The Upstairs Wife

by Rafia Zakaria

  At least an hour after the accident the incident was revealed to be different. A new generation of girls had been brought up behind the walls of that educational facility, unprivileged girls raised just like Bushra Zaidi inside the tight limits of airless rooms and insecure respectability, Karachi girls who had believed in college and education, and stared down and dodged the very buses that had killed their classmate. When these girls heard that no police report had been filed and no charges lodged against the driver for killing Bushra Zaidi, they grew agitated. Wet with tears and reddened with anger, they congregated in clusters around the cheap, painted desks, holding textbooks of anatomy and geography and Urdu literature, sweating and crying under the slow-moving fans. Their anguish and frustration swelled when their teachers tried to force them to sit down and fix their gaze once again at the blackboards covered with equations. They refused. When they were pushed out of the classrooms, they collected in the corridors; when they were pushed out of the corridors, they came outside.

  Hours after Bushra Zaidi died on the street outside Sir Syed Girls College, the girls came out into the heat, into the hordes of men that still waited at the gates, into the blood puddles that marked the spot where their friends were hit. The police who had surrounded the college after the incident, the police who were refusing to register a report against the driver, now panicked. They had never before seen girls emerge into a street, young girls, college girls shouting slogans. The crowd of girls grew as more and more emerged from the buildings. A few hours after Bushra Zaidi’s death, in the scorching late afternoon heat of a Karachi April, the street was full of angry, young girls. Slowly, the demonstration inched toward a police van parked outside the gate, their every step forward marked with their collective chant for justice for the dead Bushra.

  The policemen in the van were outnumbered. Rather than standing by, allowing the wispy, unarmed girls their protest, they charged at them with the police van. It was mayhem. One girl at the front of the line folded to the ground in the first frontal assault of the van. Then the policemen in their black and khaki uniforms stormed the crowd of chanting girls and began to beat them with batons. These were untouched girls who never spoke to strange men, girls who were permitted to leave their homes only to get an education, girls who asked shopkeepers to place objects on counters to avoid even the barest brush of a male hand, girls who had never protested.

  The policemen didn’t care. They grabbed and groped the girls, their breasts, faces, and hair, intent on teaching them a lesson. They were being taught not to leave the boundaries of their campus, not to ask for something the men did not want to give them; they were being taught the consequences for speaking up. Other police vans arrived, with more men and more batons and more guns and more anger. Crumpled by their numbers and their guns, the weeping, beaten girls retreated inside the college walls and the terrified college administration shut the gates to hold back the swarm of armed police. But the military assault on the girls continued. Shells were lobbed over the college walls, streaming tear gas through the open windows of the buildings and leaving hundreds of girls crouched on the ground, coughing, sputtering, and crying.

  After the killing of Bushra Zaidi, Karachi erupted. The story of the dead girl and the man who murdered her were whittled down to their ethnicities. She was Muhajir and he was Pashtun; she was dead and he was free. It was as if every festering suspicion, every slight between every Muhajir and every Pashtun had to be avenged. Angry Muhajir mobs set fire to Pashtun buses, their burned-out carcasses left charred and sulking at every intersection. Orangi Town, the slum that housed the children and grandchildren of the refugees, became the center of conflict, with Muhajirs fighting Pashtuns and gangs of Pashtuns striking back.

  It was the beginning of an ethnic war that would outlive them all. In the days that followed, hundreds died, and from their blood a fifth ethnicity emerged in Pakistan. There were no longer Sindhis, Punjabis, Balochis, and Pashtuns, each neatly attached to a province in a country that then had four of them. This new ethnicity was called “Muhajir,” or “refugee,” an umbrella name for all those whose families migrated to Pakistan post-1947, all those who now lived in a Karachi straining at its seams.

  Justice for Bushra Zaidi’s death did not come until almost two years later, and it was a justice erected on the shoulders of ethnicity, of who belonged where. On November 16, 1988, national elections were held all over Pakistan. It was the first time Pakistanis had voted since 1971 and they were electing a prime minister after more than a decade of military rule.

