And the World Changed

by Muneeza Shamsie

  Dadi behaved abysmally at my mother’s funeral, they told me, and made them all annoyed. She set up loud and unnecessary lamentations in the dining room, somewhat like an heir apparent, as though this death had reinstated her as mother of the house. While Ifat and Nuzzi and Tillat wandered frozen-eyed, dealing with the roses and the ice, Dadi demanded an irritating amount of attention, stretching out supine and crying out, “Your mother has betrayed your father; she left him; she has gone.” Food from respectful mourners poured in, cauldron after cauldron, and Dadi relocated a voracious appetite.

  Years later, I was somewhat sorry that I had heard this tale, because it made me take affront. When I returned to Pakistan, I was too peeved with Dadi to find out how she was. Instead I listened to Ifat tell me about standing there in the hospital, watching the doctors suddenly pump upon my mother’s heart—“I’d seen it on television,” she gravely said, “I knew it was the end.” Mamma’s students from the university had tracked down the rickshaw driver who had knocked her down: They’d pummeled him nearly to death and then camped out in our garden, sobbing wildly, all in hordes.

  By this time Bhutto was in prison and awaiting trial, and General Zulu was presiding over the Islamization of Pakistan. But we had no time to notice. My mother was buried at the nerve center of Lahore, an unruly and dusty place, and my father immediately made arrangements to buy the plot of land next to her grave: “We’re ready when you are,” Shahid sang. Her tombstone bore some pretty Urdu poetry and a completely fictitious place of birth, because some details my father tended to forget.

  “Honestly,” it would have moved his wife to say.

  So I was angry with Dadi at that time and didn’t stop to see her. I saw my mother’s grave and then came back to the United States, hardly noticing when, six months later, my father called from London and mentioned Dadi was now dead. It happened in the same week that Bhutto finally was hanged, and our imaginations were consumed by that public and historical dying. Pakistan made rapid provisions not to talk about the thing that had been done, and somewhow, accidently, Dadi must have been mislaid into that larger decision, because she too ceased being a mentioned thing. My father tried to get back in time for the funeral, but he was so busy talking Bhutto-talk in England that he missed his flight and thus did not return. Luckily, Irfani was at home, and he saw Dadi to her grave.

  Bhutto’s hanging had the effect of making Pakistan feel unreliable, particularly to itself. Its landscape learned a new secretiveness, unusual for a formerly loquacious people. This may account for the fact that I have never seen my grandmother’s grave and neither have my sisters. I think we would have tried, had we been together, despite the free-floating anarchy in the air that—like the heroin trade—made the world suspicious and afraid. There was no longer any need to wait for change, because change was all there was, and we had quite forgotten the flavor of an era that stayed in place long enough to gain a name. One morning I awoke to find that, during the course of the night, my mind had completely ejected the names of all the streets in Pakistan, as though to assure that I could not return, or that if I did, it would be returning to a loss. Overnight the country had grown absentminded, and patches of amnesia hung over the hollows of the land like fog.

  I think we could have mourned Dadi in our belated way, but the coming year saw Ifat killed in the consuming rush of change and disbanded the company of women for all time. It was a curious day in March, two years after my mother died, when the weight of that anniversary made us all disconsolate for her quietude. “I’ll speak to Ifat, though,” I thought to myself in the United States. But in Pakistan someone had different ideas for that sister of mine and thwarted all my plans. When she went walking out that warm March night, a car came by and trampled her into the ground, and then it vanished strangely. By the time I reached Lahore, a tall and slender mound had usurped the grave-space where my father had hoped to lie, next to the more moderate shape that was his wife. Children take over everything.

  So, worn by repetition, we stood by Ifat’s grave, and took note of the narcissi, still alive, that she must have placed upon my mother on the day that she was killed. It made us impatient, in a way, as though we had to decide that there was nothing so farcical as grief and that it had to be eliminated from our diets for good. It cut away, of course, our intimacy with Pakistan, where history is synonymous with grief and always most at home in the attitudes of grieving. Our congregation in Lahore was brief, and then we swiftly returned to a more geographic reality. “We are lost, Sara,” Shahid said to me on the phone from England. “Yes, Shahid,” I firmly said, “We’re lost.”

