The headscarf, like the husband, could have been a compromise meant to make Benazir, an icon of female power, a little more familiar and feminine. Asif Zardari, the scion of a feudal family and who seemed to have little of her ideological fervor or her affinity for the people, grinned widely from under his curly moustache as his wife took the oath of office. Perhaps it didn’t matter to him whether it was money or marriage that made him powerful; all that mattered was the smug comfort that he indeed was.
DECEMBER 1988
In the dark inner rooms of the women’s wing of Karachi’s Central Jail, twenty-six-year-old Shahida Parveen could not see the new prime minister take the oath of office. The new prime minister had herself spent some time in the jail, between the episodes of house arrest and exile that had filled her life after her father’s execution and before she left the country. But on that day, Benazir Bhutto was far from the grim realities of the life of a woman prisoner like Shahida.
Inside prison walls, this day passed like any other, with Shahida and the other women taking care of the children they had been allowed to bring with them. Mothers nursed their babies and played with the toddlers dressed in donated hand-me-downs. The prison remained suspended in the endless monotony and degradations of punished life—time spent waiting for relatives who never came, and always at the mercy of the abusive male guards who did as they pleased with the women, especially those imprisoned for sex-related crimes.
Shahida Parveen was on death row, awaiting execution by stoning. A year earlier, she and her husband Mohammad Sarwar had been found guilty of adultery and sentenced by a trial court under the Zina and Hudood Ordinance that had been promulgated by General Zia ul Haque in 1979 to Islamize Pakistan. Their crime was the failure to register Shahida’s divorce from her first husband, which in the opinion of the trial court made her relations with her new husband automatically adulterous. The old marriage law, which was still on the books as part of Pakistan’s civil code, clashed with the general’s Islamic additions; Shahida Parveen had not known that divorces had to be registered, and so for the crime of marrying again, she had been declared an adulteress. The fact that she was pregnant counted as evidence of the act.
Shahida Parveen had not known about any of these laws, the old ones or the new ones. When her first husband attacked her in a fit of rage in his father’s house and yelled, “I divorce you,” once, twice, and then three times, and dragged her by the hair to the door, she had taken him at his word. So had everyone else—his parents, her parents, all their relatives and prying neighbors; everyone thought these words sufficient for a divorce. It was what they knew, what the imams in the neighborhood mosques told them: saying “I divorce you” three times was sufficient to get rid of a wife. But the Federal Shariat Court expressed a different opinion. The absence of a registered divorce meant that Shahida had been married when she took up with another man, and this errant wife must be disciplined.
In prison Shahida recalled a time when she believed her luck had changed, when a new marriage proposal had arrived a year after she had been forsaken by her husband. The suitor, Mohammad Sarwar, had been a simple man, and perhaps she would not have considered him back when she was young and whole and a virgin. But as a woman abandoned by her husband she was just grateful that her fate had not been sealed. How ironic it was, she thought as she lingered in prison, that by accepting this new opportunity for marriage she would be walking into an even more dire predicament.
But her new-found happiness was too much to bear for her first husband, Khushi Mohammad. As soon as he learned that she had married again, he raged and bellowed at anyone who would listen. A woman once his was always his, he declared. One of the men listening to his rants suggested he visit a lawyer. Khushi Mohammad found one who enlightened him about the laws, these weapons he could use to insure that the misery he had mandated could not be undone. With his lawyer’s help he now told a new story. He had never divorced Shahida, he now insisted; he had never registered the divorce, or even said the words three times. The woman was still his.
Shahida’s statement in own her defense ended up indicting her, because she could not provide documentary proof of her divorce from Khushi Mohammad. Under the Zina and Hudood Ordinance, her testimony amounted to a confession of adultery, because it did not deny her relationship with Mohammad Sarwar. Once she and Mohammad Sarwar, the man who had chosen to take a divorced woman as his wife, had admitted that they believed they were married, the case was closed, because no further proof that they were having intercourse was required. They were adulterers, and the punishment, they now knew, was death by stoning.
But suddenly, just a few days after Benazir Bhutto took office, Shahida Parveen and the women in Karachi Central Jail received news that an amnesty for all women prisoners had been granted by the new prime minister. All women except those imprisoned on charges of murder were to be released. It was a momentous announcement and the women who read it in the paper, the women who knew the laws and cared about rights, could almost hear the cheers going up in prisons, the droves of jubilant women cheering the young woman prime minister who had set them free.
At Shahida Parveen’s prison, however, there was only confusion. The released women sat on the steps, waiting and wailing. They had nowhere to go, as the families they had left behind did not wish to take them back. In their eyes these women were “dirty,” and no one knew what to do with them. “Think of your sisters,” one mother said over the telephone in the warden’s office. “Who will marry them if you return and remind everyone of your sins?” So the freed women sat on the steps, and some of them begged the wardens to take them back. Shahida was one of the women who had nowhere to go. If she went back to her neighborhood, Khushi Mohammad stood waiting, ready to exact the bloody revenge the new prime minister had forestalled. The women would be freed, but the law responsible for their imprisonment remained defiantly on the books of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
SEPTEMBER 1990
Three mosques stood to the west, north, and southeast of our house. The mosque to the west was called the Mosque of the Truthful, or the Masjid-e-Siddiqia, and it was the one whose calls to prayer pierced the air outside our windows. When we heard the muezzin clearing his throat by the microphone, my mother or grandmother and I, the women who prayed at home, would scramble to finish what we were doing—the final stirs to a curry, a hurried end to a phone conversation, some gobbled last lines of a juicy novel—as the sound was broadcast throughout the neighborhood. We would rush to our ablutions, take the special long scarves free of the stains and wear of daily life, lay out the prayer mats, and begin to pray.