  On the eve of the election Karachi vacillated between two powerful women. On one end, at her tree-lined mansion by the sea, was the newlywed Benazir Bhutto, whose party won a national majority of seats. As the sun set that day, she knew her party was the only one with a majority and that for the first time in history a woman would serve as prime minister of a Muslim country. But on the inner edges of the city, in the slums of Orangi, in the squat houses of Nazimabad, in the teeming flats of Gulshan-e-Iqbal and Gulistan-e-Jauhar, another celebration reigned. Benazir had won the country, but she had lost Karachi. The city and nearly every electoral seat in it had been swept by the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (a political movement to obtain equal rights for Muhajirs, migrants from India). Their victory was a victory for another woman, the dead but not forgotten Bushra Zaidi.

  NOVEMBER 1988

  Uncle Sohail wanted to add a new floor to his house. The plot on which the house stood was small, a half plot really, as my grandmother had once smirked. It didn’t have a garden or even a straggly backyard onto which the house could be expanded, so he decided to build up. It was not a novel trajectory; many in our neighborhood and throughout the city were doing the same. We could see stubby two-stories sprouting stately third ones all over the place, with balconies staring smugly over the roofs beneath them. Others squashed new bedrooms with attached bathrooms and even sitting rooms into what were once courtyards. These new rooms could then be crammed with chintzy sofas and stereo sets carted back by brothers and sons in Dubai. There was no longer any room for gardens; they were now abandoned as homeowners came to accept the limits of what they could coax out of stingy Karachi soil. They needed room for the next generation or for new arrivals to Karachi: daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and sometimes even their children. The bigger the brood, the taller the edifice. The bigness of a house, the numbers of grandchildren scurrying about, these dutiful homages also suggested a victory against that other burden of migration—the loss of the brood. It was a victory that the people of Karachi liked to publicize: the reassembled brood, all housed in one humungous space, was a testament to an immigrant family’s success. Riches and relatives, the best of both worlds brought together.

  The fervor to keep the clan together was further fueled by Karachi’s economies of scale. In newly swollen Karachi, a good job at a bank or managing a small shop now meant a life of eternal cohabitation where all your roommates would be relatives.

  Naturally, these additions never matched the original houses. Either the people had changed and realized their dreams did not fit the city, or the city had changed, had become bigger and fuller with new migrants atop old ones. Its new size required new dreams, and the distance between the two was sometimes reflected in the mismatch of the architecture. If the ground floor had been square and angular, built in the modest aspirations of first migrants, then the next one would be curvy and ornate, with flourishes of plaster flowers stuck on every surface. The second and third floors were the tastes of a new generation, raised on different visions, interested in aping other sensibilities. Sometimes this generational rebellion was subtle and reflected only in the choice of color and paint; one addition painted lime green and pink, and stuck to its unwilling beige parental wing in an act of unwilling compromise.

  Uncle Sohail’s case was different. The additions to his house reflected the desires not of a second generation but a second bride, and one who had moved in hoping for a child. Now, three years later, th
ere was still no baby. So, during an ordinary afternoon visit, when Aunt Amina told us of his plans to build again, we gasped. This bit about constructing another level to the house immediately put meat and gristle on the bones of our suspicions. A man who could marry twice could certainly marry a third time; why else would he need a new addition?

  We couldn’t tell what Aunt Amina thought of the development. In the three years since the arrival of the second wife, her face had hardened into an impenetrable cast, broken only by outbursts that had become predictable to us. But we all focused on Aunt Amina as we considered the possibility that Aziza Apa was on the hunt for a third wife for Uncle Sohail. She had never really been able to choose the second wife, and perhaps now with proof that Sohail had not chosen the right woman to beget babies, she could get him a younger one. Maybe it would be third daughter of some poor family, too desperate not to relegate their daughter to being a third choice or to subject her to a gynecological exam to make sure that this time there would be no room for error.

