The Upstairs Wife

by Rafia Zakaria

  He left as he always did, after he ate breakfast and read the front page of the newspaper with his second cup of tea. It was an old habit, as was his loquaciousness, always so exacting in the morning, his quips and observations and pronouncements on the price of this or the result of that, in contrast to her preference for a slow, silent start to the day. She saw him to the door, to insure as she always did that his descent was singular and uninterrupted by a pause at the door of the woman downstairs, to whom the morning and the week and the husband did not belong.

  She fell asleep again that morning, lulled by the calm that always settled over the neighborhood between ten and noon, after the men had left for work and the older children for school, fewer people around doing the asking and the demanding that went on during all the other hours of the day. Off she drifted, amid the low sounds of a woman haggling with a vegetable seller and the window shutter straining against the breeze.

  When she awoke she was disoriented, in that odd limbo that follows a stolen sleep. It took a few confused moments and a fumbling grasp for the little clock on the bedside to remember that this was her second waking, that breakfast had already been accomplished, and Sohail had already departed to work. It was only then, after she had remembered all the duties already performed and assured herself that no one had witnessed her nap, that she realized that she could not hear anything downstairs. Not the television that marked the other wife’s waking and her sleep, or the telephone conversations with mothers, sisters, and friends that happened in the interim. Perhaps she had gone to the bazaar, she decided, but it was still early. Other than the butcher or the grocer, none of the stores opened before eleven. But she would not be there, for with no husband to welcome, what woman would cook?

  She forgot to wonder as she started the curry and then turned on the television, chopping the onions and shelling the peas for the rice and curry she had planned for their evening meal. A show about the old buildings of Karachi awakened her memories of the buildings of her youth, the crumbling structures now splayed on the screen. There was the Café Grand that was no longer grand, the now squalid insides of Empress Market where she and her mother had amassed such stores of delicacies without the barest scent of refuse. She had not been to Saddar in more than a decade, she realized, and now perhaps there was no Saddar left to go to.

  It was midafternoon, after her lunch of rice and yogurt, and after she finally emerged from her mournful reverie, that she remembered again the silence downstairs. She began to listen more intently now, but she could hear nothing. She began to wonder if she had missed a departure, a quick slip out to the stores while she had been busy making dinner, but she knew it could not be. The woman’s departures were usually loud, preceded by the squeaky turn of the metal armoire where she must keep her money and the clang of the metal keys she turned in its lock. The sounds would tell Aunt Amina that her companion wife was on her way out, and it would always be confirmed by the bang of the inner and then the outer door.

  But Amina had heard none of this. Her foreboding grew until concern turned into paranoid imaginings. Had she and Sohail slipped away, gone together and forever, tired of sharing their marriage with a vestige like her? Had the woman abandoned the husband after she found that he was not the man she had dreamed he would be? Had she left him once her tripart marriage, cobbled together by dint of religious prescription, was old and creaking with disappointment? The possibilities came so fast that she could not order them or even taste the individual flavors of each against the more familiar tastes of her own hopes.

  The mechanics of a surreal day are often lost. Aunt Amina managed to get into the other wife’s apartment, the home that had once been her own, but the details of just how she did so are now forgotten. Perhaps with a key from the old days, spirited in some corner of a drawer. She might have quietly opened the door with the key, or she could have asked one of the little boys from across the street to climb through the courtyard window and scurry to the front door to let her in.

  It was Asr when she entered, and the mosques were making the call for midafternoon prayer. The children were home from school, playing laughing games of cricket and begging their mothers for money to buy candy. She remembered, as she stepped into the sounds curling from the open widows, that they were so much clearer and more immediate on the second floor.

  The shock was not the sounds but the alterations. The walls were now painted in purples and pinks, so unlike her own apartment’s whites and beiges. He had lied, she immediately realized, when he had told her that he preferred them. Here it was, her husband’s other life, lived downstairs and on alternate weeks but for years and so different, so purple. Revolted, she would have turned back if not for the heavy silence. She could not be there, Aunt Amina determined; if she had been, she would have come out to defend her territory, to keep her from seeing in all its lurid colors the second life lived below.

  But she was there. She was in the kitchen, on the floor by the fridge that Aunt Amina hadn’t seen since she moved upstairs years ago. The kitchen was the place she least wanted to see, and she came to it after having walked through the length of the apartment. The other wife lay on the floor on her stomach, face down, the door of the fridge still ajar. It must have been open for some time, as water had pooled on the floor by the body. She did not want to touch her or turn her over or shake her to see; she knew at once. She wanted to scream, but the scream did not come. Several hours later, Uncle Sohail returned home and, seeing the door of the second-floor apartment ajar, risked angering Aunt Amina by stopping in. There he found them, his two wives; one dead and one alive, in the same room for the first time.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Return to the Original

  MARCH 2004

  The funeral was held the next morning. The night before was a long one, distorted by the havoc over the arrangements and the details of informing everyone and getting the announcement of the death read over the mosque loudspeakers. Some of her relatives came, two or three women with pinched brown faces clutching wadded tissues, their noses red with rubbing and crying. At the door, they gazed confusedly at Uncle Sohail, waiting for instructions, some clues over protocol before scurrying into the bedroom where the dead woman had been laid on her bed.