  Today, I’d be less emphatic. Ifat and Mamma must have honeycombed and crumbled now, in the comfortable way that overtakes bedfellows. And somehow it seems apt and heartening that Dadi, being what she was, never suffered the pomposities that enter the most well-meaning of farewells and seeped instead into the nooks and crannies of our forgetfulness. She fell between two stools of grief, which is appropriate, since she was greatest when her life was at its most unreal. Anyway she was always outside our ken, an anecdotal thing, neither more nor less. So some sweet reassurance of reality accompanies my discourse when I claim that when Dadi died, we all forgot to grieve.

  For to be lost is just a minute’s respite, after all, like a train that cannot help but stop between the stations of its proper destination in order to stage a pretend version of the end. Dying, we saw, was simply change taken to points of mocking extremity, and wasn’t a thing to lose us but to find us out, to catch us where we least wanted to be caught. In Pakistan, Bhutto rapidly became obsolete after a succession of bumper harvests, and none of us can fight the ways that the names Mamma and Ifat have been archaisms, quaintnesses on our lips.

  Now I live in New Haven and feel quite happy with my life. I miss, of course, the absence of women and grow increasingly nostalgic for a world where the modulations of age are as recognized and welcomed as the shift from season into season. But that’s a hazard that has to come along, since I have made myself inhabitant of a population which democratically insists that everyone from twenty-nine to fifty-six occupies roughly the same space of age. When I teach topics in third-world literature, much time is lost in trying to explain that the third world is locatable only as a discourse of convenience. Trying to find it is like pretending that history or home is real and not located precisely where you’re sitting, I hear my voice quite idiotically say. And then it happens. A face, puzzled and attentive and belonging to my gender, raises its intelligence to question why, since I am teaching third-world writing, I haven’t given equal space to women writers on my syllabus. I look up, the horse’s mouth, a foolish thing to be. Unequal images battle in my mind for precedence—there’s imperial Ifat, there’s Mamma in the garden, and Halima the cleaning woman is there too, there’s uncanny Dadi with her goat. Against all my own odds I know what I must say. Because, I’ll answer slowly, there are no women in the third world.

  A PAIR OF JEANS

  Qaisra Shahraz

  Qaisra Shahraz (1958– ) is a novelist, script writer, and educator. She was born in Pakistan and moved to Britain at age nine and has lived there with her family ever since. She studied English and European literature and scriptwriting at the Universities of Manchester and Salford, earning two masters degrees. She is an education consultant, an international teacher trainer, a college inspector, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a member of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Shahraz’s publications include two novels: The Holy Woman (Black Amber, 2001), winner of the Golden Jubilee Award; and Typhoon (Black Amber, 2003). Both have been translated into several languages. Her fourteen-episode television drama, The Heart Is It, won two TV Awards in Pakistan. Her award-winning short stories are taught in schools and colleges; “A Pair of Jeans,” her very first work of fiction, was first published in the British text book Holding Out: Short Stories by British Women Writers (Crocus, 1988). Since 1990 it has been taught in Germany from litera
ry texts aimed for schools and in 2006 was among the stories chosen by the German Education Ministry of the Federal State of Baden Wurttemberg as compulsory required reading from 2007 to 2012 for the Abitur (higher level) English Literature exam for all the gymnasium schools for seventeen- to eighteen-year-old students.

  “A Pair of Jeans” puts the symbolism of clothing at the center of the culture conflict in the lives of Asians in Britain. The jeans that Mariam wears for a normal, innocuous hiking trip put undue stress on her engagement. They become a symbol of all that her fiance’s parents fear: the loss of identity and cultural moorings in an alien land, and their loss of power over their son.

