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The Upstairs Wife

Page 24

by Rafia Zakaria


  But in Swat, where hundreds of homes and hotels had fallen, another group of people descended from the mountains. They came not from the east, where freedom fighters from Kashmir were waylaid or hiding, but from the west, the villages around Peshawar and near the border with Afghanistan. They had long hair and long beards, and everything about them was dark: they appeared at night with cloths wrapped around their faces and wearing mottled brown and blue shalwar kamiz. They came into the markets of Mingora, the newly quiet bazaar shorn of tourists. One evening they made their way through the small shops and at gunpoint took all the music CDs, DVDs, and posters of women that they could find from the terrified shopkeepers who had managed to survive the earthquake.

  On that Ramzan evening, after the fast had been broken at dusk, the men who had come from the hills piled all the CDs and DVDs and pictures of women into a heap in the middle of the bazaar. Then their leader, a man named Maulana Fazlullah who led a group called Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, gave a short sermon. The earthquake had been sent to punish the people of Pakistan for their abandonment of Islam, for their profligate ways of watching obscenity, listening to the tainted sounds of that which had been prohibited, allowing their women to go about uncovered in the streets, and straying from the correct path. The bodies, the fallen buildings, the cries of motherless infants, the maimed fathers and mothers left to suffer in the cold nights were bearing divine punishment for these sins. As the flames engulfed the pile, the orange light illuminated the wrapped faces of Maulana Fazlullah’s followers.

  NOVEMBER 2005

  There was no stipulated mourning period for a widower, not like there was for women, who had the neatly prescribed three months and ten days or the length of three menstrual periods for the task of moving from a life of wifehood to widowhood. The task of mourning for a man was of different proportions. It could even be said that the normal amount of sympathy allotted to the man left without a wife to tend to him was reduced, in Uncle Sohail’s case, to further nominal proportions given that he still had one wife left.

  There was also the complication of reinstating a marriage that had been halved with such precision for nearly two decades. Should it simply return to what it had been? And could that even be, the revival of unthinking, unscheduled days and weeks and weekends belonging only to each other? Given the swiftness of the other wife’s death, perhaps the transition should be delicately handled. And then there was the question of whether it should be done at all, whether either of them, now decades into their habit of longing and parting and waiting, could begin a new chapter in an old marriage.

  The first few days were the easiest. The demands of performing for the audience of mourning guests, the seldom-seen relatives and curious neighbors, kept them both busy. The third day was the end of the period of mourning required for all except widows. On the traditional third day of mourning, Uncle Sohail, wearing his clean, starched shalwar kamiz, went to middle floor where he had spent alternate weeks for the past twenty years. He opened the windows, lit incense, and waited for the mourners, as was required of the day, the men staying with him and the women ascending the stairs up to Aunt Amina’s floor, where she sat with them, prayed, and read the Quran for the departed soul.

  After the third day fewer people came, and then even fewer until it was clear that, henceforth, it would be just Aunt Amina and Uncle Sohail left to each other. The question of the future hung between them with a doleful silence. The ground floor lay empty and now also the middle floor, an expanse of unused space in a city of people crushed together. After the first week, and for the second, third, fourth, and fifth, Uncle Sohail followed the erratic patterns of a man suspended between a living wife and a dead one. Within him waged the war of habits: the habit of one-week spurts with two different women, the habit of being cared for always by the one or by the other, the habit of leaving and good-byes.

  But the longing for a freshly cooked meal or a bed with clean sheets or a hot cup of tea goaded him out of the most tender memories. Confronted by these needs, he told himself that he could not live in the past, wallow in its tragedy. At those times, he would turn off the television, turn off the lights, and go back upstairs to the clean house and sheets and the living wife, and he forgot for a week, or for a while, the burden of having to keep the memory of his dead wife alive all by himself.