  The question of space was crucial; the house was big but each floor was small, and separate spaces had to be provided for the men and women who came in droves to mourn the death. The middle floor could not accommodate them all, and Uncle Sohail, along with two or three other men from the Kokan community, the men who always showed up at such times of crisis, had to make some decisions about options. The ground floor, cleaned and empty and shorn of furniture, everyone agreed, was the logical place to receive the men.

  Dawn broke and the men began to gather in greater numbers. As the tea came to a boil in the kitchens all around the neighborhood, a maulvi saheb, a religious cleric, arrived from the mosque and began reciting verses from the Quran. His voice, smooth and milky and melodious, rose in long, languorous chants from the courtyard in the middle of the house, filling all three of the floors. The men huddled and greeted each other, speaking in low tones, and then made their way to the bereaved husband. With head bent, Uncle Sohail stood at the entrance in the crisp, starched white shalwar kamiz he normally wore on Eid or for weddings. One by one the men clasped his hands, nodded and embraced, and murmured some words.

  After the dead woman was found, Aunt Amina’s first instinct was to retreat upstairs. In those first confused moments when she was stunned and unsure, she believed she could still hide in her upper floor sanctuary. But the matter of a deceased woman was a delicate one; the woman’s own mother was dead and the peculiar dimensions of their family, the absence of daughters and mothers-in-law and son’s wives, left unfilled a crucial position in the operations of mourning. The role of mourner in chief among the women could not be assumed by just anyone; it had to be a woman of authority, a woman who knew the women who would be coming and could greet them, who could tak
e from them the condolences they had come to offer, to be returned in kind when they suffered a similar loss.

  The women awarded this honor to Aunt Amina, the first wife of the man who had just lost his second wife. Up they climbed to the third floor and knocked on her door. After the first group came, another followed, and soon there was no point to locking the door. The pile of shoes outside it, the slides and the heels and the flip-flops, was an indication to new arrivals that the women’s gathering was inside. There was no choice. Aunt Amina had to hurriedly bathe and change, dress in white, and sit in her living room, where one of the women had covered the floor in white cloth.

  The women sat around her in a circle on the white cloth. One of them had lit some incense, and another had brought the Qurans and placed them on a table in the center of the room. The relatives of the first wife, the plain-faced cousins, the one widowed and the other a spinster, who had come the night before, stayed at first on the middle floor, unsure of their place in the pecking order. There they busied themselves with the things that had to be done: preparing the shroud, bathing the body, and making it ready for the men who would take it for burial. When this was done, they sat awhile, their hands folded in their laps, until they too ascended the stairs and sat at the edge of the room where Aunt Amina officiated over the gathering of mourning women. She pretended she did not see them.

  A messenger came from the men to say that it was time for the bier to be carried away. Led by obedience and practice the women filed out and down, for it was a ritual to see for the last time the deceased woman who would never be seen again in the flesh. So Aunt Amina returned to the room with the purple walls to look again at the face of the woman who had passed. On each side of her stood women who watched, searching for the subtext they knew made this funeral, this last good-bye, different from the others. “She looks peaceful,” one of them said, as she knew was supposed to say in the presence of someone who has passed from this world into the next.

  AUGUST 2005

  It was supposed to be a new beginning for the city. Smart and slick and goateed Mustafa Kamal was a mayor with a plan for a city without a plan. Kamal was a child of Karachi, of its schools, of its eternal questions of belonging, of its hopes and disappointments and realities. His parents had migrated from India and come to the city with their burdens of dreams. He was born in the city and raised among people trying to reconcile those dreams with the realities they had landed on. Like all the hopeful, aspiring children of the Muhajirs, Mustafa was not rich and not poor, and he was averse to the lordly politics of the feudals and their children, their SUVs full of armed guards and their entitled romps all over Karachi.

  Coming of age when the MQM first took over the hearts and minds of migrants and their children, Mustafa Kamal had got his political start working as a telephone operator at the party’s office in Azizabad. Speaking the curious mix of Urdu and English so specific to Karachi’s middle-class kids, he looked and talked unlike the politicians of old. Each gesture, each volley of words, like infrastructure, global, megacity, revitalization, rained on the ears of hopeful Karachiites who saw Kamal wresting them from the past of lost dreams and into the future of new ones. With Kamal at the helm, the reclamation of Karachi could finally begin.

  Mustafa Kamal endeared himself even more because he had a plan for the city. To get people’s attention, he first announced that Karachi was a city of nearly sixteen million people with bustling industries and shops and houses, cars and motorcycles and rickshaws crammed into circumscribed space, all jostling against each other, apparently without a plan.

  Not only was there no plan, Mustafa Kamal and his similarly eager cohorts told the newspapermen and the television channels, there was not even an accurate map. The city had grown and expanded chaotically, with a road built here and a bridge built there, hundreds pouring in from one village and thousands pouring in from another, some sticking together in one portion of a slum and others setting up a shantytown. There were places police didn’t go, buildings built by sly developers who paid off local thugs who extorted money from shopkeepers and protected the whole operation. The city was wild, and to tame it a map and a plan were required.

