The Holy Woman

by Shahraz, Qaisra

  An iron fist of fear clutched around Shahzada’s heart. Mesmerised, like a hare in the clutches of a python, she stared into his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’ she whispered.

  ‘Well, now that I have no son, who is going to be my heir, Shahzada? To whom am I going to bequeath all this land? I am not going to hand it over to some stranger who just happens to marry my daughter. This is our land, accumulated and paid for by the sweat and toil of my forefathers, down the centuries by different generations. Tell me what would you do in my position?’ He paused for what seemed to his wife to be a moment of doom. Then: ‘There is only one choice that is facing us.’

  ‘No!’ Shahzada’s deafening cry shook every corner of the dark room. Her breathing ragged, she leapt out of her bed and stood in front of him. ‘No, Habib! Say it is not what I think you mean.’ His ominous silence terrifying her, she beat her fists against his chest. Alarmed, he pushed her away from him.

  ‘Stop it! Control yourself, woman!’ Shahzada’s face paled. Glaring down at hers, his eyes were colder than the peaks of the Himalayas. At that moment something died in Shahzada. She was staring at a total stranger – the ruthless feudal landlord, not her husband.

  ‘No, not until you tell me what is on your mind. Don’t hold me in suspense, I beg of you, Habib!’ she pleaded, reaching up to beat at him again. Alarmed by the primitive violence that had erupted in her body, Shahzada surprised both herself and him in the process.

  Habib again grasped her arms tightly and held her away from him. ‘All right, I will tell you. I am going to talk with my father about Zarri Bano becoming a Shahzadi Ibadat, a Holy Woman. Are you satisfied now?’ he snarled down into her face.

  ‘Shahzadi Ibadat,’ his wife echoed dully, her voice sunk to a whisper, moving away from him – his touch now scorching her. ‘So you are going to sacrifice your beloved daughter?’

  ‘Sacrifice?’ he ejaculated, caught on the raw. ‘How dare you say such a thing! My daughter will become a Holy Woman – the most pure, devout, scholarly, and revered by all.’ As the words left his mouth, the better he felt.

  ‘You are mad, Habib Sahib! How can you do this to your own daughter? I won’t permit it! This is not the Emperor Akhbar’s time. It is the twentieth century – it cannot happen.’

  ‘It can and will happen! Do you think that you, a female, can prevent it? The scales are weighted against you, woman.’

  ‘Habib, listen to me,’ Shahzada appealed desperately. ‘She is going to marry Sikander. She has just told you.’ Shahzada felt as if she was walking in quicksand and the ground was fast disappearing beneath her feet.

  ‘Oh no, she is not. I have decided! You had better tell her. I have lost a son, and I am not going to lose my inheritance to a complete stranger. I want you to support me in this. That is your duty as a wife. If you don’t do it, our ancient traditions will outweigh your opposition, so you had better get used to the idea. Remember what I said: I will divorce you on the spot if you rebel against us.’

  Habib fixed his wife with a cruel stare. ‘And stop talking nonsense about sacrifice. My beautiful Zarri Bano was destined for this fate. Her brother’s death sealed her future as a Shahzadi Ibadat. This is what has always happened when only sons died in people of our class: the inheritance then was passed on to the next female member – you know that.’

  ‘So you are going to wed your daughter to your fields and to her faith.’ Tears of anguish rolled down Shahzada’s face. ‘It is zulm, cruelty of the worst kind. If you go through with it, I will never, never forgive you, Habib – never! You can divorce me! There will be nothing left between us. Remember this, you’ll have made your daughter a Holy Woman, but you will have buried a wife too, at the same time.’

  ‘I will not listen to any more of your foolish prattling. I am going to sleep in another room,’ he blustered, storming out with heavy strides and banging the door behind him. His wife’s words had upset him. He knew what she felt, for he had felt the same pain. Unlike her, however, he had no choice. He was alarmed by what Shahzada had said about not forgiving him but, ‘she will change with time,’ he told himself emphatically.

  In his mind he recalled the vision of another Shahzadi Ibadat from his childhood. How fascinated he had been by that woman and the fame and reverence she had elicited from everyone. Wherever she went, ‘Bibi, Bibi,’ had echoed reverently around her.