  JULY–AUGUST 2006

  The skies darkened and the rains came to Karachi, gently cooling sunbaked foreheads. As they always did in the first hours of their fitful romance with the rain, people celebrated. They packed picnics and crammed into Suzuki vans to go to the beach and frolic in the choppy waves. The women fried fritters of flour made from chickpeas and served it up to the men with chutney made from green chilies and tamarind. Children squealed as they jumped in puddles, took outdoor showers under the gutters, and caught tadpoles and then freed them. Like the first moments of everything that came to Karachi, the first hug of the monsoon was always a joyous one.

  But the rain didn’t stop and things started breaking down. The power was first to go. At first people pretended not to notice; the women kept frying the fritters, the men hitched up their pant legs, and everyone pretended it was all still good fun. The children kept playing, not noticing that the puddles were becoming fetid, that the rainwater was mixed now with the water from the sewers.

  They pretended until the electricity had been off for eight hours, then ten, and then a whole day. They started to worry a bit as the ice in their refrigerators began to melt and the food stored in its recesses, frozen meat from the Eid before, chicken pieces for curries, garlic peeled and cleaned and stored in bags, began to drip. Without electricity, there was no water to drink or for bathing or to wash dishes or clothes, no way to pump into overhead tanks what would come flowing out of people’s taps. The water fell from the sky, the taps ran dry, and the people began to get upset.

  The heart of the old city of Saddar, where the British had once lived, where the roads had been clean and orderly, and where my grandparents Said and Surrayya had arrived and lived in awe amid such spaciousness, was badly hit by the monsoon of 2006. Under the surface of streets that had become canals, water burst through drains designed for a city of four thousand but bearing the waste of four hundred thousand. This time it was too much for the choking sewers, and they sent rivers of waste into the streets.

  In this dank heart of the city stood the Sobhraj Maternity Hospital, a sandstone building built in 1928 by a Hindu financier who had lost his wife in childbirth. The hospital, which had brought babies into Karachi, increasingly the babies of the poor and then the very poor, for decade after decade, braving monsoons and floods and wars and cataclysms, also gave up that year. Constructed decades earlier, the storm drain that ran under the hospital was lower than those of the adjoining areas. That year the avalanche of water that came through it from the shops of Urdu Bazaar and the eateries of Burns Road made the drain under the hospital give way. It strained and seethed and finally burst, unleashing water and sewage into the hospital and under the beds and stretchers on which women lay writhing in labor.

  The beds were old and immovable. The stretchers were newer, but their wheels didn’t work. The fathers-to-be, the new fathers, and the two or three doctors who had braved the rains to come to the hospital asked the orange sellers and banana sellers, who now sat on their empty carts without any produce to sell, if they might borrow the carts so that extremely pregnant women, women in the throes of childbirth, could be wheeled out of the hospital. Twenty carts were rounded up, and they became beds, delivery tables, and stretchers for the women and the babies born in Sobhraj Maternity Hospital in Karachi in August 2006.

  Mustafa Kamal, the mayor who had been working so hard, so diligently to develop a master plan for the city spent day after day roaming through the neighborhoods of burst sewers and submerged homes. He hitched up his own pants and carried and set up a folding chair, forcing lazy work crews to unclog pipes, remove debris, re-string power lines. As he
moved from place to place, from Azizabad to Liaqatabad, from Saddar to Tariq Road, from Gulshan-e-Iqbal to Clifton, he was asked many questions and heard many excuses. The Karachi Water and Sewerage Board would not work with the Karachi Development Authority, who insisted that the task of clearing the streets belonged not to them but to the Karachi Municipal Corporation. If there had been an organizational map, it would have revealed a city carved up into a million little turfs and territories and bureaucracies and pensions and payoffs. But there was of course no such map. Perhaps then, wading through the foul waters left by the monsoon of 2006, the maker of the master plan of 2020 realized that Karachi’s problem was not the absence of a master plan but the presence of too many masters.

