When she remembered this encounter, Aunt Amina could not recall if she had uttered a polite “Sorry, I cannot come,” or offered a terse “I cannot come,” but she was certain that her response was a refusal. Whatever the words may have been, the door shut on the woman who, after a decade of living downstairs, had suddenly come calling. Aunt Amina couldn’t recall if she had actually seen the face of the other woman, that broad unremarkable face, crumble from hesitant hopefulness into anguished disappointment.
MAY 16, 2002
The cemetery of the white, or the “gora,” has sat in the center of the city ever since there was a city. Its name, Gora Qabristan, remained long after the British had left, and long after the “white” people who settled in the area made arrangements to be buried elsewhere. The people buried there now were brown and poor and unable even to imagine the white people who had laid claim to its first graves. Their spare, meager graves competed for space with the older plots marked with marble and stone, their curved Madonnas rising up from the sodden ground. The new ones stood just apart from the rest, as if embarrassed.
The arch over the door at the entrance announced the date as 1845, marking when Gora Qabristan was consecrated as the Karachi Christian Cemetery by the chief collector of the city. His own wife would be buried there, the regal Lady Phyllis Lawrence, who had followed her husband to the city after his appointment. Lady Phyllis loved racing horses on the newly inaugurated Karachi Racecourse that the British officers had built. But on June 30 she fell from her steed and was battered in a mad crush of horse hooves and hard earth. Lady Phyllis was buried in Karachi, and her husband erected for her an elegant portico, arched and delicate and shady, a final resting place for a wife who fell far from home.
The shaded mausoleum still stands today at the edge of the cemetery, its once gorgeous vista marred by stubby buildings skirting its sides. But other graves around Lady Phyllis’s have fallen on even harder times. The saltwater never sits too far from the surface in cities like Karachi, built as they are on land reclaimed from the sea. That, along with human excretions from the nearby slum buildings, has flooded some areas of Gora Qabristan today, taking over with every passing year more and then even more of the graves within it.
The dark hours are the most trying for Gora Qabristan, when prowling dogs, unsated from the trash heaps already picked over by slum children, wander amid the shadows of the crosses and addicts lie deadened amid the graves. On a dark night sometime in the middle of May 2002, a body was dumped amid the graves. It was rumored to be the body of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who had come to Karachi in search of a story about Al-Qaeda and its operatives working in the city. He had been kidnapped months earlier in January, and ever since then, American and Pakistani investigators had been searching for him under a glaring media spotlight. For a time they thought their search would end at Gora Qabristan, the Cemetery of the White, which sits beside Sharea-Faisal, the city’s main road that leads to the sea to the west and to the international airport to the east. It was a false hope. The body they found was later discovered to belong to another of Karachi’s casualties. Daniel Pearl's body, or pieces of it, was found in a shallow grave in another part of Karachi.
AUGUST 2002
The iddah, or period of waiting, lasted three months and ten days—three menstrual periods—and applied to both widows and divorced women. It was unclear what the women would be waiting for. Its intention was the pragmatic regard for concerns of paternity, of insuring that children born after a husband departs by way of death or divorce could be properly pinned to the correct paternal line for the purposes of inheritance and familial obligations. So the women, young or old, disappeared into this period of seclusion that promised, at least theoretically, the possibility of emerging again eligible to be married or restored to social life, reassigned to another man.
I never saw any woman surface again. My grandmother, an old widow, was no different. Like all the other widows, women who faced the task of justifying a lone existence in a strictly paired world, my grandmother’s sudden submersion into seclusion brought on by her husband’s death became the first step in a transformation from the living into something less. Slowly in the days and weeks after, she began to change from a woman invested in the living and the longings of the world around her to one focused only on the world that existed beyond life, where she would once again become part of a pair.
She had always been pious, had always prayed all five of the obligatory prayers, and had always been the one to read the Quran cover to cover every Ramzan. But if prayer had been the activity for the time between meals and tending to Said and sitting with Aunt Amina, now it had become her primary activity, with small breaks for all the rest. An ordinary piety would not do for a widow. Perhaps she knew from the examples of widows and menless women who had passed before that her transformation had to be so complete that she almost became a spirit living in this world, a shadow in prayer waiting to be lifted to the next one.
She slept alone downstairs, insisting on keeping her windows flung open to the front garden so she could enjoy the night breeze. Her day began in the dark before Fajr prayer, when the jasmine planted just outside her windows gave off the headiest scent. She still performed her morning ablutions, her brown skin loose on her bones, in the marble-tiled bathroom that she and Said had gazed at with such disbelief when they first built the house.
After Fajr prayers she added several more of her own, reading special verses of the Quran that she deemed particularly powerful in the luminescent first moments of the day, when only the most faithful rose and prayed to their maker. Sometimes after Fajr prayers, when the household was beginning to burst into activity, she would rest until her breakfast of a single cup of tea and, only sometimes, a half slice of bread. On many days she fasted, and far more than what was prescribed, each fast expiating, cleansing, shoring and storing for the life beyond death, her own and her husband’s.
