The selection of the sacrificial “lamb” at the livestock market was taken very seriously. The lamb need not and most often was not a lamb at all but a goat or a cow or even a camel; it could be any of the animals that Muslims were permitted to eat. Its selection factored in a complicated set of variables, including age and price and size and constitution. The men had to open the mouths and slap the flanks of hundreds of goats and cows to determine which one was healthy and which one would be worthy of selection for our family this year. When the lucky animal was found, a goat whose skin was taut and healthy, whose eyes shone with promising clarity, whose limbs did not wilt due to dehydration or exhaustion or simply age (disguised by the pulling of a few telltale teeth), the haggling would begin.
I, like all the other women of my family, was not privy to this process, but between my brother’s hurried telling and my grandfather’s detailed one a clear picture of it emerged in my mind. The task of settling on a price alone could stretch into an hour, for the men who sold the animals were in no hurry. They would start by citing a price that exceeded what the animal was actually worth by two or three times. These tricks of haggling I knew well, having seen them practiced with relish or resignation every time my mother or grandmother bought a kilo of tomatoes or a bolt of cloth. An animal was far more costly though, often close to three or four paychecks, with hefty cows costing as much as a small wedding. This made the sacrifice an even heftier responsibility, and I understood that this bargaining was of real import, its additions and subtractions equal to thousands instead of tens or hundreds of rupees.
The women did not see the animal until it arrived at the door, and the black gate was opened. In rolled the Suzuki minitruck revealing the sacrificial cargo tied up on the truck bed with an array of ropes and wires. Said and Zaid would accompany the animal’s delivery in a rickshaw, which was Said’s preferred mode of transportation for the purchase of livestock, something he, a city man for generations, did only once a year. The goat would then be tied in the back garden, between the coconut trees where its bleats and baas would punctuate the sounds of the house.
The goat would remain the men’s responsibility until the day of Eid. This meant shopping for its sheaves of hay or bags of grain, feeding it, and making sure it was as comfortable as possible up until its last day on earth. If the goat was particularly boast-worthy in appearance or demeanor or size, it would be paraded up and down the neighborhood and introduced to other animals procured and reared for a similar purpose. Only after the sacrifice was done, after Said or Abdullah or Zaid had taken the sharp cleaver the professional butcher handed them while he held the animal down by the neck, after the blood had been drained from its throat, its hide skinned, and the large pieces of flank and shin and chest quartered into pieces was the animal handed off to the women.
But then it would be truly ours. The goat was brought into the kitchen on large steel trays reserved for this very purpose. We’d get to know it well, carefully cutting the slabs into smaller pieces, washing, drying, and sectioning them into tens of separate plastic bags whose tops would be tied with rubber bands. The division itself was mandated in the Holy Quran. Separate portions of sacrificed meat were for the poor, for our neighbors, for relatives, and for ourselves. But the rules were, as always, broad and general, and it fell to my mother, my grandmother, and me to determine which sections of the animal would be given to which relatives as gifts. A whole leg, which could be roasted to feed a large family, signified special affection, while stew meat was a cursory gesture for an acquaintance or second or third cousins. By the time the daylong sectioning of the sacrificed goat was concluded, many relationships would have undergone this yearly reappraisal. All this conducted under the pressure of sacrificed meat arriving in an avalanche from the homes of others; this was inevitably followed by the not-so-small matter of readjustments, as the received meat revealed the truth about our standing with others.
In 1994 Eid ul Adha fell in the middle of the second summer of curfews and cordons, when getting around the city was hampered by sudden gun battles, shops shutting down in the middle of the day, and roadblocks. Often you had no choice but to abandon your car and walk the miles to your house, only to return to no car or a car stripped of seats and steering and stereo. In that summer of continuing tumult, when the heat was familiar but the uncertainty still new, Said and Zaid were determined to make their annual pilgrimage to the livestock market and select the animal that would be our family’s offering.
That Saturday arrived with the heavy humidity of a summer morning in Karachi. Saturday was only a half holiday, and the men had calculated that this would mean a less crowded market, an easier time getting there, better deals and greater discounts, and ultimately a sturdier animal. But with the morning came unwelcome news. According to the newspaper, an army raid the night before in a congested downtown neighborhood had left behind a slew of bodies.
The newspaper delivered another deflating piece of news: the MQM, to honor its slain activists, was calling for a day of mourning. Shops and markets must be shut down, they demanded, to register their protest against the ongoing bloodbath in Karachi. We knew their demands would be met, as all shopkeepers, scared of their shops being burned down by angry MQM workers, would acquiesce. There would be no livestock market that day.
Said and Zaid each spent the day in a sulk, though for different reasons. To Said the sacrifice represented, even decades after his arrival in Pakistan, a new freedom of expression. Unable in Bombay to complete the sacrifice in the crowded lanes around the mosque, that he could do so in his own backyard, in the house he had built, in the country he had chosen was a confirmation that his decision to leave was the just and prudent one, some salve on the painful memories for which even wealth could not compensate. For him the sacrifice was a renewal of vows: a remembering to be grateful that he lived in a Muslim country and could complete with freedom the rites of Muslim sacrifice.