  MARCH 2007

  Two years seemed a long enough time to mourn the departed. For two years Aunt Amina had been the only wife doing the caring and yet only one of two wives being cared for. She had tolerated and even accommodated the rituals of mourning and the uncomfortable position of listening to the sometimes feeble and sometimes effusive praises that visiting mourners heaped by ritual or rote on her ears. “She was such a good cook,” one neighbor woman, sweaty from her climb upstairs, had pronounced as she undid the heavy nylon burka she had put on to walk the ten steps between her own house and Aunt Amina’s stairwell. “She always sent us the most delicious sweets every Ramzan,” she had continued.

  Aunt Amina smiled and nodded, never letting her guests get an inkling of the reality that neither woman had ever, never on Eid or during Ramzan, on their sickest days or their most joyous ones, ever eaten a morsel cooked in the other’s kitchen. In the early days after the second marriage, if Uncle Sohail had made the mistake of bringing a plate of food from downstairs to upstairs, it had provoked such a storm of tears, followed by such a frigid coldness of mien that he had never dared to repeat his mistake again. The food from downstairs, the feelings from downstairs, and the existence of downstairs had stayed downstairs for as long as there was a second wife living there. The mourning women broke the rule on the day after the funeral, and it was perhaps the shock of the death, or the suddenness of it, that allowed Aunt Amina to concede, for the sake of appearances, to the story of wifely sisterhood that everyone wished to believe.

  Those old enough to remember the initial misgivings fell into the story too. “Time heals everything,” they would say awkwardly to each other, forgetting the stares they had poured on the house with the two wives and the giggles and snickers in their kitchens when they saw the newlywed couple drive off in the car on workday mornings. They had felt so thankful then to have their husbands, their fat or sweaty or bald husbands, all to themselves. They were unable to resurrect that thankfulness now in the quiet room upstairs where Aunt Amina received them. It was such a neat and clean room, free of the encroachments of a daughter-in-law who needed more space or the grown grandchildren who had nowhere else to sleep.

  It was not these women who tormented Aunt Amina anymore. What bothered her now was Uncle Sohail’s unwillingness to let go of the woman he had married against her will. At first, his departures into reverie seemed admissible, a natural expression of grief she resented but had to permit. So she sat quietly and tried to pretend that everything was as it had always been. When Uncle Sohail slumped downstairs after dinner and sat there for hours she said nothing.

  On Fridays his vigils would last longer than usual. The Fridays after the death of the second wife he would go to prayers at the mosque as usual and come upstairs for his meal. Then he would announce with a rehearsed coldness that stung in its preemptive clarity that he was “going out.” He would go downstairs, and she would hear him open the windows, open and shut a drawer or a cabinet, and then settle into silence. It was these long, noiseless Friday afternoons of nothing that frightened her, taunted her, assaulted her with the notion that even though she had outlived the second wife, she had failed to hold the primary spot in his heart.

  On some Fridays she tried to console herself with what she had gained. No longer was her life divided, no longer did she dread the Sunday evenings when he would descend the stairs into the arms of another woman for another week. No longer did she lie in bed worrying about what would happen as she got old: the vulnerable alternate weeks when she would be uncared for and unheard from. The passion with which she had weighed his affections and counted on his guilt, measured against the divine command of the perfect justice she was due, had dissipated.

  But with the passage of many Fridays and his unerring devotion to spending them downstairs with the ghost of what once was, Amina’s sense of abandonment began to sting. What she had first allowed with the lenience of a benevolent victor permitting the vanquished some small moment of repose, she now began to consider a crucial lapse in judgment, a chink that would grow into a chasm that would wrench from her again what was finally hers. He did not want to get over her, she thought, getting angrier and angrier through the long Friday afternoons.

  Soon the poison from Friday spread into the rest of the week, into breakfasts and lunches and bedtime embraces, into all conversations and trips to purchase groceries and each and every one of the familiarities of marriage that had so recently reentered her life as undivided wholes. Schooled well in the art of fighting a living opponent, she battled a dead one, a woman whose every failing had been erased by death and whose every endearment was embellished by an absolute absence. At the store together, if he reached for a jar of jam whose flavor she disliked, she decided immediately that she must have liked it. If he paused for too long in the middle of a conversation, she felt the presence of the dead woman’s words. The assault of the second wife was constant.