By midmorning she returned to the Quran, three or four of the thirty burgundy-bound volumes she and Said had bought for that first Quran reading Khwani when the house was being built. She set herself the goal of finishing eight to ten a day, the entire Quran read every three days for so long that she barely had to look at the pages. She read in the name of her husband so that he should be spared the travails of the grave, and in her own name so that they could both be forgiven their sins and reunited before their single maker on the Day of Judgment and ultimately in paradise. Sitting by the window of the unused formal dining room at the margins of our house, she kept reading, glasses perched on her nose, until the call to Zuhr prayer filtered in from the mosque to draw her to another form of worship.
She permitted herself only one or two worldly indulgences. One of these was insuring that her son and grandson were properly cared for, with the meals they liked cooked with the greatest of care. Even in her transformed state, aligned toward preparation for the next world, she made sure to sniff under the lid of every pot on the burners, ready always to start a curry or boil lentils herself to insure that the standards that she had set for the household were upheld even as her own reign over it drew to a close.
The other duty was the phone calls she made to Aunt Amina. For years, according the established routine, these came in the mornings one week and in the evenings the next when Uncle Sohail was with his other wife. The phone calls in the evening were longer, beginning just after she had drawn her hands over her face to complete the last supplication of the Asr prayer. They continued softly until the sky dimmed and the call to the Maghrib prayer sounded from the mosque.
The two women, one who had spoken only to herself and the other only to God throughout the rest of the day, talked about things that may have seemed strange to others. Aunt Amina focused on the still pressing catalogue of slights from an absent husband whose betrayal still stung even as it failed to rattle. Surrayya responded with her stories of a man now gone, what his thoughts would have been on the weather that day, on th
e rudeness of a servant, or a film they had seen together thirty years ago in Bombay. At the call of Maghrib prayers, their discourse concluded and they set off again for the worlds beyond their reach and to the men who lived in them, one woman returning to prayer and another to the habits she had perfected for alternate weeks of her life.
SEPTEMBER 2002
The first white people, the British, in the region had come for trade, seeing in the sandy desolation of Karachi a nascent port from which to lug the sugar and spices and silk of the subcontinent back to the shores of England. The clock tower they had built still stood guard at Keamari Port even though the time was incorrect. No one cared much about this small detail; the tower remained because it was, like the smell of fish and the wetness of the gangplanks, part of how things had always been. So the tower that had kept the British on time continued looking out on waters no longer blue but a sludgy, sulking black, with traces of oil spills and the complex effusions of chemicals. The ships came still, merchant navy ships with Pakistani captains, hardworking boys carrying hefty cargoes of oil for the Arab sheikhs who employed them.
Now there were also American ships with cargoes meant for the American boys fighting over the border in Afghanistan. If the ships of the British had carried goods away after gathering them from far corners of Lahore and Jodhpur, the shipping containers of the Americans arrived bursting with them. They promised not to include guns, just food, uniforms, flak jackets, helmets, and fuel for the thousands of American soldiers waiting in Helmand and Kunduz and Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif.
The cranes unloading the American ships stood out against the dwarfish buildings around the port and the worn rags fluttering on the fishing boats. One by one, they unloaded the metal boxes full of materials for war. As was customary, an illicit trade soon began among the crane operators and the customs officials, and soon the American military gear could be bought at one of the many markets that stretched on the road between the port and the city. If the officers of the Pakistan Navy knew about this, they did not say anything. After all, everybody had to make a living.
But the Americans did not come just to Karachi’s port. They also came looking for terrorists, the men they believed were hiding in the nooks and crannies of Karachi, the men who had killed Daniel Pearl and had planned the attacks of September 11, 2001. These men bearing secrets and potential carnage could be sheltered by the late-arriving Pashtuns or the mafias in the madrassas of Binoria Town or deep inside the slums of Korangi, Landhi, and Orangi. There were so many layers of humanity and places to hide that anyone who didn’t want to be found could breathe and burgeon with a peace unimaginable in other places.
Karachi was a city made for hiding. Everyone was running from something in Karachi: the migrant from the Afghan border hiding from money lenders, the secretly married couple hiding from the condemnations of their village’s tribal council, the children of the Muhajirs hiding from the military, the drug-addicted factory workers hiding from the bosses from whom they had stolen. With so many seeking escape in Karachi, a complex mechanics of hiding developed. There was always a way of getting where you needed to go under an assumed name, always someone who could be paid or bribed for their services.
This is what the agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, their binders and hard drives bursting with the names and pencil-drawn profiles of terrorists, were told when, in late 2002, they met their Pakistani counterparts to lay out their plans. The men they were looking for were not all Pakistani, many were actually Arab, just like the men who had blown up the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. But the trails they had followed all led to Karachi, to a cobweb of safe houses that had to be emptied out if the men were to be caught and their plans aborted. The Pakistanis from Inter-Services Intelligence nodded, their faces blank as they sipped their cups of tea. They told the Americans that if they wished to catch terrorists, they must grow beards and wear Pakistani clothes and try their best not to look white.
