like the slide and swing set that seemed forever untouched by children.

  Then they arrived at the house that Gulf money had built; it was painted brown, with “Mashallah” (Praise be to God) written in large, silver script across the upstairs balcony. The red and blue balloons tied to the gate confused her, as did the presence of the cotton-candy man standing just outside the gate. One brother-in-law was walking in as their car pulled up, carrying a large gift-wrapped box. Seeing him, Aunt Amina felt a small, unwanted pang of delight; could it be for them? Could it be that Aziza Apa had recanted, realized how much she had hurt her, decided to have a party that would make her feel welcome and restore her to dignity within the family?

  They left the car and went through the gate, past the tiny garden crammed with terracotta planters and a dry fountain. Aziza Apa’s face appeared at the door, children’s shouts and squeals behind her. Her face was a shade lighter, caked with “foreign” makeup her husband had brought her. Her large mouth, painted plum, spread into her hostess smile. “How lovely of you to come for my Shahid’s birthday,” she said, looking Aunt Amina up and down. They had not seen one another since Uncle Sohail had married again. As they stood at the door, Aziza Apa, on her tiptoes, looked through the space between their heads. “Where is she . . . Sohail?” she exclaimed. “Why did you not bring her as well?”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Woman in Charge

  APRIL 10, 1988

  The Stinger missiles first arrived in Karachi from the United States, cushioned in their crates like sleeping babies. On arrival they were cradled in the muscled arms of the Pakistan Navy, promising victory in a war that had haunted the region for a decade. At the Naval Station Mehran in Karachi, where they were unloaded, the Stinger missiles were placed in special containers and flanked by security convoys that would escort them the length of the country and across the border into war-torn Afghanistan.

  The lightness of the Stinger missiles made them well suited for transport over the rock-strewn, uncertain terrain. Once at their destination, they would fit easily atop the shoulders of fighters situated on the ground or wedged in the nooks of mountain passes and behind bushes. The Stingers were the magic bullet the boy soldiers scattered along the border were praying for, their heaven-sent help against the Soviet invaders. With these missiles the mujahid could finally take shots at the green tanks crawling like crabs through the crater-filled territory and at the black, low-flying helicopters that patrolled it from the sky. All they had to do was take the shakiest of aims and fire, and the heat-seeking Stinger missile would roar straight into the heart of the enemy’s steel carapace.

  On their way to these boys, the Stinger missiles stopped to rest in the city of Rawalpindi, just south of the small capital city of Islamabad, and set deep inside Pakistan in a cozy circle of green-topped hills. None of the ordinary citizens who lived in Rawalpindi knew then that the Stingers were stopping there, and those who did decided not to tell anyone. Rawalpindi served as general headquarters of the Pakistani military, from whose manicured lawns General Zia ul Haque, the president of Pakistan, ruled the country.

  At 10:00 a.m. on April 10, 1988, when the local housewives were just beginning to fry the onions for their daily curries and the schoolchildren had started to squirm in their seats in anticipation of recess, the blasts began. They came from a place known as Ojhri Camp, a depository for military weapons in the middle of Rawa
lpindi. Ojhri means innards, the discarded entrails of slaughtered animals, and now Ojhri Camp was on fire.

  Once the explosions began, they were everywhere. Bombs crammed with nails and gunpowder blasted into the sky; smooth, mango-sized grenades small enough to fit in a soldier’s pocket exploded in a bloody shower. The booms of dynamite added to the chorus in a wild cacophony of destruction that could only signal war. The Stingers too erupted, rising from the gray, unmarked warehouse. The missiles flew high in the morning sun of that feckless Rawalpindi morning, their furious ascent unfazed by the curtains of humidity that always settled on the city at that hour. When they had reached a point high enough to almost disappear, they began to crash down on houses and schools and mosques full of people. Some whizzed horizontally, flying low and hurling themselves indiscriminately at flesh and cars and buildings.

  The people surrounded by the blood and wreckage thought this was the Day of Judgment, the reckoning promised in the Holy Quran. No one knew who selected the targets that day, but the missiles erupted anyway, beckoned by the dense heat of vegetable sellers, paper peddlers, schoolchildren and housewives, the rich, the poor, everyone who happened to be nearby.

  Far away in Karachi, the city that had first welcomed the Stinger missiles into Pakistan’s arms, the news came through the state-run media. Inter Service Public Relations, the public relations arm of the military, had issued a communiqué announcing that thirty people had died and the situation was under control. It did not mention the thousands of critically injured people who still waited for medical attention, the fires that still burned, and the splintered homes that gaped up at a dusk that would not come.