The Upstairs Wife
Page 17
CHAPTER 7
The Graveyards of Karachi
JANUARY 1990
It was not enough to be born in Karachi to be from Karachi. It was not enough to live in Karachi to be from Karachi. It was also not enough to be born in Karachi and to live in Karachi to be from Karachi. To be from Karachi, you had to prove that your father, and preferably his father before him, had been born in Karachi and lived in Karachi, and therefore were from Karachi. If you were from Karachi by these markers, you could claim to be from Sindh, the province in which Karachi was located. If you could claim to be from Sindh, you could claim a lot more—a larger quota for government jobs, a larger quota for seats in government colleges, a larger quota on belonging and so a greater chance of making your life in Karachi as comfortable as possible.
These facts of ancestry were captured in a document known as a domicile certificate. My brother, the first son born in Karachi after Pakistan became Pakistan, was the first to need one. The document was a registration requirement for the annual board examinations for the ninth grade administered by the Board of Education of Sindh province, the first of a series of exams and tests and forms and certificates that would be required as he tried to make his way to the coveted goal of medical school. The “domicile,” as it was called, was recorded along with the roll number my brother was to be assigned. In the vast machinery of government quotas and allotments, where opportunity and ethnic identity were so closely intertwined, this number would identify him to the examiners and appear with the marks he received for that examination and each one afterward. You could not take exams without having the number, and you could not receive the number without the domicile.
The domicile noted your ethnicity and hence also whether you belonged to one of Pakistan’s four major ethnic groups: Balochi, Pashtun, Punjabi, or Sindhi. If, like the millions of Muhajirs, you could not prove ancestry in Pakistan, you were left to compete for the tiny number of “merit” seats available in Pakistan’s public universities. In effect it meant that millions of students from Karachi, the children of Muhajirs, competed for a few thousand seats in the city’s government universities, while the rest were taken up by students who could claim Balochi, Pashtun, Punjabi, or Sindhi ethnicity based on their ancestors having been born, before Partition, in one of the four provinces of what would become Pakistan. Everyone else was a migrant, and so were their children and grandchildren.
That’s where we ran into trouble. My grandfather Said did not have a domicile because he had been born in India before Pakistan was created. My father, Abdullah, also did not have a domicile because he had also been born in India, a month before Pakistan came into existence. My brother, studying hard for his ninth grade examinations, in which he would be tested in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, Urdu, Sindhi, English, and Pakistan studies, also did not have a domicile. None of them could prove that they lived in Pakistan, had lived in Pakistan, or were from Karachi. A birth certificate was not enough, the tired clerk at the window of the General Inquiries Office of the Karachi Municipal Corporation told Said at four in the afternoon, just when he was about to clamp the shutter down. A birth certificate was not enough, the clerk repeated with the lazy ease and confidence of a well-worn incantation, thrusting instead a pink piece of paper at Said’s confused chest.
Said brought the paper home and laid it on the desk that had been moved to his room when he retired. Pushing back his reading glasses and wiping the sweat from the bridge of his nose, he read it again and again, his forehead furrowing as he tried to understand the instructions. When he was done, realizing that reading and rereading failed to give the clarity he sought, he copied out what it said on a separate piece of paper in neat blue ballpoint so that he could read it a few more times. He kept the original pink sheet neatly filed, where it would not be lost or torn and where its proclamations could be checked against the copy he had made. After these efforts, the requirements and procedure of obtaining a domicile in Karachi, of proving that you really lived there, began to become apparent to him. He needed to produce six photographs and certificates of every qualification held by the father and the grandfather of the applicant. A photocopy of the father’s—Abdullah’s—national identity card and copies of the neighbors’ identity cards had to accompany the application as well, to insure that those who claimed to live in a place actually did inhabit it.
Said set out to fulfill the requirements that had been laid before him. He paid special attention to number five. It instructed unequivocally that if the applicant was under twenty-two years of age, the father’s domicile had to be appended to the application along with the minor’s affidavit. If the father had no domicile, it was necessary, of course, to make the father’s domicile first. There were seven other steps to the domicile process, but Said’s copied list stopped abruptly at this point. Before his grandson Zaid could claim he was a resident of Karachi, let alone a Pakistani identity, let alone a portion of a quota, his son, Abdullah, who had lived in Karachi since he was fourteen, had to prove that he indeed did so. The task of proving that his son lived in Karachi so that his grandson could take his exams and claim his share of a quota fell to my retired grandfather.
Perhaps he had not been in Pakistan long enough to know that the instructions, their convolutions and redundancies, their labyrinthine details and parenthetical prescriptions were so confusing because no one was expected to follow them. No one, that is, who could produce the sly envelopes of cash that would be slid under files or the tips offered as gifts or the favors called in by relatives in high positions. He did not know, or perhaps he did not want to know, and so he decided to follow the instructions, bit by bit and line by line. He began where it had all started. At the photography shop in Saddar where they had taken their first pictures in Pakistan, days after their nerve-wracking arrival. Those had been the pictures they had used on the school forms for the children, black and white square pictures affixed carefully with glue on the marked-out square at the top left-hand corner. The store had made copies of the children’s birth certificates, as they had to be attached to the forms. They had done it once for school and again for college, and once or twice for something else in the days when Partition was too recent and dictates about domiciles did not exist.