SEPTEMBER 2002
The bottom floor of Aunt Amina’s house was being vacated by the renters. They were a large family with six adults and four children who had lived crammed into its four rooms for more than ten years, ten hot summers and ten mild winters jammed between doors that would not give and walls that would not stretch to accommodate their expanding lives.
One afternoon in September, three large pickup trucks took the renters to their new lodgings in the Gulshan-e-Iqbal neighborhood, their broken tables and rolled rugs and television sets all packed together and covered with shabby sheets for the journey across Karachi’s streets. Aunt Amina entered the apartment for the first time in a decade. Standing in the doorway, looking through the portico under which Uncle Sohail ushered her into a married life, she wept.
Before her was complete destruction. The tile floor of the courtyard was hacked and wounded in so many places that the gray concrete underneath stood jagged and exposed. Inside the emptied rooms the walls still bore the resentful weight of lives stacked into impossible proximity: a child’s multiplication table stuck to a poster of a Bollywood starlet’s almost-exposed breasts; bathroom supplies in the kitchen; a hotplate in the living room. In the kitchen, the walls were darkened with the grease of a million meager meals. They had not bothered to clean up, and the droppings of their creations now lay thick and heavy and black and stinking behind the stove, under the sink, and in every crack and corner.
And it smelled of the sweat of hundreds of unwashed nights, of the newborns’ urine, of the sickness the deceased grandmother had suffered. Children’s paint had spilled in one corner and in another a woman’s henna-stained fingers had accidently touched the wall. Each room bore its own store of ghosts who refused to leave through the now-opened doors and windows.
How had it become this way? Aunt Amina asked herself as she walked from room to room. The images of two decades before came back suddenly against the squalid reality before her: this was the room where she had sat dressed as a bride; that was the room where she and Sohail had eaten their first meal alone; that the room where she had waited for the sound of the vegetable seller. Not since the day Sohail had married his second wife had these memories been so alive. Once a repository of images from the days when her marriage was whole, the rooms had become squalid squares that housed the resentment of others.
She had never met them, these people who had arrived armed with the recommendations of Aziza Apa, people whose background was known to no one, but whom Sohail had eagerly deemed appropriate. She had not wished to argue then; she was so focused on what was going on in the other half of the marriage that she couldn’t stop to consider what was happening in the lower half of the house. She had stayed upstairs, on her new floor, without any memories of happier times or sadder times, wanting only to be freed from looking down into the courtyard. She had been too high up to notice the squalor accumulating below, too annoyed by the sounds of so many children to notice the fate of the rooms that had once been her own.
Wandering with Uncle Sohail, Aunt Amina made him promise that it was she who would select the next tenants and supervise the renovation of the ground floor. Future tenants would not be those forced on them by Aziza Apa or anyone else; there would be no one who would wreck the house that they had built, a house that was hers and his together. “No more,” she said amid the tears that soaked into the handkerchief she held on her nose. She decided, amid the wreckage, that she would reclaim some part of what had once been her own, of what she remembered as good.
SEPTEMBER 2002
Most of the houses in Gulshan-e-Iqbal had been built in the 1980s, with the money husbands and sons sent back from their toil in the Persian Gulf, on oil rigs and construction sites and in cabs and factories. The men came back once or twice a year with sweaty wads of dirhams and riyals rolled in pockets sewn inside their pants and swathed their wives and mothers and sisters in black burkas covered with rhinestones. To house the women and the children they sired as regularly as their visits, the men built mansions of glitterin
g resplendence, which they hoped would excuse the fact that they did not live with their wives for most of the year. The Gulf boom had long ended by 2002, but these faded beauties still stood. Next to them sprouted apartment complexes and the smaller “villas” and windowless, gardenless “garden homes” that the postboom generation could afford.
It was a chauffeur working in one of these houses who snitched first. Goaded gradually by the agents of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) who had been lurking about the neighborhood market for weeks, noting the comings and goings in the area while drinking tea at the roadside café, the chauffeur coughed up just the leads the Americans had hoped for. The snitch’s boss was a rotund man of few words named Mohammad Ahmad Rabbani, whose movements seemed far too furtive and restless for the usual husband returning from Kuwait. Even more interesting to the ISI were the people the snitch’s boss entertained. The men going in and out of the house were not posturing Pakistanis but Arabs, stumbling to give the snitch even a few words of instruction in Urdu.
The ISI found the boss and questioned him in his own house. It was a cordial interview run by the Pakistanis in Urdu while the Americans watched from the fringes. His properties were “guesthouses,” Mohammad Rabbani insisted, where he played host to various visitors from the Gulf who wished to visit Karachi to oversee the charities to which they donated. The men weren’t terrorists, they were philanthropists or their agents who wished to check in on the orphanages, religious schools, and mosques they funded. That, Rabbani repeated again and again, was all he knew. Before they let him go, the ISI made Rabbani write down the addresses of all the “guesthouses” he owned in the city, matching them against their list.
The Upstairs Wife Page 21