I had never been to any of the mosques and I never wondered why. I didn’t know a single woman who had ever been to a mosque or had any interest in going. The idea of staying home was sold as a reprieve unavailable to men. Men, by command of the Holy Quran and the Hadith, the sayings of the Holy Prophet, were required to pray in congregation, making the trek from their homes to whichever mosque was closest, stand shoulder to shoulder with other men, rich with poor, friends with strangers, all united in the fellowship of the Muslim community. How lucky women were not to have to troop outside at dawn or in the afternoon heat, many women would say. Besides, having the men leave for a while provided a respite of its own, from making cups of tea or conversation or whatever else their presence required.
But there were things we did not know. Since only the men went to the mosques, they were the only ones to hear the Friday sermons, which during the winter of 1990 kept stubbornly coming back to the subject of women. To the purely male congregation the imam of Masjid-e-Siddiqia and other mosques named for blessings and righteousness and Mecca and Medina, the men preached about the horror of having a woman lead the country. They poised their sermons on the backs of a single hadith from Bukhari: “Those who entrust their affairs to women will never know prosperity.”
If we had really strained our ears at home, pressed our ears to the windows and shut out all the sounds o
f televisions or radios, we may have been able to hear a bit of what was said. We did not do so, and it was not certain that we would have cared if we did. When we laid our prayer mats, we didn’t think about the country’s leadership and we didn’t pray as a community. My grandmother prayed downstairs by herself in her room, joined sometimes by Aunt Amina when she visited. My mother prayed upstairs in her own room, with me sidling up by her mat if I arrived just in time.
In the mosque, with its lines of men arranged behind a single man, the issue of who led whom must have seemed far more immediate. The idea of all of them congregated behind a woman was too blasphemous to imagine. It was that nightmare perhaps that whetted the consciences of the righteous all around the country, and it had now been realized. And in every mosque the man at the pulpit could describe in lurid detail the consequences of this nasty deviation.
The insistent fecundity of Benazir Bhutto stirred the lusty imaginations of the men in the mosques, amplifying their visions of the ruin that could be wrought by a wily female at the reins of the nation. Exactly nine months after her wedding, as Benazir Bhutto was campaigning for the first democratic elections in a decade, she had given birth to a baby boy, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. Now, as prime minister she was pregnant again, expanding her brood and her cabinet, flaunting a swollen belly behind podiums at state functions. There she was on every evening newscast, her scarf slipping from her head often enough to be fit for a caricature on comedy shows, and failing to find the right Urdu word for the English thought she wished to express.
One man was particularly perturbed, and when Benazir Bhutto was seven months pregnant with her second child, he decided that he would make his move. Exactly one year after the elections that brought her to power Benazir Bhutto faced a no-confidence motion from Parliament that had elected her as their leader. The move was led by a man she had known well, her uncle Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, whose hundreds of acres of land lay not far from her own fiefdom and who, along with her father, was one of the founders of the Pakistan People’s Party. Even in this battle, the charge against one Bhutto was led by another Bhutto who held opposing views, who felt perhaps that a male Bhutto deserved the legacy a female had usurped.
On the chilly morning of November 2, 1989, hundreds of Pakistan’s elected leaders trooped into Parliament House in their starched tunics and trousers. Many had been sequestered for days in an unidentified location at the foothills of the mountains near the capital. Benazir’s party was fighting to keep her in power, and the opposition wished to oust her.
The opposition’s arguments pivoted on the assertion that Islamic tradition did not allow a woman to be a head of state. The country had gone through such pains to begin the path of Islamization, the speakers attested, and the Constitution clearly stated that the Holy Quran and the Sunnah took precedence over all else. The Sunnah exhorted against entrusting any affairs at all to women, let alone the affairs of state. With a woman at the helm, the country of the pure would never be a country of the prosperous.
Amid the din of angry men booing and pounding their desks, Benazir Bhutto stood up to address Parliament that morning. She defended herself and her husband against the baseless charges of corruption that her detractors had leveled against her, reminding everyone of the tremendous price she had paid for power, the exile, the jail terms, the threats that she and her father, a martyr for democracy, had made for the nation.
When the votes were counted for the no-confidence motion, the opposition had won only 107 of the 119 votes it needed to succeed. The votes of only twelve men had prevented the ouster of the woman at the helm. Her speech had worked, at least this time. Just eight weeks later, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto gave birth again, this time to a baby girl she named Bakhtawar.