  The master plan for the city of Karachi that Mustafa Kamal, elected mayor of the city, set out to have prepared in 2005, fifty-eight years after Partition and in the wreckage of other uncompleted plans, would attempt to tame Karachi’s growth. The plan makers—among them not only political functionaries and businessmen but also engineers, town planners, statisticians, and urban historians—asserted that the key to this was to control development, to provide boundaries for the unbounded and incentives for the apathetic.

  One of these boundaries involved the idea of a “sunset clause.” Ranging from five years to perpetuity, the sunset clauses would rein in the builders who bought land and used a single building license to build several stories on lots permitting only one. The administration of Mustafa Kamal enforced a long-forgotten building control ordinance and added additional regulations, including a new permissions process for builders. Any new building plan would be submitted to special development authorities who would review and provide preliminary approval of any development project. After this, the plans would be submitted to the Committee for the Development and Growth of Karachi, which would remain the final arbiter on development decisions.

  Kamal’s Strategic Development Plan 2020 read like a manifesto for Karachi’s future. It promised to make it a “world class city” with “investment friendly infrastructure.” Its choices reflected the creation of a city more for the aspiring middle class instead of the barely surviving poor. “High rise” apartments would obviate the need for upgrading settlements, “flyovers and expressways” would eliminate traffic snarls. There would be “malls instead of markets” and “global capital investment” instead of old-fashioned begging and courting Islamabad bosses for money. To make this Karachi possible, the poor would be shipped from the center of the city to the periphery, less seen and better ignored.

  The waterfront would be reclaimed and transformed too, into an expansive twenty-six kilometer stretch of world-class hotels lining a promenade cooled by the Arabian Sea breezes. Forty thousand acres of beachfront development projects required bulldozing parks to make room for mansions, pavilions, and entertainment complexes. With this plan, Karachi could do it all and have it all. But among those who sat on the committees that discussed and implemented the plan were some who had worked on past plans, in 1985, 1994, and 2000. Others even remembered the plans of 1978 or earlier. Nobody spoke of the old plans now, having decided that it was time to let go of the past and believe that this plan for Karachi, the Strategic Development Plan 2020, would be the plan that would defy the obstacles that killed the previous plans, allowing new rulers to realize new ideas.

  OCTOBER 8, 2005

  Nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas and the Hindukush mountain ranges, Swat District was as idyllic and serene as Karachi was gritty and exacting. It was a place people escaped to, and the ruddy-faced, gray-eyed locals of Swat were happy to accommodate the Karachiites’ desires for reprieve from the routines of too many cars, too little electricity, meddling mothers-in-law, and unstable jobs. Those who could come were moneyed, and their rupees stoked the tourist economy of Mingora. The bazaar in the main market of the Swat District’s biggest town displayed stall after stall of embroideries and beautiful woodwork that the men in the market procured from craftsmen in the mountains, up in the recesses of Gilgit Balitistan in stone dwellings set on steep hills navigable only by those who lived there. The bazaar was also full of guides fluently wheedling Pakistanis in Urdu or tempting British or the American climbers in English. Just a short drive from the capital, Islamabad, Swat was appropriately remote and always hospitable. A chilled beer and a place to pray could be found within a few steps of each other. Tolerance, the people of Swat believed, was necessary for tourism, and tourism was their livelihood.

  The bazaar in Mingora was just beginning
to bustle in the minutes before nine o’clock. It was a late start, for it was the month of Ramzan and most had fallen asleep again after the dawn meal. Shopkeepers were just opening their stalls for the foreign tourists when the earth began to tremble. A few perhaps felt the first gentle shakes that made the windows rattle. Within seconds, though, the tremors began, and then the crumbling, the violent toppling. The people who had been in their homes rushed outside and some who were outside inexplicably rushed indoors. Rocks and glass and the wood from crumbling houses flew; cars crashed into those fleeing or lying on the ground injured. Cracks appeared in the earth, rending trees from the ground and swallowing people.

  The epicenter of the earthquake of 2005 was twelve miles east of Muzaffarabad, in the strip of Kashmir that Pakistan had wrestled away from India. But Swat was close enough to be left bloodied, rubbled, confused. It was days and weeks before helicopter scans of the mountainous territory revealed entire villages flattened, entire populations eradicated. The nearly one hundred fifty aftershocks razed so many more of the hardscrabble villagers’ dwellings. The official death toll was initially said to be 74,698 people, but the final count was dogged by disagreements between this or that government agency and was never publicly announced.

  In the days after the earthquake, aid poured into northern Pakistan from all over the world. Even those believed to be enemies made efforts to rescue the hundreds of thousands of people left without shelter on the steppes and promontories of affected mountains. On October 28, 2005, then prime minister of Pakistan Shaukat Aziz called on those affected by the quake to come down from their mountain homes into the cities and valleys to obtain medical care and aid supplies. With snow already falling on the treacherous mountain passes and aftershocks continuing unabated, it was the only way to get to them.