The Upstairs Wife

by Rafia Zakaria

  Sitting down and ladling pudding into her own bowl, she continued with some slight assumption of victory. “I think it will be good for us, you know. . . . I have been going down, and it is so airy and light after I had it painted white. And then,” she continued, eager to unload her best bit before any interruptions, “we are getting old, and climbing up and down the stairs every day and every time you buy groceries and milk is too much.” She looked at him, peering through the membrane of memories that bound them together and kept them apart. She looked at his eyes, his moustache, his forehead and saw the man she wanted him to become once again, the man she had seen from the window of her bedroom, the man who had said he knew from the moment he saw her that she would be his perfect bride. She looked at him now and waited for an answer.

  He did not look at her, and for a long while he did not say anything. Then he cleared his throat and with the softest of voices poured out in words venom more deathly than blows. “You know, Amina, twenty years ago when I married her, I learned for the first time what it was to be happy, to be with someone I truly understood and who truly understood me.” He looked directly at her now, over the empty plates of curry and the almost full bowl of pudding. “I could have left you then, as so many men do. We did not have children and your father could have given you a home.” He stared at Amina, her face flushed as if freshly slapped, and he kept on, his eyes glassy and his lips wet. “I did not leave you because I did not want you to be disgraced, to live like an abandoned woman, and so I . . . we put up with you, put up with you when we did not have to, when we did not need an interloper, someone watching and hearing and listening and blaming. Now she is gone and I am left here with you. . . . Leave me be. We will never move to the first floor, or to the second floor. They are sacred for me, for they are what I shared with her, and even if she is gone I will not let you take what was hers.”

  DECEMBER 15, 2007

  It would turn out to be one of the most important days in the history of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. In the middle of the dry winter, when men huddled around smoky stoves in the hujras (meeting rooms) dotted all over the tribal areas, a historic gathering was about to be achieved. Its architect was Baitullah Mehsud, the short man so many had underestimated and who now stood to take the helm of a movement whose resilience against armies with far greater resources baffled the world.

  On December 15, 2007, Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud called together a shoora, a meeting of commanders and allies from all over the tribal areas of Pakistan. The men came from the seven tribal agencies as well as from the “settled areas” of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in northwestern Pakistan. Sitting on the backs of Toyota trucks, their guns held up like staffs between their thighs, the men poured in, men who had fought disparate battles all over the region, had worked tirelessly to exhort local populations to give up their sinful ways, to keep their women indoors, not to listen to music, to stop straying from the path of Islam. They came from North and South Waziristan, from Khurram and Orakzai, from Mohmand and Bajaur. They came also from Kohistan and Buner and the Malakand Division. Maulana Fazlullah’s men came from Swat, they were the men who had descended from the mountains after the earthquake and vowed to restore the rule of Islam to the little village.

  In gathering these men, tribal elders and seasoned fighters, warriors who had fought all their lives in Afghanistan against the Russians and now against the Americans, the new arrivals who came from Uzbekistan or Yemen or Libya, Baitullah Mehsud was able to make the unprecedented happen. After hours of negotiation, all the members of the shoora agreed to unite under the leadership of the little man from Makeen who had brought them there. Under his leadership, they decided the consolidated organization would be called the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. With its formation, tribal enmities, ideological differences, quibbles about whether or not foreign fighters should or must be accommodated were put to rest. Under the banner of this single organization, the men agreed, they could wrest Pakistan back from the un-Islamic forces that had taken it over, fighting until the end and by whatever means necessary.

  Before the men of the Tehreek-e-Taliban departed to make the journey back to their homes, Mullah Omar, the newly selected Tehreek spokesman, issued an ultimatum to the Pakistan Army. Reported the next day in newspapers and television channels all across Pakistan, the declaration gave the Pakistan Army “ten days to cease all operations in Swat, withdraw all troops from the region, and close all military checkpoints between North and South Waziristan.” Mullah Omar wrote, “Our main aim is to target US allies in Afghanistan but the Government of Pakistan’s ill strategy has forced us to launch a defensive jihad in Pakistan.” If their words went unheeded, Baitullah Mehsud, the new leader of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, said, “the Government of Pakistan will be paid back in the same coin.” The ultimatum’s ten days would be up on December 26, 2007.

  The news reporters who wrote down the date, and the readers who read it in the paper, did not know then it would be a significant one. No one knew that the day after, December 27, 2007, would be the day Benazir Bhutto, the freest woman we knew, would be assassinated.

  EPILOGUE

  FEBRUARY 2014

  My grandmother Surrayya died on a Sunday while I was visiting my parents’ home on my frequent trips to Karachi from America. She was eighty-four and had been ill a long time, her suffering a cause of anguish for us all.

  As is our custom, we buried her before dusk. When the three days of traditional mourning were done, I visited Aunt Amina at her house. Night was just falling, and the bright lights of Destiny Gardens across the street were already on. Workmen were unloading chairs, and the tents blazed with lights. There was going to be a wedding that night.