My brother, Zaid, was upset for less noble reasons. There he was, thwarted once again by a city that seemed to have no mercy on the plans and hopes of its young. The trip, only postponed my grandfather assured him, lingered as an idea in his head, mingling with the fresh memories of all the cancellations and disappointments of the past year. There was the outing to the beach disrupted by the kidnapping of a friend’s father; the concert that concluded a half hour after it began because of a bomb threat; the exams carefully prepared for again and again and again only to be put off due to curfews and killings and strikes and sit-ins. As he sulked about the house, picking up this book or digging through that drawer, he moped with all his teenage ire at the injustice of being born in a city so unpredictable, so determined to snap whatever hope it dangled in front of him.
In the retelling, that first surprise of the day would be nearly forgotten. The one better remembered occurred after dinner, after we had gone upstairs to our beds and the nightly episode of The A-Team had concluded, and the house was dark and the black gate locked and the night watchman employed on his rounds that my grandfather’s chest pains began.
By the time my grandmother called for us, he was gasping for breath; by the time he could be loaded in the car, he was barely clinging to life. By the time he arrived at a hospital emergency room, clearly overwhelmed by the double whammy of a citywide strike and suspended ambulance service, Said had already drawn his last breath. When they called Surrayya from the hospital, she did not need them to say the words to know that her husband was dead.
The funeral was held between noon and midafternoon prayers the next day, as the Muslim tradition of burying the dead with as much alacrity as possible dictated. In the fetid heat of Karachi, it was one religious injunction that served the city’s dead well, insuring a dignity of which they would otherwise have been deprived. Burial too was a matter for the men, who could insure the proper purification of the body, the correct measures of cloth that would become the shroud, and the proper transportation of the body from home to the graveyard and finally t
o the grave.
The women remained inside and apart and behind. In the hours after my grandfather’s death, we receded into the bedrooms, groups of cousins and neighbors and aunts gathering around my newly widowed grandmother. They waited at the sidelines to hand things to the men when they came to ask, looking for scissors or clean vessels or buckets or extra copies of the Quran.
When all the rites were completed, the deceased made ready for his last journey. The room in which he lay was cleared of all men to allow the female relatives one final good-bye. Then the women receded into the house as funeral procession composed of men chanting verses from the Holy Quran lifted my grandfather and left. Not a single woman, not my grandmother or mother or aunt Amina, was permitted to go to the final funeral prayers at the mosque and the cemetery where my grandfather would be interred. These were the rules. Women could bring impurity to the fulfillment of last rites, and purity was crucial to insuring the departed an entry to paradise. The moment of Said’s death also began Surrayya’s iddah, a period of three months and ten days or three menstrual periods during which it was mandated that the widowed woman remain sequestered from unrelated men—from anyone other than brothers or sons or men she could not marry.
The task of the women was keeping the memory of the departed. In the days after his death, as they counted out prayer beads, recited special verses for the dead, and flipped through the pages of Qurans worn with reading, the story of my grandfather Said was told again and again, sometimes recounting his sudden end but more often recalling only his kindness, his mirth at the birth of his grandchildren, his generosity at the weddings of his daughters. Every day for the first three days and then every Sabbath evening until forty days had passed after his death, the women came and comforted, dried Surrayya’s tears, and calmed her fears. As the shock of the first days passed, she began to speak a few words, to add to the stories. With the passage of time, she began to add stories of her own, her stories and the stories of all the women coming together to keep alive the memory of the man who was no more.
CHAPTER 8
Loving and Leaving
DECEMBER 2001
In the fallow month of Ramzan, when weddings were on hold, the purveyors of Destiny Gardens had concocted a cleverly pious scheme for the use of their premises. During Ramzan the five daily prayers were increased to six, with the last held right before the dawn preceding the next day of fasting. Most of the mosques in Karachi still did not permit women, and even if they had, the awkwardness of entering with men and scurrying to a shielded corner to escape the male gaze almost guaranteed their decision to stay away.
The middle-class women, who bore their formidable mantle of responsibility with bravery and pride, could not, after all, toss propriety aside to fulfill a religious calling. For generations they had imbibed the idea that the women who turned up at the doors of mosques were the downtrodden, forsaken by fate and family, who came with their palms outstretched and faces covered in shame. The Holy Prophet had never turned away a supplicant from a mosque or a female who turned up at its door. To be at a mosque could be interpreted as being in need, and no middle-class woman wished to risk such a terrible misconception.
Thus there was money to be made by providing a venue for women who wanted to gather at Ramzan without judgment, and in lieu of weddings, a setting where women could catch up on gossip. That Ramzan of 2001, when the fasts were short like the days, Destiny Gardens filled the vacuum by putting up a sign advertising “Lady’s Taraweeh Prayer at 10:00 P.M. Nightly.” The red and white cloth sign was sedate, designed to flutter in the breeze to catch the eyes of women in the back seats of cars.
On the first night a handful of women scurried past the gates and into the hall, their faces painted with smiles. Most of them were related to the wives of Destiny Garden’s owners and were therefore required by this relationship to attend every such outing. Such was the price and reward of having wealthy relatives.