  • • •

  Miriam slid off the bus seat and glanced quickly at her watch. They were coming! And she was very late. Murmuring her goodbye to her two university friends, she made her way to the door and waited for her bus stop. Once there she got off and hurriedly waved goodbye to her friends again. She pulled her jacket close, suddenly conscious of her jean-clad legs and the short vest underneath her jacket. The vest had shrunk in the wash. All day she had kept pulling it down to cover her midriff. Strange, she felt odd in her clothing now, though they were just the type of clothes she needed to wear today, for hill walking in the Peak District in the north west of England. Somehow here, in the vicinity of her home, she felt different. As she crossed the road and headed for her own street she was acutely aware of her appearance and hoped she would not meet anyone she knew. She tugged at the hemline of her vest; it had ridden up yet again. With the other hand she held onto the jacket front as it had no buttons.

  Her mind turned to the outing. It had been a wonderful day, and though her legs ached after climbing all those green hills, still it was worth it. Her eye on her watch, she hastened her pace. It was much later than she had anticipated. She remembered the phone call of yesterday evening. They said they were coming today. What if they had already arrived? She glanced down at her tight jeans. As soon as she reached home, she must discreetly make her way to her room and change quickly.

  Just as Miriam reached the gate of her semidetached house she heard a car pull up behind her. Nervously she turned around to see who it was. On spotting the color of the car and the person behind the wheel, her step faltered; color ebbed from her face. On the pretence of opening the gate, she tried to collect her wits. Too late! They were already here. Her heart was now rocking madly against her chest. The clothes burned her. She wanted to rush inside and peel them off. She clutched at her jacket front, covering her waist.

  She braced herself. She could not scurry inside. That was not the way things were done, no matter what. Calmly, she let go of the gate. She turned to greet the two people who had stepped out of the car and were surveying her. She didn’t realize that she had let go of her jacket: It flew wide open, revealing the short vest underneath. Their eyes fell straight to the inch of bare waist flesh. The woman was her future mother-in-law, a slightly frail woman dressed in shalwar kameez with a chador around her shoulders. The elderly man was the woman’s husband. He towered behind his wife.

  Miriam was unable to look either of them in the eye. A watery, hesitant smile played around her mouth. She did not know what to do. Her cheeks burned with embarrassment. These were the very people she had wanted to impress. All she was aware of now were the surreptitious glances they darted—not at her as Miriam, but at the figure she presented in a pair of Levis and skimpy leather jacket. This was not the Miriam they knew but a stranger, a Western version of Miriam. She sensed their awkwardness. They too were caught off guard and did not know what to do. The father-in-law was bent on avoiding eye contact by studiously looking above her head.

  He pushed the gate open and in two strides had crossed the driveway and was now solidly knocking on the front door. Miriam stepped aside to let the woman, silently walking behind her husband, pass. Miriam followed them in a semidaze. As she closed the gate behind her, she remembered with mortification that while the woman had accepted her mumbled greeting by her reply, “Wa laikum Assalam,” the father-in-law had ignored it.

  Miriam’s mother, Fatima, opened the door to her guests, beaming with pleasure and warmth. She had not expected Miriam to arrive with them. She got a shock seeing her daughter hovering behind. Never before had Miriam seen such a dramatic change in her mother’s face. Normally she wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if her daughter had turned up at 11 o’clock at night, as long as she knew where she was and with whom, and at what time she was returning home. Today, she was viewing her daughter’s arrival and appearance through a different pair of lenses: those of Miriam’s future in-laws.

  The jeans, which wouldn’t have aroused her interest normally, today stood out brazenly on Miriam’s body, tightly moulded against her full legs. Fatima gaped at Miriam’s midriff showing through. Heat was now rushing through Fatima’s cheeks. An inch of her daughter’s flesh was visible! Her mind reeling, Fatima communicated her displeasure and signaled her daughter with her eyebrows to go up and change into something more respectable. Miriam was only too glad to oblige.

  Squeezing past her mother and out of sight of their guests, Miriam almost ran up the stairs to her bedroom, shut the door behind her, and breathed deeply. The tiredness and exhilaration from the hill walking had vanished—discontent had taken its place. Two steps into her home had led to another world. The other she had left behind with her friends on the bus. What mattered now were the two people downstairs. And they mattered! Her future lay with them.