  They needed a new beginning, she concluded, a beginning in which the arrangements of the decades, the habits of the divided lives did not intrude. She had to take back not only his life but also his memory, and install in its place a new one, with other recollections, stories about her and about how they had been before. Stories of the day he had come to see her, stories of their short courtship and furtive first glances at each other on their wedding day, stories of their first days together when he had not doubted, nor thought of anyone else, not doubted their marriage and the solitary solidity of one husband and one wife. After two years Aunt Amina decided that she had to wrest back her marriage. She made a plan to conquer the memories of her husband.

  SEPTEMBER 2006

  In an instant, there was darkness. The lights on the streets outside the Aiwan-e-Sadr, where Pervez Musharraf, the army chief turned president lived, grew dark. The high-voltage bulbs that shot bolts of blue light outside the Supreme Court of Pakistan went out. The lone bulb in the shop that sold cigarettes just outside the diplomatic enclave also stopped shining. Suddenly, on the evening of September 24, 2006, in the middle of newscasts on television, while dinner was just beginning to be served to senior bureaucrats, and lesser bureaucrats were complaining to their wives about not being invited to meetings where dinners were served, and the clerks of the lesser bureaucrats were wondering why their wives had not yet served dinner, all Islamabad went dark.

  It took a few minutes for the TV and radio stations with their own power generators to realize that this was no ordinary outage; that the lights had dimmed not simply over Karachi or Lahore, for that was not news, or Peshawar, for that was certainly not news, but over the whole country. This was news. They sent out their men, who had been dragged from their own half-eaten dinners into the news vans that would take them to the darkest possible spots of the cities, which they knew would attract people to the only lights available, their camera lights.

  It was just a little while before the country began to wonder if this was a bigger and perhaps more meaningful darkness. It felt different from the routine power outages that interrupted their playtimes and prayer times. The news of the historic proportions of the darkness spread in the old-fashioned way, from one person to another.

  Because the president had recently announced that parliamentary elections would be held soon, and
the cauldrons of power, set to simmer since the most recent coup seven years ago, seemed suddenly to have reached a boiling point, everyone now suspected that the darkness portended something more threatening than simply a countrywide darkness. Everyone suddenly remembered that the president, who was also the chief of army staff, was not in the country, and this made them even more uneasy; perhaps it was another coup, a coup to replace the man who had taken power in a coup, under a darkness that was no ordinary darkness but a national one.

  At 10:00 p.m. Tariq Hameed, the chairman of the National Power Administration Board, whose own house remained lit with a private generator, issued a statement saying that no sabotage was involved and the power outage was due to a technical problem. Then the officials of the Ministry of Information, who were accompanying President Musharraf on his trip to New York City, told other officials who had been left behind that the president was doing fine and that the information about his well-being should be shared with the rest of the nation. The officials assured the nation that even though this was an extraordinary sort of darkness, it did not mean that anything else was afoot, that some big change was underway.

  Nobody listened, and as night fell and the lights flickered, people watched for tanks to come rolling into Islamabad, for ranks of soldiered men to appear on street corners to enforce curfews. Perhaps a new leader was behind the darkness, stealthily taking over before things became worse; someone from within the military, a younger leader, a rebel who did not like the general who had struck a deal with politicians convicted of corruption. Perhaps there was such a man, angry at President Musharraf for striking a deal with the Americans, permitting them to kill Pakistanis via remote control and to ship the weapons and fuel of warfare through Pakistan to the hungry white soldiers in Afghanistan. Sitting and sweating in the darkness, the people wondered whether there was such a man, a man who would stand up to America, who would keep out the corrupt politicians, a Pakistani man who would lead Pakistan out of the darkness. They wondered for hot, sticky hours over cups of tea or glasses of nothing until the lights finally, slowly came back on, and they realized then that it had all just been an ordinary darkness, interrupted finally by a mediocre light.

 

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