Choice Words

by Annie Finch

  Sarai and I knew we had to find a doctor who did not know my mother. After two frantic weeks, Sarai managed to find a friend whose cleaner had used the services of a cheap doctor who asked no questions. The doctor’s place was situated by a well-known bridge.

  Sarai drove me. An elderly woman in a floral shalwar kurta—the doctor—opened the door to a small side room. We huddled in plastic chairs in front of a wooden desk with a prop-up calendar. The doctor stared at us. I was frightened she would recognize me as my mother’s daughter.

  “Who is getting it done?” she said.

  “Me,” I squawked.

  “Married?”

  I lifted a hand temporarily wearing Sarai’s wedding ring. The doctor barely glanced at it.

  “Why isn’t your mother with you?”

  “Dead.” Blood rushed to my face for figuratively murdering my mother.

  “Husband?” The doctor asked, stone-faced. “Mother-in-law? Sister-in-law?”

  Sarai jumped in. “She is newly married and does not want a child so soon.”

  “You are?” “Friend.”

  I feared the doctor would guess this was all a farce and kick us out, in which case the miracle I’d asked from Allah would be delivered and the baby would not be aborted, but then I’d be back to step one.

  I wanted to know what she would do with the remains but I was terrified of the answer. I wanted to ask if the procedure was safe. But what right did I have to care about my safety? I did inquire at which hospital the abortion would take place, my fingers crossed that it would not be one where my mother practiced.

  “There’s your hospital.” She pointed to a run-down gurney against one wall. I stared at the rickety bed, the gray wrinkled sheet, a huge black-and-white clock on the wall.

  “Return in three days. No eating after midnight. Cost—two thousand rupees, cash only.”

  Whenever I wanted to buy anything—music, makeup, shoes—I asked my parents for money and was expected to show what I’d spent it on. There was no way I could ask for two thousand rupees and not be held accountable.

  To borrow from girlfriends, I made up a story about losing jewelry I needed to replace, but no one had any money. Desperate, I approached a male family friend with a liberal outlook. To my relief, he handed me the full amount, assuring me there was no need to return it. However, his expression conveyed disappointment and disgust that comes with trusting a girl enough to allow her to study abroad only to have her betray her morals and Muslim upbringing.

  Three days later, I pay the doctor first, and then I undress from the waist down. My feet are placed in stirrups. Sarai sits on a stool next to the gurney. She does not flinch at my bone-crushing grip. At the foot of the gurney there is a steel trolley with surgical tools waiting to invade me. Sarai keeps whispering it’ll be okay.

  The doctor gives me an aspirin.

  “How long will it take?” I stammer.

  “Five minutes.”

  She tells me she is going to scrape the lining of my uterus and that I will feel some pressure. She bows between my legs and I hear a muffled roar like a vacuum cleaner. An excruciating spasm begins in my lower abdomen. I once stepped on an anthill and was bitten so badly I’d felt my foot was on fire. This was worse. This was boiling acid blistering, devouring, disintegrating my insides.

  I scream. The doctor slaps my inner thigh. “Shut up.” I whimper. She slaps me again. “Shut up or I will stop.” She says that her husband is just beyond the door leading from the side room clinic into the house.

  “What,” she demands, “is he going to think is happening in here if he hears you?”

  I bite my tongue. I try to think happy thoughts. I scream again. The doctor stops the machine.

  “One more sound…” she says, half punching my exposed tummy, “and I will send you home with the deed half done.”

  I concentrate on the black-and-white clock hanging above me. The long hand and the short hand and the second hand are all moving. Five minutes are long up.

  I can hear my baby being sucked out. I had wanted to deliver this baby and give it up for adoption but all I have to offer is death. I would like to see the remains but I’m scared I’ll be denied this request and I do not want to give the doctor further control.

  For the first time I fully fathom the gulf between the crimes of a man and the crimes of a woman. As I lie there, the clock ticking, my uterus being cleansed, I realize I hate this culture which has forced me to kill my baby. But my culture will say I only have myself to blame: I had premarital sex and it is fitting that I suffer.

  After it is done, the doctor informs me to take over-the-counter painkillers for cramps and heavy bleeding.

  “How heavy?” I ask, weak from pain. “For how long?”

  “Heavy,” she says. “One week. One month. It varies.”