The three men went to get their pictures taken at the same little studio in Saddar and returned with the satisfaction of having happily concluded the first step. In their hands they clutched greasy paper bags filled with meat and lentil kebabs and potato-pea samosas from Saddar that evoked with their aroma memories of the family’s first days. The photographs were picked up a week later, “Khan Photo Studio” stamped in purple letters on the brown paper sleeves of each one. Said added them to the file in which every step in the quest to obtain an official domicile was being safely tucked away. The receipt for the photographs was filed, along with the pink slip with the list of instructions, the first laminated and the rest in triplicate. With these papers and pictures in place Said determined that he had made an adequate map.
For the next four working days, Said awoke early, as he had done when he had an office to go to, before retirement had partitioned his days into blocks devoted to reading the newspaper or sipping a second cup of tea until it was time to take his mid-morning doses of heart and blood pressure medications. He bathed and shaved and dressed in the half-sleeved shirts that his tailor in Saddar had made for him in the last year of his working life, simple shirts made of cotton that Surrayya starched just a bit to prevent creases. He put on his watch and gathered his files, the original and the duplicate; he affixed his pens on the edges of his shirt pocket. Then he set out for the bus stop, carefully shutting behind him the black gate of the house he had built, sweating like everyone always did long before they got anywhere in Karachi.
The Karachi City Courts stood across the street from the Sindh High Court, a magnificent building of pink stone so fanciful in its grandeur that it suggested then and now some secret princess must be hidden within. There wa
s none of course, only an assemblage of grim judges who never held court for matters as trifling as those troubling my grandfather. The docket for the Sindh High Court judges was laden with matters of far greater import: the complicated legal technicalities of tariffs on goods that arrived at the port, or the delicacies of tax policy. Feudal landowners who held more than one thousand acres could file for exemptions, of course; the law applied only to those who could not make their way around it.
So it was from the safe distance and within the freshly mown, dew-laden lawn that the Sindh High Court looked at the crowded arena of the ordinary, where a sweaty Said arrived a little before nine in the morning with his files defensively stuck in his armpit. The minutes before nine o’clock were important ones for the file-clutching multitude, who until that moment had to wait outside the gates. At nine o’clock they could rush in and clamor for the first or the fiftieth or the four hundredth spot in the line that would allow them access to the doors of officialdom.
By the end of the day, Said had learned the peculiarities of the domicile application line and even written down the names of the three clerks who rotated duty at the window. There was the laid-back one who smiled at mistakes and caressed his oil-slicked hair with his fingers; the other two, stern and stolid, sneered at them. It was because of the loquaciousness of the first that he had gathered information that was curiously absent from the form, and absolutely necessary if one was to avoid the disastrous consequence of denial of domicile. Other details came from the veterans of the line, experts armed with their own piles of files, some of them paid men who took on the drudgery of the line for a secret fee.
On the first day, Said managed only ten minutes in the line before discovering that a permission slip was required, which itself entailed navigating another line and obtaining a piece of paper that proclaimed official permission to stand and wait in this one. This took all day. He returned on the second day and managed to get about halfway, from the scorched courtyard to the stairs under the awning that cast the slightest shade over the waiting men. He had almost stepped inside the corridor when surprise struck again. A top official was visiting, and the higher-ups of the high-ups had decided the corridors were too crammed for making a good impression. “Clear them of people,” they told their peons, who in turn cursed the crowd and cast them away. The domicile window was shut early that day.
On the third day, he reached the clerk. It was the chatty one, exuding fumes of coconut hair oil. Slick but nevertheless amiable, he was a man whose position at the window was still new enough to accommodate consideration for the supplicants that appeared before him. It was he who had pointed out a gross deficiency in the domicile application Said wished to file: all the documents were official but not “attested.” Attestation required a further official stamp without which they meant nothing. “Get them attested,” he told Said. “It can be done with the payment of a few hundred rupees to any one of the men sitting under the trees outside.” Said had long wondered what these men with the stamps at the makeshift tables were there to do, and he was about to find out.
It was the fourth day now, and after all the gathering of attestations and permissions and the diversions to other lines and waits under dusty-leafed trees, he expected that day to submit the papers to obtain a domicile for his son, which would become the basis of domicile for his grandson. One of the stern clerks awaited him at the window this time, a nine-year veteran of the line, comfortable in his official omniscience and sporting a Faustian disdain for the masses he was forced to face every day.
The government-issue clock sitting on top of the picture of the founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and behind the clerk struck 11:45 just as Said took his place before the domicile application window. This particular quarter hour was a delicate one, suspended between the clerks’ tea break and the coming lunch break, but Said did not know its significance. He also might not have been able to tell if the clerk who stood before him was particularly susceptible to the smells of the dal fry and the steaming chicken qorma special already being delivered by the restaurant boy on heaped trays. Behind the clerk the clack of domicile-producing typewriters had already ceased.