On the second and third nights, the women dragged more of their curious friends along, women in black burkas adorned with rhinestones or lace or ribbon, just like the wives of the sheikhs in Arabia. After the first week the gathering ballooned to a few hundred; by the middle of Ramzan the owner of Destiny Gardens knew he had hit the jackpot. Soon the wealthier ladies were sponsoring evenings, offering catered snacks and sweets to their gathered friends and paying the fee for Saudi Arabian clerics to lecture the women (from behind a partition, of course) on the ways of fulfilling all the requirements of being a good Muslim woman, wife, mother, sister, and daughter. There was so much to learn, the gathered women nodded to each other after each sermon, tightening their headscarves before they went outside. They were coming here to pray, to do the work of the divine, and it would surely be approved by an exacting husband or whining son or disapproving father. After all, who could keep a good Muslim woman from prayer and knowledge of her faith?
Aunt Amina never set foot inside these gatherings. These were the same women who reminded her that it was her duty, as a Muslim woman, to bear a second and even a third and fourth wife if her husband so chose. She watched them in their adorned burkas trooping in to the brightly lit wedding hall, its sound system blaring verses of the Quran at the same volume as it blared Bollywood numbers in other months. She laughed. Whatever the spectacle, everyone would come to the circus, she thought, eager to assess the fresh, new girls being delivered to the marital market.
It was just such an evening at the end of Ramzan that Aunt Amina was contemplating her half-married life. She had undertaken various rituals to close her days. In the early days of the second marriage she had tried out the state of nothingness for size, choosing not to cook or eat all day during those weeks when Sohail would be gone, feigning death almost, in the misguided hope that her visibly wasting form would provoke some concern or hesitation before tasting the morsels and mouthfuls he consumed in her company. Ramzan would soon arrive, and she cried at the tragedy of opening the fast alone, something she had never done before and something she imagined no one, except the most destitute and forsaken, had ever been subjected to doing. But after the third Ramzan alone, she decided to move on, her own pathos worn out with overuse.
Some five or so years into the new arrangement, after some particularly dark days, the reality that the new divided order was there to stay finally dawned on her. In this moment of self-awareness she had made a pact, vowing that even on the days he did not come she would live life just as fully, eat and drink and laugh and smile with just as much fervor as she did when he was there. This schedule was outlined and posted: a proper meal cooked and ready and heated at dusk, consumed at the table and not on a sofa right before bed. She had to wake early and not sleep until ten, clean and pick up the rooms before evening, and shower and change into new clothes before 5:00 p.m. She would be visible and alive and existing with or without his presence to validate it.
She followed the list closely for an entire week, joyfully dressing and preening and preparing her favorite dishes with relish, hoping secretly that the smells and sounds of her now fully lived life would waft downstairs and provoke speculation. This new plan brought her strength and even pleasure as she assiduously reviewed the list, praising herself for sticking to it.
When he left the following Friday, she did not lift the curtains or wake at the early hour or change her clothes or take a shower. But she did not cry or weep or lament either; and in place of the fervent emotions came an indolence that was if not soothing then at least less exacting than the dictates of her plan. She began slowly to do as she wished, without sadness or considering how it would be perceived. She began to grow accustomed to listening only to her own thoughts and finding resolve within.
Thus she was not prepared for the knock on her door one dimly lit evening in the holiest last days of Ramzan before the Eid moon was sighted. It was not her week with Sohail, and in the manner of the many such weeks she had spent alone, she had broken the fast by herself, with a single date and a cold glass of mi
lk flavored with her favorite rose syrup. Sated, she said her prayers against the soothing hum of the television, its blue lights flickering over her prayer rug as the darkness settled outside.
Then the knock came again, the low insistent rap, rap. It could not be Sohail, as he had a key and was no doubt bound for some family gathering at the home of one of his relatives. The realization that Sohail was not even in the building made her a bit afraid, and she wondered for a second if she should pretend to be asleep. But then, because she couldn’t decide, she went to the door.
Through the peephole she saw her, a smiling woman, her head small and black and round in a headscarf, her body covered and buttoned in swathes of thick polyester. It was the other wife. “Please open the door,” she said, noting immediately the presence behind the peephole. In earlier years, perhaps Aunt Amina would have just receded, let the knocks continue and be met with a silence. Perhaps she would have asked the other wife why had she done it? What was it like to steal another woman’s husband?
Yet that evening Aunt Amina was drawn by the desire to see her up close: to see the gray at the temples, the wrinkles on the brow, the face so much plainer, so much more worn by worry than her own. It was a long moment of looking, stretched by the largeness of an encounter too big to fit into it. The other wife opened her mouth and her words fell fast and incoherently in a pile on the doorstep. She was dressed to go to Taraweeh prayers, she said, and had come to ask Aunt Amina if she would go with her. It was only across the street, and she saw it every day from her window and had always wanted to go. She did not want to go alone. The words came out in a clutter, raspy and garbled and hurried and scared, as the unmoving Aunt Amina listened.
The Upstairs Wife Page 20