  His Zarri Bano and her personal charisma would surpass every Shahzadi Ibadat of all time. She was both beautiful and educated. She even had a post-graduate university degree. The more he thought about his daughter becoming a Holy Woman, the more convinced he became that it was the right decision. His wife was of a weaker sex, and was thus bound to see it in a shortsighted way.

  ‘Does she not wish glory and honour for our daughter?’ he addressed the stars above as he took a stroll around his estate. The light from the starlit sky beamed down on the acres of cultivated land. Habib’s broad chest swelled with pride, as his eyes happily scanned the moonlit meadows of sugar cane and rape as they disappeared far beyond the horizon.

  A sigh of utter self-satisfaction escaped his lips. Wealthiest of all land owners, nobody could rival his fortune or his influence. ‘Yes! All this will be my Zarri Bano’s, hers to inherit. She will be the sole mistress of all this after my death. As my beloved child, my princess, she deserves it all.’

  His spirits soaring, he strolled back to his villa. His agile mind, however, was running ahead and rapidly making decisions. Tomorrow he would consult his father about Zarri Bano. On second thoughts, he wanted to talk to him straight away.

  Siraj Din was still awake, unable to sleep. He missed both his village home and bed. He puffed heavily at the hookah pipe, making the water gurgle in its steel base – disgusted. Even the tobacco didn’t taste the same here in town!

  Habib found his father on a charpoy, on the rear veranda, watching the stars dance in the sky above. Siraj Din greeted his son and patted a place on the chair next to his portable bed.

  ‘Father, I need to talk to you. It’s about Zarri Bano and our inheritance,’ he said quietly. Siraj Din forgot the tobacco and sat up straight in his bed to listen. There was a lot to be discussed.

  Shahzada lay curled up on top of her bed, staring dejectedly into space. This was the darkest hour of her life. Horror at what her husband was about to do engulfed her for the hundredth time. ‘How can they do that to my beloved child?’ she cried. ‘It is cruel and inhuman. Zarri Bano is made for love, for life, for bearing children. How can they seal her fate to a barren life, with only ibadat, worship – for comfort?’

  The dark, suffocating silence of her room mocked her. It taunted her, revealed her impotence as a woman, as a mother and as a wife. Shackled to the centuries-old traditions and customs of her husband’s clan, she could do nothing. Zarri Bano’s fate was indeed sealed. There was to be no escape for her daughter.

  By the time her husband returned to their room, Shahzada was still wide awake. He didn’t come near her bed and she made no move to acknowledge his presence – a new phenomenon for them both. It was as if a thick wall had suddenly descended between them, sealing them away from each other like enemies. She didn’t fear him any more. In fact, she feared nothing and no one. Not even her father-in-law. All she feared was the ordeal that awaited her daughter.

  In the darkness, Shahzada’s eyes shone with bitterness and hatred. She knew, with chilling precision, what she had to do. She would stand by her husband and endorse his decisions. She would, however, never forgive him or the barbaric traditions that made men like him enslave their women and force them into alien roles. Men like him who forgot their humanity and bargained with the lives of their loved ones, for the sake of their precious parcels of land.

  She wanted to rush out of her home and put a torch to the fields, reduce them all to ashes. She wept: ‘Land represents fertility. For my family and daughter, it spells doom and sterility. To keep the land in the family, my daughter is destined to remain forever barren and chi
ldless, denied the joys of motherhood; her arms never to know the aching joys of holding a newborn child to her breast.’

  Shahzada wondered sadly what her daughter was dreaming about at that moment. Did Sikander feature in those dreams? Did she sleep peacefully, unaware of the sentence which had just been passed on her and the noose waiting to be tied around her neck?

  ‘I am a mother, but a traitor,’ Shahzada sobbed into her pillow.

  When she awoke early in the morning to the sound of the muezzin’s call to prayer from the nearby mosque, Shahzada wept again. Her daughter who had led such a carefree, secular life would soon have her whole life pivoted around the prayer-mat. Totally devoted to ibadat.

  Rising with slow, measured movements Shahzada went into the bathroom. After her ablutions, she offered her fajr prayers.

  Habib had woken up, and watched her from his bed. He noted the length of time she had spent in saying her personal prayers – her du’ah to Allah. What had she prayed for? Was it for their daughter?