The clerk said nothing as he looked over the forms, starting as he always did at the back of the packet of papers. His silence seemed a sign of fulfillment. He flipped one page and then another, moistening his perusing finger each time on the tip of his tongue, page after page after page undergoing his scrutiny. It began to seem that the form, after this fourth attempt in the line, this fourth trip to the domicile office, on top of all the trips and photo takings and file makings, all the other lines that had already been braved, would finally be filed that day. In the clerk’s pause-laden perusal, Said even took some liberties, began to consider what he would do after this was over, perhaps before taking the bus home a stop at Bohri Bazaar to visit to an old friend who still kept a watch shop there. It was, after all, still only noon.
Then the clerk stopped on the first page. Turning his ballpoint pen around to the blunt end, he tapped underneath a line that said “Country of Birth.” It followed right after the line that said “Date of Birth” and that stood next to the numbers 14 July 1947. Next to “Country of Birth” in blue ballpoint pen, Said had carefully written “Pakistan/India.” The clerk looked up and said, “It is Pakistan or it is India. You have to write one country in this line.” Said had been prepared for this. It had been a matter of much discussion in the line itself, the question of whether you put Pakistan or India as the place of birth for children born before Pakistan was born. “You see, son,” he answered, “there was no Pakistan or India when my son was born.” And so he continued speaking into the whirr of the fans behind the clerk, “What was then India was also all of Pakistan.”
The clerk did not agree. With the red pen he kept tucked behind his ear for just this sort of corrective opportunity, he did what omniscient clerks in government offices could do. He drew a straight red line across the clean blue letters in Said’s handwriting that spelled out “Pakistan.” It was only after he had eliminated them that he drew his tongue over his lips and looked up at Said. “It is ‘India,’” he said. “Your son was born in Bombay. It is in India.” He stamped the first page of the application with large red letters that read “SUBMITTED” and, handing Said a yellow slip with a date, slammed the wooden window shut and went off to lunch.
The line behind my grandfather remained, waiting for the window to open again, after the clerks had their lunch and their nap and read the paper and discussed its contents and called their wives. My grandfather turned toward home with a generation less to claim it than he had believed was the case. The domicile for my father was picked up and the application for my brother submitted. With my grandfather and father both labeled Indian in origin, my brother’s claim to Karachi was brand new, only as old as his fourteen years.
JANUARY 20, 1990
Rubaiya Sayeed was only twenty-one years old when her father, the neatly bearded and white-capped mufti Mohammad Sayeed, became home minister of the Democratic Republic of India, a prestigious position for the first Kashmiri Muslim man in the history of that country. For the five days he had held the office, the mufti had wielded more power than any Kashmiri; now responsible for internal security not just for the disputed slice that was his home but also for the entire smoldering swath of difference that was India. It was the home minister who could order curfews and cordons and strategize which antigovernment protests must be stanched immediately and which were allowed to fizzle to their own slow deaths.
Distracted by these important matters, the mufti was caught unprepared for what happened on his fifth day in office. It concerned his daughter, the youngest and most cherished of all his children. They had named her Rubaiya, after the couplets of poetry that the mufti liked to recite. A rubaiya was one verse, a single sliver of poetic perfection that held the whole universe, and that is the name the mufti chose for his last and most loved baby girl.
That Rubaiya could be
plucked so flagrantly from the street where she had grown was simply unthinkable. It happened at a bus stop, just as sunset was settling on a December day in the valley over which Pakistan and India had battled ever since they were countries, its Muslim population and Hindu prince leaving it forever torn between the two. Rubaiya Sayeed, the child of a Muslim cleric who had chosen to side with the Indian government over Muslim freedom fighters, was a child of the disputed valley.
That evening she was returning from Lal Ded Women’s Memorial Hospital where she worked as an intern. Her day had been spent amid the cries of birthing women and screaming children. The winter was hard on the hospitals in Indian Kashmir; the short, cold day, the proximity of birth, disease, and decline jolting in its intensity. Rubaiya was glad to be part of the action, a small girl but fierce in her determination to help others. At the hospital, she felt like she was part of the shootings and deaths, the distorted normality of life in the valley. She did not want to be a girl who watched from the sidelines.
They came from nowhere and swept her up, four masked men bearing weapons. In an instant, the slight young woman who had just stepped out of the dust cloud of a public bus was suddenly not there at all. After several long minutes the one or two people who had been close enough to see the men and the car in which they disappeared began to murmur, and then as five and then ten minutes passed, everyone knew.
She had been taken by one of her own, by Muslim men in a Kashmir where everything depended on whether one was Muslim or Hindu. The guerillas of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, a separatist group that had been fighting the Indian state for independence from Kashmir, would soon proclaim that the gesture was revenge for their own women, the distraught mothers and abandoned brides and widowed sisters whose men had been taken by the Indian government, by the Home Ministry led by the father of the kidnapped woman.