NOVEMBER 1989
Aunt Amina was moving upstairs again. The third floor, so new that it still smelled of paint and plaster and had the tools of workmen littered in some corners, was not, after all, for a new wife. No one had expected it, but the judgments of those previously betrayed are never quite sound. So it was quite likely that Surrayya, her brow furrowing into a million crinkles at even the mention of Uncle Sohail’s construction project, did not exhale until Aunt Amina mentioned that her move upstairs would be accompanied by the arrival of renters downstairs, and provided some details as to their identity.
With the dust from the carpenter making cabinets for her new kitchen mixing with the dust that rose in funnels from the cricket ground across the street, Aunt Amina moved a level above. The edges of her mouth, turned like the petals of a wilting flower, did not change their course. Nor did the catalogue of complaints that recorded the time and temperature of every one of Uncle Sohail’s injustices become any less exact in its appraisals. Aunt Amina, with the entitlement of a queen who never questions the justice of the tithes that fill her coffers, moved upstairs to the floor built from the proceeds of her tormentor’s employment.
Perhaps the initial arrangement had been unpalatable to all the women involved if not the man at the center. If Aunt Amina could not stop herself from listening in, from imputing meanings to groans and sighs and creaks and squeaks, it could just as well be that the second wife could not rid herself of the ghost of the deposed woman that lived upstairs.
The unseen does not disappear, but heavy curtains and solidly built subterfuges can make denial a possibility. Such was the case with Aunt Amina’s move to the third floor, the first occasion since the tragedy that religious duty or compulsory custom had not mandated and that she had decided was worthy of celebration. At the dinner she held for us a few weeks after the move, she allowed an excited Uncle Sohail, constantly smoothing his moustache into the twirled ends befitting a man with two wives and a three-story house, to show us every nook and cranny of the new addition to his empire. From Aunt Amina, there were just a few sidelong smirks and eye-rolling grimaces behind his sweaty, house-proud back, the most pronounced when he showed us around the waist-high roof terrace where he had chosen to lay flooring in case they built yet another floor.
A day or two after that dinner we had to pay an unannounced visit to Aunt Amina in her new house, with its custom kitchen cabinets and bathrooms with showers instead of cups and buckets. Our visit was because of a simple act of forgetfulness, the sort of mindless misplacement that happens all the time. On her last visit to our house, Aunt Amina had forgotten to take with her the latest volume of Pakeezah Digest.
Pakeezah, or “pure woman,” was a digest containing serialized stories to which my grandmother and Aunt Amina shared a subscription. It was a densely packed volume, its miniscule print cramming thousands of Urdu words onto its pages like all the angry wives of the city suddenly letting go. There were no pictures inside, but the cover always caught my attention and held it. It was invariably a painted portrait of a beautiful woman with a distressed expression.
And so it was that at half past five on an April afternoon, when Karachi’s crows lined up on electric wires waiting for dusk and Karachi’s wealthy were rising from their afternoon naps, that we pulled up before Uncle Sohail’s enlarged house for the delivery of the digest. I was sent upstairs by myself with it, the fumes of whitewash a sharp, heady noseful in the landings between each level. The gradient of the stairs became a bit less steep as you climbed up, as if the faith of the builder in the height of his creation had improved as he got farther and farther away from the ground.
And at the top, Aunt Amina was waiting, in the long housedress she wore on weekdays when Uncle Sohail was not expected. Her hair hung along her back in a loose braid, her face was devoid of adornment, her whole being a picture of the carelessness of one not expecting anyone. She had been expecting the digest though, and she grabbed it from my hand. Her evening’s entertainment had arrived, and I received a hug and a kiss and a prayer for the delivery.
It was on the landing between the second and first floor, where the stairs changed and became uncertain that I saw the other wife. It was the suddenness that stung and stunned at the same
time. She stood at the doorway of the second landing, the spot where I had stopped hundreds of times on visits over scores of years, for until a few bare months before it had been the threshold to my aunt’s house.
There she was, real and large and not at all the woman I had conjured up over the five years she lived in the shadow of our lives. Her face was ordinary, a sweat-beaded face indistinguishable from a million other faces on a hot, humid day in Karachi. It wasn’t ominous or striking; it was round, like a tired beige moon long relieved of the expectations of illumination. The temples and the nose were dotted with the scars of previous pimples, and a thin layer of smoothed hair suggested a small bun behind the fleshy neck that connected face to body.
She disappointed, not because she was pretty or even ugly or interesting or boring or tall or short or intelligent looking or bearing on her forehead the telling mark of the simpleminded. She was a shock because she was so unremarkable, so lacking in anything special that as a result, she became an affront to the provocative idea we had constructed in her place. Uncle Sohail’s second wife was like the lady you might meet at a visit to the next-door neighbors’, or like the woman you could join with in accusing the tomato seller of being an extortionist, or like someone you might greet respectfully as the mother of some girl who was a friend of a friend. In her bland regularity she was an accusation as vexing and confusing as the betrayal she represented.
I said nothing to her that day, no greeting, no smirk, no angry glance, no truthful remonstrance, not a single word. An exchange would have bound us in too intimate a connection. I rushed downstairs slipping on the crumbling edges of the steps and said nothing at all to anyone.
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