  She peeled off her jacket, vest, and tight jeans and let them fall, lying in a clutter on the woollen carpet. She looked at them with distaste. Her mouth twisted into a cynical smile. “Damn it!” her mind shouted, rebelling. “They’re only clothes. I’m still the same young woman they visited regularly—the person they have happily chosen as a bride for their son.”

  “Deny it as much as you like, Miriam,” her heart whispered back.

  “It’s no use. They have seen another side of you—your other persona.”

  The other “persona” had, by accident or contrivance, remained hidden from them. When they first saw her at a party she was dressed in a maroon chiffon sari. Later, on each occasion, she was always smartly but discreetly and respectably dressed in a traditional shalwar kameez. Now they were seeing her as a young college woman under the sway of Western fashion and, by extension, its moral values. Muslim girls did not go outdoors dressed like that, especially in a short jacket which hardly covered the hips—and a skimpy vest! She had heard of stories about in-laws who were prejudiced against such girls because they weren’t the docile, obedient, and sweet daughters-in-law that they preferred. On the contrary, they were seen as a threat, as rebellious hoydens who did not respect either their husbands or their in-laws. Miriam was all too familiar with such stereotypes.

  She pulled off a blue crêpe shalwar kameez from a hanger. As she put it on her rebellious spirit reared its head again. “They’re only clothes!” her mind hissed in anger.

  She could not deny that by putting them on she had embraced a new set of values: in fact, a new personality. Her body was now modestly swathed in an elegant long tunic and baggy trousers. The curvy contours of her female body were discreetly draped. With a quick glance in the mirror she left her room, a confident woman gliding down the stairs. Her poise was back. Her long dupatta was draped around her shoulders and its edge covered her head.

  Once downstairs in the hallway, outside the sitting room door, she halted, her hypocrisy galling her. She was acting out a role, the one that her future in-laws preferred: that of a demure and elegant bride and daughter-in-law. Yet she was the same person who had earlier traipsed the Pennine countryside in a tight pair of jeans and Wellingtons, and who was now dressed in the height of Pakistani fashion. Or was she the same person? She didn’t know. Perhaps it was true that there were two sides to her character. A person who spontaneously switched from one setting to another, from one mode of dress into another—in short, swapping one identity for anot
her. Ensconced in the other home ground her thoughts, actions and feelings had seamlessly altered accordingly.

  Her head held high, Miriam entered the living room. Four pairs of eyes turned in her direction. She stared ahead knowing instinctively that, apart from her father’s, those eyes were busy comparing her present appearance with her earlier one. It was amazing how she was able to move around the room at ease in her shalwar kameez suit, in a manner that she could never have done in her earlier clothes. She sat down beside her mother, acutely aware of her mother-in-law’s eyes discreetly appraising both her appearance and her movements.

  After a while the conversation flagged. Fatima was doing her very best to revive a number of topics of interest to the other couple. The two guests, however, seemed to shy away, particularly from the one concerning their children’s marriage in six months’ time. Miriam noticed that they had made no direct eye contact with her. This was quite unlike their usual behavior. There were moments too, when husband and wife exchanged surreptitious glances. Fatima was now quite anxious. From the moment her guests had stepped inside, her instincts told her that something was wrong. She was ready to discuss the subject with them, but first she requested her daughter to bring in some refreshments. The dinner had already been prepared and laid out on the dining table in the kitchen.

  Miriam was only too happy to leave the room; behind her a hushed silence reigned. She puttered around the kitchen, collecting bits and pieces of crockery from the cupboards. Her own hunger had vanished. She was arranging the plates and glasses on a tray when she heard their voices in the hallway. They sounded as if were saying goodbye to her parents. Surprised, Miriam picked up the tray. Were they going already? They hadn’t eaten anything! The table was laid for dinner. She called out, “Auntie,” addressing her future mother-in-law. She turned and smiled. They were in a hurry to get home, she explained, because they had guests staying over.