It was this eldest son’s idea to convert the ground into a commercial venue for weddings, and eventually he had managed to convince his reluctant father. The idea smacked deliciously of profits. People kept coming to the swelling city, requiring them to squeeze into smaller and smaller spaces. This made gatherings a problem. How was one supposed to entertain the entire family and all the future in-laws with appropriate aplomb in a tiny apartment crammed with too many people and the residues of their comings and goings? The answer—for those who had wandered too far from ancestral villages or who had made momentous migrations—was the wedding hall.
At the time, wedding halls were cropping up everywhere in Karachi, sometimes a whole line of them stretching out on a single road leading to some faraway suburb. They were pink and white or red and yellow, like miniature copies of fantasy palaces, bearing names like Paradise Dream, Royal Garden, and Sea Breeze Castle. At these venues, festivities could be bought in packages and guests feted in hefty numbers, increasing the debts of aging fathers and requiring loans against the future paychecks of graduating brothers. Each building had a booking office on the premises, where a nice man offered colorful brochures featuring dream weddings, installment plan options, and salon packages and honeymoon suites that accompanied a booking at their venue.
The news that the ground was slated to be a wedding hall came neither through the owner nor his son; it was the reasonable deduction of those who witnessed the sudden clearing of the lot. A week before this meeting, the lane dwellers of Kokan Housing Society woke up to the roar of two majestic bulldozers clearing the thorny babul bushes that grew on the fringes of the ground. Adherents of the urban creed are fast to interpret construction as a positive omen, not considering its potential for destruction. So at first the residents and boy cricketers were not all that concerned. Perhaps the ground was being transformed into a park, they told themselves, an act of benevolence by an old boy made good who wished for the neighborhood children to have a safer place to play.
But the clarification came fast, and when it did there was no denying it. The bulldozer was followed by crews that raised the stage where future brides and grooms would be presented to family and friends under lights bright enough to assure good photographs. And after the arrival of the billboard the horror was complete. “Destiny Gardens” was spelled out in the unlit neon tubes tucked on the truck bed. The total transformation had taken a little less than a week: the clearing began on Sunday and the billboard arrived on Wednesday.
On Saturday the men gathered at the Kokan community center to discuss what could be done about the new development. Their defeat, however, was evident in their resigned poses. All that was left to decide were the precise terms of a respectful surrender. Uncle Sohail, affecting all the mannerisms of the recently wronged, sat at the center of the gathering. It was his house, after all, that was one of those closest to the end of the lane, closest to the monstrosity of commercialized nuptials that had now arrived at their doorstep. “We cannot allow this to happen,” he began, having decided to take on the role of the most wronged victim. “If this happens, our lane will be changed forever,” he continued, undeterred by the silence around him.
“We cannot stop him,” a grizzled, wrinkled old man said solemnly. His words freed others to speak of the realities of the situation, for many of them had come to offer reasons for the rout than to gather resources for a battle. They cited the lateness of their response and the already-cleared land. One after another, the obstacles were enumerated, interspersed with the objections of one or two others who, like Uncle Sohail, stood to suffer most from the increased traffic. This troubled minority told stories of the changes to come, of the noise and the guests, strangers from all parts of the city pouring into the street and onto their doorsteps.
It was the fear of these vast hordes of wedding guests that finally prompted some action. Two gates would be erected, one at each end of the lane, sealing it from either side. These gates would separate the lane from the larger street where the wedding hall would be. Every night, the gates would be locked after nine o’clock and opened only by residents, who would be given a key to the padlock. They could not stop the wedding hall by filing the requests for injunctions and stay orders and zoning objections that better-heeled neighbors with closer connections in the judiciary could have mustered. But they were not so poor as to do nothing and were still protective of their respectability, and so the gates were approved by a near consensus. Uncle Sohail, still disgruntled that no greater action would be taken, refused to vote.
He had his reasons, stated and unstated. The Destiny Gardens sign that hung over the newly established wedding banquet hall would confront Aunt Amina on a daily basis, whether she was alone or with Uncle Sohail. Weddings would take place every day in a bonanza of unceasing celebration. The words “Destiny Gardens,” bright pink and blue against the Karachi night, and the fairy lights would cast their manic nuptial mirth on Aunt Amina’s room and on the roof terrace Uncle Sohail had built for some peace and solitude.
MAY 16, 1991
It was easy to eliminate a woman but not so easy to erase her memory. A single television appearance by the same man who had sworn Benazir Bhutto in was all it took to strike her down. The now wide-hipped, headscarved Benazir, with toddler and baby and husband in tow, was dismissed on charges of corruption. She had promised too much and delivered too little, and her husband, everyone insisted, had stolen too audaciously.
The disappointed, sun-darkened boys sitting by the tanneries on the Lyari River in Karachi, the sharecroppers gathering grain and sugarcane for their feudal overlords in Punjab, the shoemakers sewing soles beside the railway station in Lahore all turned on her suddenly. Promised change had not come and it had to be the woman’s fault. The woman had not filled their growling stomachs, she had not deposed the local despots who wreaked havoc on their precarious existence, and she had not given the bread or the garment or the house promised in the melodic slogans heard at every election rally. Their short stores of patience were exhausted by gibes of other men who said their votes had cursed the country by handing a woman the affairs of state, men who scolded them daily, or at least weekly, from the pulpits of their mosques.