  When Shahzada stood up, he was confronted with her vanquished, bereft face. Dark rings lined her eyes. In one night she had aged. There was no condemnation, but no forgiveness either in those warm brown eyes.

  ‘Have you been praying for us, Shahzada?’ Habib asked, a hesitant timidity entering his voice for the first time in his life.

  ‘I have prayed for all my family. For my dead son, may he rest in peace in Jennat. For you, and may Allah forgive you and us, for what we are about to do,’ Shahzada replied with quiet dignity.

  ‘Shahzada, there is nothing to forgive. Why do you persist in such talk?’

  ‘I will not argue with you, Habib.’

  He noted her deliberate omission of the respectful Sahib after his name. It saddened him, but he let it pass.

  ‘What I’ll say is this,’ Shahzada continued. ‘I will never forgive you, but I’ll do my best to support you in everything, as it is my duty.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he responded with a sigh of relief, grateful for her support.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ Shahzada spat bitterly. ‘I am just a puppet, a mere worthless woman to do your bidding. You and your father are the puppeteers, Habib. You hold my daughter’s fate in your hands. What choice do I have? I can only swing and dangle along in whichever direction you pull and manoeuvre my strings. What can I do to save my daughter from the fate you have destined for her? People say it is their kismet, but it is bullies like you who carve other people’s kismet for them and dictate their destiny – as you told me so gloatingly the other day. I am shackled to the chains of your male domination, your ressmeh, your traditions.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense!’ He turned on her angrily, sitting up in his bed.

  ‘There you go again. That is all you believe I do – talk nonsense. As far as you are concerned, Allah has only blessed you with any commonsense.’ She turned away from him and left the room. Habib remained sitting on his bed, bemused by her words.

  ‘Oh Jafar, why did you have to die?’ he cried out. ‘It is because of your death that I am forced into doing this. I feel that the rift in our family will never heal. Your mother will never forgive me, and that will be so hard to bear.’ He put his head in his hands and wept whole-heartedly.

  Chapter 8

  SHAHZADA WENT DOWN to the kitchen quarters of the house, to check if everything was in order for their guests’ breakfasts. She prayed that Zarri Bano wasn’t awake, for she could not face her yet. The task that loomed ahead of her was a mammoth one: to prepare her beloved daughter for her role as the Holy Woman.

  Standing forlornly in the middle of her large, well-equipped modern kitchen, Shahzada tried to supervise the work of her three women cooks as they prepared halwa puri, chana curry, tea, pastries and parathas. Her mind in a total whirl, she hid her face a number of times in the folds of her head shawl, as tears kept gushing silently down her cheeks. Her housekeeper, Fatima, was the first to notice her crying.

  ‘Shahzada Sahiba, please, you mustn’t cry. We all loved our handsome Jafar. We have the rest of our lives to cry and mourn for him, so please stop,’ Fatima urged, also now unable to stop herself from weeping. ‘Please go and sit down in the other room, we can manage here.’ Brushing her eyes with the corner of her chador, Fatima led her mistress out of the kitchen.

  They went into an adjoining room, and sat on the comfortable sofa together. Treating all her servants and subordinates as equals, and with innate kindness, Shahzada had built a special rapport with Fatima: she had been with them for over twenty years, and was therefore almost like another member of the family.

  Although commonsense dictated that she mustn’t do so, the urge to confide in and to share her anguish with Fatima wouldn’t be denied. Otherwise, Shahzada felt she would go mad, hugging such a lethal bomb to her chest.

  ‘Oh Fatima, Fatima!’ Shahzada began in a broken voice. ‘I thought I was the happiest woman alive. I have a beautiful home, a wonderful lifestyle and was, until my Jafar died, blessed with the most beautiful children that I could ever have imagined or dreamt of. I know all mothers are proud of their children. I tried not to be, but I was. How can I forget my handsome son? My lovely Ruby, and as for Zarri Bano …’ She choked on her tears.

  ‘Please, Sahiba, you still have your Ruby and your Zarri Bano. Don’t cry. You have every right to be a very proud mother. No one can compare with the beauty of our Zarri Bano, and she is still alive.’