  But the lane itself, absent streetlights, was the dim gray hue that hangs over most of Karachi. Even so, I could see how it had changed. The original people, those first migrants from India who had harbored dreams of replicating the community they had left behind, are nearly all gone or in the process of going. The houses became too small after new floors could no longer be piled atop one another. No more rooms could be wedged into gardens and verandas and garages. The parents and grandparents had died, and homes had to be sold so the proceeds could be divided between siblings and smaller places bought in farther suburbs. Only the very wealthy or their children could afford to live independently in their own homes and away from family entanglements; in other structures, large families divided lives and rooms and resources as they always had.

  Some, a few golden sons, had made it big and moved to mansions by the ocean. The sum of it had been an emptying out, a changing of hands to families who did not care to know their neighbors. Some of these newcomers painted their windows black so that no one could see inside. Others had posted armed guards outside. Straggly men with faces frozen in eternal suspicion, they walked up and down the short frontage belonging to their masters, their AK-47s slung over their shoulders. The straps of the guns were decorated in traditional patterns of Pakistani folk embroidery.

  Aunt Amina’s house remained unchanged. The stairwell leading up to the third floor, where she still lived, was dark. We climbed up the first flight and to the middle floor, which had not been inhabited since the death of the other wife. Its door stood darkened, solid, and unmoved. The stairs leading up to the third floor had crumbled a bit over the years. They had never received their final coats of cement, never been made permanent. I stumbled on my way up, afraid to fall in the darkness. No light filtered up from the ground where a lone bulb lit the entrance to the stairwell. Aunt Amina heard me, and she opened her door: the light from her rooms fell on the last few steps up.

  She was not alone. The shadows of two small children clung to hers. When I hugged her, they shied away. They were the children of our cousin, I learned, who was now Aunt Amina’s tenant. An even later migrant from India, the bottom floor had been rented to him. Now the children sidled behind her, sizing me up. Uncle Sohail, stooped and pale, shuffled into the room
from the bedroom next door. He walked with a cane, the discomfort of the effort visible in every shuffling step, a diminished man whose illness in the years since the stroke had become a part of him. He had recently been admitted to the hospital with a sick heart, he told me after he sat down. He had refused a pacemaker, because, he said, life had already put him through enough.

  The two children, the boy and girl, did not notice Uncle Sohail at all. They remained stuck to Aunt Amina, peering at me from their secure positions at her waist. They came every day, she told me, so that their mother, who recently had a third baby, could get her household chores done. Their books and toys were strewn on a table nearby. When the little girl decided to speak, a torrent of words fell from her mouth. She told me her name, her brothers’ names, the name of the school she went to. Aunt Amina smiled. We sat and watched the kids, and Uncle Sohail talked a bit more about his recent health troubles and the weather. It had been so cold, he mumbled, but it was getting warmer now. We hung our heads remembering how hard and unforgiving Surrayya’s last days had been. “Those who suffer in this life are spared punishment for their sins in the hereafter,” Aunt Amina murmured.

  When I rose to leave a while later, Aunt Amina followed me to the door. “Don’t forget me,” she said, her eyes wet behind her glasses. Her father and now her mother were both gone; there were fewer reasons for her to visit her brother’s house, to remain connected to him, and through him to us. Words felt wooden and inadequate, as they do in such moments. “How can that be?” I told her, “I cannot ever forget you, I grew up with you.” Back in the bedroom now, Uncle Sohail coughed loudly. As I started down the stairwell, the two children rushed in front of me, unafraid, navigating the darkness with expertise. They made the journey many times a day.

  I could never forget her. The shadow of her marriage, her exclusion, her accommodation of a life she had never expected had cast its imprint on my own life. The memory of her misery weighed on me; the questions about her choices plagued me. How real had they been? How helpless had she been? These familiar thoughts twisted about my mind as my own marriage was arranged, as I became a bride and left Karachi for America. They were with me when I left the marriage that had been chosen for me, when I decided to rebel, when I returned to Pakistan and then returned to America, again and yet again. My story was built on hers.

  A few days before my grandmother died, the newspapers announced that parts of Karachi were now officially under the control of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (the Taliban Movement of Pakistan). The civil war that had been a possibility was now real in Karachi, and its casualties—policemen, doctors, students, journalists—appeared every day, their bloody or shrouded corpses splashed over the pages of newspapers and on television screens. These images are as menacing as a recently published map of Karachi that shows the city encircled by Taliban-controlled areas in the west, the north, and the east. The only side of the city not enclosed is the one that opens out into the sea.

  When measured, the Taliban-occupied area measures 470 square miles: about one-third of Karachi. This in turn translates to nearly 2.5 million people, mostly the poor and Pashtun, whose lives are now directly under Taliban control. Sometimes the newspapers run stories of life in this alternate universe. One of these articles claims the Taliban have already appointed emirs to rule over these various bits and pieces of the city. In their jargon of emirs and emirates, one-third of Karachi is now part of the “Emirate of Pakistan.” Mobile vans with Taliban judges and enforcers are said to roam the lanes doling out “justice” to thieves and drug addicts, who suffer amputations and floggings for their sins. It is more justice than the police have been able to provide or the actual city courts to promise. The people accept it. At least someone is interested in resolving our problems, they say.