The soiled country had to be sanctified again, and the ceremony took place on May 16, 1991. A new prime minister, clean and pure as only a man could be, had introduced a bill that would allow the country to expiate for the sin of electing a woman. This ultimate act of the country’s repentance would be a return to the truth, to the destiny from which Pakistan had drifted.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, elected with a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly with his coalition of the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (Islamic Democratic Alliance), quickly introduced the Enforcement of Shariat Act of 1991. Unfurled before a Parliament of men clad in pristine white tunics and vests tailored to hug rotund bellies, the Enforcement of Shariat Act declared itself the supreme law of Pakistan. The act next declared that all Muslim citizens were required to follow Shariat, and that the state, under auspices of the act, would insure that Shariat was taught in schools, practiced in law courts, and dominant in matters of state, economics, and exchange. Swooning with repentance, no one seemed to notice that the act neglected to say what Shariat was or which version of Shariat among the many existing schools and subschools of Islamic thought and countless splinter groups would determine these important questions.
It was a well-enacted and properly executed rite done with the effortlessness of the most practiced rituals from royal wedding to holy acts of purification. And, as is the case with all well-enacted rituals, the obedient population would not balk at the details. That the Constitution had already declared the Quran and Sunnah to be supreme; that the injunctions of a previous purification, allowing for the stoning of women and the policing of errant sexual liaisons, had never been taken off the books by Benazir; and that all the new vows of loyalty to Islam had been sworn before and enacted in law were minutia that interested no one.<
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No one remembered that laws supposedly enacted in the name of Islam and Shariat, which made the woman, even if she was in a position of supremacy, still only equal to half a man had never been removed from the country’s statute books. Those laws—the legacy of General Zia ul Haque, who had tried to Islamize the country by passing laws that regulated the sexuality of women and subjected them to floggings and stonings—had all remained on the books during Benazir’s tenure; she had not even attempted to remove them. But like the previous dalliances of a finally wedded king, the mistaken first choices of an awkwardly democratic Pakistan needed to be forgotten. New vows of return to purity and male supremacy would accomplish that, piled as they would be atop old ones, already existing ones.
The Enforcement of Shariat Act of 1991 blazed through the Parliament of Pakistan, then through the Senate, and onto the shiny, polished desk of the president, who, flanked by a picture of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder, on one side and the green and white flag on the other, happily signed it into law. The best way to protect against making the wrong choice was, as the provisions of the act read, to limit the number of choices an unreliable population could make. With the government banning all that was wrong, that could be thought wrong, that could accidentally be wrong, nothing in this newly purified country could be wrong.
JUNE 1992
At dusk the tanks rolled into Liaqatabad, a scrappy neighborhood in Karachi’s central district. It was summer and the dusk had come late, near eight o’clock, amid the cozy atmosphere of family dinners and the theme songs of the daily soaps blaring from blinking television sets. Along the three- or four-story apartment buildings that lined most of the roads, little boys were completing last-minute runs to corner stores and men were speeding home from work on their motorbikes. They were the ones to hear the news on the streets and bring it home to the women.
While people peered down at them through windows, behind gates, and between alleys, the same beige-brown Al Khalid tanks everyone had seen marching in the convoys on Independence Day and Defense Day and Pakistan Day crept through the streets like the sandy crabs on the beaches at the edge of the city. Shopkeepers selling meat to last-minute customers or haggling over a kilo of onions with a harried housewife felt uncertain enough to draw down their shutters just a bit, and then a little more. They counted the tanks with increasing unease and then watched as the frightening scene unfolded.
The tanks were followed by khaki-topped trucks driven by soldiers. Most people had never seen the Pakistan Army at such close quarters, and now they could make out the olive, khaki, and brown amoebic shapes of their camouflage. From beneath their olive helmets, the soldiers looked out at the streets of Karachi, at the plastic bags and rotting fruit peels and other rubbish heaped high on street corners. In every truck, one or two soldiers stood erect, weapons pointed up at the windows above or the flat rooftops of smaller homes, their fingers dangling on the triggers.
It was the beginning of a different kind of sunset ritual in the city, that of curfews and searches and gun battles and shoot-on-sight orders. The soldiers had come at the behest of the generals in green-hilled Rawalpindi, where men sitting with flags and medals hanging heavy from their shirts had pored over maps of Karachi and devised a plan to clean it up. The city was contaminated, the soldiers had been told, full of people who did not belong, people who hoarded guns in their homes and bullets in their pockets and loyalty in their heart for the homeland of their forebears, for India. The people of Karachi had to be taught a lesson and the soldiers were there to do so.
This lesson would be a long one—nearly two years long. The next morning the subdued residents of Azizabad, Liaqatabad, Orangi, North Nazimabad, and Qasba Colony would wake up to a besieged city. Sandbags were piled in heaps next to traffic lights, and behind them crouched soldiers in camouflage, their gun barrels peeping out at schoolchildren too young to know to avert their gazes. There were thousands of these soldiers. Their presence assured that the cleansing of Karachi would render it truly Pakistani and devotedly faithful.