  ‘Do not talk about her beauty – for what use is it when it is hidden away, for no living man to admire, to love and to reproduce it?’

  ‘What are you saying, Sahiba? What is the matter with Zarri Bano?’ Fatima squeaked.

  ‘She is doomed.’ Shahzada looked directly at her friend and helper, her eyes shimmering with tears.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Fatima stared back at Shahzada with fear etched across her plump face. ‘Tell me, why is she doomed?’ A believer in black magic, Kala Jadoo, Fatima was now very alarmed indeed. Had somebody used a tweez, an evil amulet, to ruin her pet’s health? Fatima’s mind became ablaze with all sorts of ideas and superstitions. ‘It used to happen in the village, but surely not here in the town,’ she whispered to her mistress.

  ‘It is not black magic, Fatima. It is worse. She is going to become a Shahzadi Ibadat, a Holy Woman!’

  Fatima stared back in horror at her mistress. ‘Shahzada Sahiba, no!’ she groaned, her voice low – almost a hiss. ‘It cannot be true. Who said so?’

  Shahzada watched Fatima’s distress reliving her own reaction yesterday when Habib had first mentioned it to her. Hadn’t she herself beaten her husband on his chest with her fists? And this, from an obedient, submissive wife who had never raised her voice at him before, let alone her fists! The unreality of it all washed over her. ‘None of this is really happening! It has to be a nightmare,’ she found herself gasping out the words.

  She felt so old. The double loss of Jafar and now Zarri Bano had melted into her very bones.

  She was the chaudharani, the queen of this clan. Yet in one single stroke, her husband had reduced her to the status of the lowest of the low. Even the fishmonger’s wife had more autonomy and would have been able to battle against her husband’s aggression for her children’s sake. She, on the contrary, was tied to a gilded cage.

  Even if her husband had weakened under her pleas, she couldn’t fight single-handedly against the pressure of his male elders, especially his father. For who had ever heard of a daughter-in-law taking the law into her own hands and defying their wishes? As a woman, she was of no consequence – her opinion counted for nothing. A law unto themselves, men’s words were commands, and they were born to be obeyed. They possessed a successful knack of reasoning, and making everything sound so plausible. In the face of their thinly disguised tyranny one could never hope to win or to challenge them. They were always steps ahead of you and very adept at that.

  Zarri Bano had no chance, crushed against this wall of patriarchal tyranny. Even with her youth, feminism,
and a university education, and with an outgoing and assertive personality on her side, she was still fated to be the loser in this game of male power-play.

  Like her mother, it had been drilled into her from infancy to both respect and pay homage to her father’s wishes and those of the male elders. To veto any of their decisions was seen as the height of insolence and a sign of moral and social disorder, a form of rebellion which the elders deemed it imperative to crush immediately and in such a manner that it would never rear its ugly head again.

  On the other hand, for Shahzada to help her daughter escape from her destined role was also unthinkable. For where and what would Zarri Bano escape to? The strength of her clan, like any other’s, depended on their izzat – their family honour. For Zarri Bano to abandon her home would bring their izzat crumbling down on everyone’s head. Nobody would be able to recover from the shock, the baesti, the loss of face.

  For her daughter to marry before the Holy Woman ceremony was also out of the question. The marriage would give rise to a great scandal, especially if it wasn’t sanctioned by her father and grandfather, and in the light of her brother’s recent death. They were to be mourning Jafar for three months.

  In short there was no escape for her beloved daughter! Zarri Bano too, was going to be tied to a gilded cage, but she would be inside it. For unlike her mother, she could never marry, have children, enjoy the company of a husband, or lead a carefree normal life like any other woman. Her only role and duty was that of Ibadat, religious worship.

  ‘Fatima, I wish I was a fishmonger’s wife.’ Now she spoke her thoughts aloud. ‘For then I could protect my daughter’s interests. Here I am a chaudharani, but I don’t even have enough power in my little finger, to save my daughter from the fate that is awaiting her.’

  ‘Please, Sahiba, don’t cry. Of course it will not come to that. It cannot happen to our Zarri Bano. It is both insane and cruel. How can a beautiful woman, ripe for marriage and children, be denied the role for which we, like all women all over the world, are destined? That is what Allah created us for.’