  As our speculations brewed, Aunt Amina remained solidly on my grandmother’s bed, quiet, her face stuck in the sort of immobility she had perfected in the two years since her betrayal. When she did speak, it was only briefly, offering minimal details. There wasn’t a third wife, she said. It was the second wife who wished to build the extra story from her own money earned at the bank. Sohail, however, had said that the newest part of the house would belong to Amina, as she was the first. The lowest floor would be rented out, he had triumphantly told her as the cement trucks and the contractor started to pull up. “Just think, Amina, an extra five thousand rupees every month for no work at all” was how he rationalized it. The new wife could not make him a father, but she had made him a landlord.

  NOVEMBER 22, 1988

  The chill had settled in stubbornly, and the women of the Bangash tribe in Parachinar, in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province shivered underneath their quilts as they put out the kerosene lanterns. It had been a busy day for them; seven goats had been slaughtered. Little boys, still permitted to roam among women, brought them into their courtyards to be cleaned, trimmed, and deboned.

  The best meat was always cooked on the day of the slaughter, in large metal cauldrons dragged out for the occasion and emptied of their stores of lentils, scraps of cloth, even a bottle or two of perfume oil someone’s husband had brought back from the city. The little boys helped drag them out, their surfaces like smooth coins that had passed many hands. In these cauldrons, set on the stones of hot coal fires, the fresh meat would be braised in clarified butter that had been made from the fat of slaughters past.

  The tribe was celebrating the return of fighters, men who had gone off as youths to aid in the battle against the Soviets. They told stories of the sulky retreat of Soviet soldiers, their tanks casting sad lines of defeat on the snow of the Salang Pass. The men laughed as they recounted this, slapping each other on the back, their guns having been slung against the pillar at the entrance. The older men spoke of earlier wars, the oldest told of the British who also had come and drawn a line in the mountains that rose up beyond their horizon between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The white men had failed again, the toothless elder chortled in a voice that was barely a creak among the booming laughter of the young men.

  The white men would fail again, the soldiers had told themselves as they hungered for fresh bread, as they watched gangrene creeping up the limbs of injured comrades on a rain-soaked night they were certain would be their last. But they did not think of those nights now as the smoke from the cooking fires rose. The day passed in triumphant stories, and the boys who had ferried the plates of meat into the courtyard hours earlier were sent to exhort the women to hurry.

  The food was ready before dusk—rice, meat, bread, and huge dishes of yogurt. The eating began and the talking continued and their spirits rose to even greater heights. Outside as the night grew darker, their voices, lulled by food, faded into a slow contentment. The air chilled, and the embers flickered with red, the smell of wood smoke mixing with the smell of bones picked clean. The men drifted off to sleep, satiated and content to be in the company of their comrades rather than the women who had waited for them.

  The women too were asleep, save one or two nursing mothers fumbling in the darkness to feed their babies. The young mothers curled up in the folds of their worn velvet quilts and stared up at the clear, star-sprinkled sky, dreaming of the future, perhaps with one of the men who had returned.

  It was from the sky that the horror descended that night, when the high sparkles that looked like stars suddenly began to fall. Those who were still awake would have seen the hurtling plane and the encroaching shadow of a second, smaller plane; and finally they would have heard the scream of the missile. Everyone else would remember only the explosions.

  Men, awaking with a violent jolt, reached for their guns and ran toward the flaming debris that littered the square where they had convened so joyously just hours earlier. Pieces of burning cloth and flesh fell from the sky and scattered through Parachinar, one of the Pakistani towns closest to the Afghanistan border. The women wailed and screamed, their voices rising over the flames and black clouds of burning fuel.

  The first bodies that the men found were women, recognizable by the remnants of their long hair, somehow untouched by the flames. The men covered them with the cloths they had wrapped around their necks, leaving other women to care for their bodies. Whether dead or alive, women could only be taken care of by other women. Later, the women of Parachinar bathed and dressed the dead women, and then a single man was permitted to enter and carry one shrouded body at a time, taking care not to touch it by chance even once. The burial prayers could be said only by the men, and they were done before dawn.