  The resistors are failing. Since September 2013, nearly thirteen thousand people have been swept up in an operation to “clean” the city of militants, gathered during more than ten thousand raids into the city’s alleged militant strongholds. Army Rangers, who have now made Karachi their near-permanent home, carry out the raids. They are helped by the Karachi police, whose string of constantly changing chiefs reflects the uncertainty about who really controls the city. There have been five chiefs since 2013. One of them, Chaudhry Aslam, was killed by a huge bomb planted on the ramp of a major Karachi highway. The explosion was forceful enough to catapult the multi-ton bulletproof SUV he was riding into the air. He was killed instantly and the Taliban took responsibility.

  The rich or powerful or visible are not the only targets. A few days before the police chief was killed, a group of Taliban soldiers unleashed a different variety of mayhem. In the middle of a night in January 2014, they crept up a hillock on the edge of a poor Karachi slum. At the top was the shrine of Ayub Shah Bukhari, a poor man’s saint, where tired men went to supplicate. They believed the saint was an intermediary with a better connection to the Almighty, and so they begged him for better jobs, easier lives. Like them, the shrine itself was meager, the pale green of the building fading against the sand-laden winds that blew over the dry hillock. Six of them were there, praying in the dark and cold of the night.

  The Taliban assassins killed all of them. They bound them and lined them up in the shanty by the shrine and cut off their heads. They left behind the machete they used for their butchery, blood and tissue still visible on the blade when it was photographed and splayed on television screens. The Taliban did not believe in anyone interceding for the Almighty. Anyone who tries to pray at one of the hundreds of shrines dotted all across the country is, in their view, a heretic. To make sure there was no confusion on this point, they left a bloodied note by the bodies, claiming the killings as corrections, examples of what would be done to those who persisted in praying at shrines, to saints, to anyone but the God they prayed to.

  The only place to escape the Taliban is in the suburbs by the sea. On the road that leads there, the face of Benazir Bhutto still stares out from a placard. Her image flanks that of her young son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. He is the new chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party, and he has vowed to protect the culture and heritage of Pakistan from the Taliban. He announces his message again and again, usually via Twitter, sometimes at film festivals or concerts held in secured locations. The road to Bilawal House, the mansion Benazir built when she first became prime minister is now entirely blocked off with layers and layers of armed guards and security cordons. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari lives beyond them, in the house that bears his name.

  I was just a little girl when, through a haze of whispered conversations, I first learned about Aunt Amina’s predicament. It was an odd thing then for a man to take a second wife, even if it was, under the way the men interpreted the Holy Quran, a technically permissible one. I did not know any other women who lived in such an arrangement. In the years since, as Pakistan has slipped farther and farther into an increasingly unquestioned conservatism, polygamy has come into the open and is even encouraged as the form of an ideal Muslim family, fitting the idea of Pakistan as a model Muslim state, an Islamic republic. Social activists argue that multiple marriages will solve the problem of destitute women and children who are without male guardians. Clerics remind everyone that promoting what is already permitted will end illicit affairs and prostitution.

  If you notice an absence in these social prescriptions, it is the voices of women. Unraveling the emotional scars created by a life of competing for a man, the daily smites of being overlooked, ignored, or unloved, is not a wound Pakistani women wish to open to the world. In self-exposure lies further vulnerability, and the private has in our imaginations always been protected. But letting this realm remain private has rendered the effects of polygamy invisible. In such an arrangement is the assumption that the private and public are entirely separate realms, and that the indignities of one do not replicate in the other. And yet it is on the memories of marriages we know and see that our own are patterned.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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bsp; A tremendous thank-you to my family near and far who remain my strength and without whom neither I nor any of my writing would have been possible.

  Thank you to Philip Gulley, whose encouragement was invaluable and the first step in making this book a reality.

  Thank you to Julia Serebrinsky, who held my hand through every moment of writing this and after, and without whose wisdom, insight, support, and friendship I could not have written this. Thank you to Stephen Hanselman, whose optimism and spirit kept me going and who had faith in me as I began this journey.

  Thank you to Amy Caldwell, whose skill, care, and support nurtured this book and gave me courage. Thank you also to Beacon Press and their commitment to giving voice to this story.

  Thank you to Hedgebrook Writers Residency, where I wrote so much of this book. The warmth of Cedar Cottage and the lovely meals and fellowship of that unique place and the wonderful writers it brings together permeate this book.

  Thank you to the editors at DAWN newspapers, some of the bravest people I know, for publishing my column every week. My exchanges with them and with my Pakistani readers are the backbone of this book.

  Thank you to Guernica magazine and their amazing editorial staff. Thank you, Joel Whitney and Michael Archer, founding editors of Guernica, for having faith in me and all the new writers you publish in every issue. Thank you to Katherine Dykstra, who edited the essay that became the germ for this book.