Over the next few months the residents of Karachi would become familiar with other weapons in the soldiers’ arsenal: the long lists of men they believed were involved in activities against the Pakistani state. One by one, the supporters of the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, which had rallied the city and brought it into the assemblies and the Parliament of Pakistan, were cornered. The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), which had first won elections in 1988, now controlled most of the electoral districts of Karachi. They represented the “Muhajirs,” the migrants from India who had settled in Karachi, politicizing their presence in the country and constructing it as a fifth ethnicity. The other four predominant ethnicities in Pakistan all had their own provinces, the Punjabis with the biggest and the Balochis, the Sindhis, and the Pashtun each with their own. The Muhajirs, the MQM had proclaimed, could thus lay claim to Karachi. In a world defined by ethnicity, those who had aimed at being just “Pakistani” had lost out—they were now eternally “muhajir,” or “refugees.”
The army came to Karachi to capture them, round up the political activists of this new party who were claiming Karachi and other urban areas of Sindh as theirs. They were not hard to find. Some were captured in those fervid first days, taken from beds and street corners and shops to undisclosed locations, where they were hung up and beaten so that they would give up the names of others, who would be beaten in turn.
On the worst days the curfew lasted nearly all day, the enforced quiet breaking only between 6:00 and 9:00 a.m. and between 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. At six on the dot the streets would erupt with people, everyone rushing to do whatever needed to be done. Mothers rushed to doctors’ offices with children who had taken ill the evening before; young men rushed to work in the rich parts of the city not under curfew; and the day laborers and hawkers rushed to sell in three hours what they used to peddle in a whole day. Curfew or not, they would tell anyone who would listen that their children needed to eat.
From the beginning of the military operation in Karachi to its official end more than a year later, the city was suspended in the artificial rhythms of the military. It determined when people could move and when they must be perfectly still. Those who did not live in areas dominated by the Muhajir Qaumi Movement read day after day about the killings and disappearances and arrests. Under those reports, the newspapers published more pragmatic details, the hours of curfew that day and the alternate routes others must take to get around the areas of the city being punished by the military in order to cure it.
Within a year, a great many people would lose their lives or disappear without a trace, and the rest would learn how to navigate the new Karachi of curfews and missing persons. Children learned not to talk about politics and never to say where their fathers were born, and especially not if they had been born in what was now India or Bangladesh. The soldiers could stop anyone on the street at will, and they did, making examples of them and asserting time and again that those purged were diseased tumors that had made Karachi so sick. They were ruthless in their acts of excision. Bodies were dumped under bridges and girders and in ditches and alleys. Those alive at the time of abduction in one corner of the city were found dead months later in another. The total number killed, with some of the missing never reported and others never counted, is still uncertain, though it is estimated to be at least two thousand.
The military did not fight with guns alone. Another battle was waged on the pages of newspapers, with information, the lack of it, or deliberate deceit numbing the rest of the country into confusion and uncertainties. For every MQM worker whose body was found in some ditch or empty lot, the army released pictures of “torture chambers” run by the MQM, justifying their crackdown on the party. These pictures of dank inner rooms with exposed electrical wires hanging from ceilings appeared in national newspapers and magazines, lulling into silence those who wondered about the army’s intentions in Karachi. Barbarity breeds barbarity, readers may have thought, as they mulled
over the news in Lahore or Peshawar or Islamabad over another cup of tea. But in Karachi the searches and the disappearances, the killings and the discoveries of bodies went on and on. The military, it seemed, was not at all in a hurry.
On February 16, 1994, in the midst of Operation Clean Up, the dark-skinned, clean-shaven Altaf Hussain addressed a crowded rally in Karachi. In just twelve years he had organized a minority that had not until then had a name. As a student leader he had rallied the children of migrants to organize against the politics of feudalism, patronage, and military domination. Now in his thirties, he could not speak to the gathering in person. As the leader of the MQM, he had been forced to flee the city after a record three thousand criminal cases were registered against him. But even by telephone he was a firebrand. “We sacrificed two million people to achieve Pakistan, not to see our children killed and elders humiliated by the law-enforcing agencies,” he railed to the cheers of the remainder of his supporters, who seemed unconcerned about his physical absence.
But if Altaf Hussain was too far away to be caught, most others were not. Ten months after the February speech Altaf Hussain’s elder brother and young nephew were picked up by the military for interrogation near the headquarters of the MQM in the constantly curfewed suburb of Azizabad. Their bodies were discovered in a ditch in the industrial town of Gadap four days later. The marks on them indicated that they had been tortured.
JUNE 1994
Sacrifice was a matter reserved for the men. Eid ul Adha was the second biggest festival on the Muslim calendar, commemorating the sacrifice that Abraham had made many millennia ago, when divine mercy had replaced his son Ismail with a lamb. And so the slaughter of an animal marked every Eid. My grandfather, father, and brother were in charge of fulfilling the duty for our family, but because my father worked during the weekdays, my retired grandfather took the lead.
The Upstairs Wife Page 19