  Just when the women from the sky had been covered by the earth, brown trucks with green and white flags arrived, full of soldiers in crisp khaki shouting commands in Urdu and Punjabi, which neither the men nor the women could understand. They corralled the men away from the still smoldering wreckage, their commander conferring with the elder in a terse conversation that reminded all of past promises that had been made between the tribe and the military. This was the Pakistani military’s catastrophe to manage, and the tribe would be compensated. The men held back and watched, unsure but grounded in their places, as twenty-eight bodies were carried from the wreckage into the vans. They did not tell the military men about the two bodies they had buried; perhaps they were scared by what they might do.

  For three months the military men would not say what happened in Parachinar. The people who witnessed the incident would not tell their story for years. The bodies from the Afghan transport plane carrying thirty passengers that was shot down by a Pakistani F-16 would not be returned until the military could come up with an explanation. The Pakistan Ministry of Defense issued a statement saying “that a plane had been shot down by ground fire near Parachinar and that everyone on board had died.” A press report issued later quoted a spokesperson from the ministry as saying that the plane had been asked to identify itself, and when it did not, it was destroyed.

  Three months later a Red Cross plane carried twenty-eight bodies over Parachinar and back to Afghanistan, finally taking them home to be buried. They took with them a message from Pakistan to Afghanistan. With the Soviets gone and Zia dead, a new Pakistani military was in charge. In this new arrangement, the border straddled by Parachinar was real when the Pakistanis said so, and the night when the Bangash celebrated the return of their victorious fighters was the night when Pakistan had deemed that a lost Afghan plane was an enemy Afghan plane.

  DECEMBER 2, 1988

  Dressed in a satiny green shalwar kamiz, her head demurely covered in a white headscarf, Benazir Bhutto, at thirty-five years of age, took the oath of office, the youngest and first female prime minister of Pakistan. The image of her standing next to President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who had fewer than six months earlier announced the death of General Zia ul Haque, was splashed acr
oss newspapers all around the world. A woman, young and beautiful, recently married and not yet a mother, was about to lead an Islamic Republic that had for more than a decade been ruled by a military dictator who had executed her father.

  In the front row of the Grand Reception Hall of the National Assembly Building, where the ceremony was held, sat her mother, Nusrat Bhutto; her sister, Sanam Bhutto; and Asif Ali Zardari, the husband she had married a year earlier. It began, as official ceremonies always do, with a recitation from the Holy Quran. The man who recited the verses looked down at the Quran and never once looked up at the woman who would lead him.

  It all seemed unbelievable in its speed and cruel serendipity. Just before Zia had died, the most prominent religious clerics had slapped their palms together and smoothed their beards in triumph as General Zia ul Haque had promulgated the Shariat Ordinance of 1988, saturating the bureaucracy of Pakistan with religious clerics. A new court had been created to enforce this law. The Federal Shariat Court’s sole function was to police every jurisdiction in the country for any departure from the word of the Holy Quran and the Sunnah. This June decree was a victory for the mullahs, as they declared that Pakistan had finally been reclaimed for Islam. And now in December they were confronted with a catastrophe worse than they could have foreseen. A woman, who under the dictates of Shariat law could not be allowed to lead prayer and whose testimony in court would be counted as only half of a man’s, was now taking the oath of office to lead the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

  While the mullahs squirmed and wept, her political opponents, also defeated men, wondered at the path of compromises that had got Benazir Bhutto to that podium. The oath itself had to begin with a series of assurances that, while she may be a woman, she was still a good Muslim and believed that the Holy Quran was supreme. The headscarf she wore that day, and every day in office that would follow, was yet another assurance. Everyone knew that Benazir Bhutto had not covered her hair until she became a contender for her father’s political legacy, the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party, and now Pakistan itself.