  I did not know then that, having aborted the way I had, I risked uncontrolled bleeding, uterine damage, infections, a punctured uterus, septic shock, punctured bowels, possible chronic pain syndrome, and infertility. I would not know this until, years later, I looked up on the Internet the risks of an illegal unhygienic backstreet abortion. When I returned to college, I told Mike about the abortion and relief flooded his face. I broke up with him days later.

  I’d dream one night of a chubby baby boy who said, “It’s okay, I forgive you, forgive yourself, we’ll meet again.” Perhaps it was my subconscious assuaging my emotions so I could live with myself, but I’d like to believe it was my baby, because, since I’d always wanted only daughters, I had no reason to dream up a son.

  The doctor tells me to get rest and dismisses us. Sarai helps me hobble towards the car where her husband has been waiting. I get in. I shut my eyes. I return her wedding ring.

  Hajra, 1997

  What leads a studious girl like me who barely looked at boys, not that they looked at me, to start dating one? I agreed to chaperone a friend from high school, Khadijah, on her clandestine date just to see what all the fuss was about. When we arrived at the ice cream parlor, her boyfriend, Omar, had brought along his younger brother, Osman. Osman was courteous and cute. He kept smiling at me, making small talk, politely, respectfully, and I was flattered.

  On our fifth chaperoning, Osman asked me for my phone number. Soon we were speaking regularly. Each time, I begged Allah to forgive me for deceiving my unsuspecting parents. Anyway, all we talked about were studies and future plans and I would shyly brag about my grades and dreams of a career of my own. Osman was studying engineering in college.

  A few months later, Osman paid me a surprise-midnight-birthday visit at my house. I smuggled him in and, after accepting his gift bag and quick kiss on my cheek, smuggled him out. My parents did not wake up and I took that as a sign from Allah that our relationship was not tawdry. However, gossipy Khadijah had told our clique about Osman, and, though I wish she hadn’t, their excitement at bookish me scoring a boyfriend made me bold.

  On Osman’s birthday, I surprised him at his house while his parents were at work. After cutting the cake, Omar and Khadijah disappeared and Osman and I were alone in his bedroom. Osman locked the door and whispered that I was driving him crazy: Was it all right if he kissed me? For my parent’s sake alone I should have said “no.” Instead, basking in my ability to drive a boy crazy, I nodded even as I beseeched Allah to forgive me the sin of kissing. Next thing I knew, we were making out and he was saying “I love you.”

  I had never felt happier. Or guiltier.

  After that, I frequented his house even if Khadijah couldn’t go, and justified it because we were in love and would eventually get married.

  One day Osman had a condom and we went all the way.

  Afterwards I was shocked at what a big thing I’d done, but also at how little time it had taken doing this sacrosanct act which should have happened on our wedding night. I wept. I kept saying how I was no longer deserving of respect and Osman kept assuring me that he respected me all the more because we had made love and that even Allah
recognized the sanctity of love.

  The second time we “made love,” Osman didn’t have a condom. I truly believed pregnancy was a matter of consistent timing and effort and that no one got pregnant easily.

  But I did.

  I had watched too many Bollywood films to be naïve about my nausea or my missed period: Could this be Allah’s way of telling me to get married to Osman?

  The thought of having to get married because of pregnancy and forfeit my studies in order to look after a child jolted me into realizing that a) I was in no way equipped to be a mother and b) I wanted a career more than anything else in the world.

  Osman was shaken at the news. “Are you sure?” He kept asking. “Are you absolutely sure?”

  Osman and I did not know that home pregnancy tests were available over the counter at pharmacies. We believed only clinics with laboratory facilities could conduct pregnancy tests. And that is why I found myself peeing into a glass bottle, skulking to the edge of the garden at midnight, and handing the bottle to Osman.

  The lab results were positive.

  I was on the phone with Osman when he told me a second test was positive too.

  “My parents are going to kill me,” he said.

  My knees buckled. Osman’s tone had hammered in the fact that we were teenagers with uncertain futures and no independent incomes.

  “If my father finds out,” Osman was saying, “he’s going to beat the crap out of me. My parents will never let me get married at this stage of my life.”

  “My parents,” I said, my voice breaking, “aren’t exactly going to be thrilled over this situation either.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Osman said. “Marry you?”

  His curt tone injured my pride. I informed him that I didn’t want to marry him. We were silent for a moment before I brought up the “A” word. My family cook had terminated an unwanted pregnancy—she already had seven little children—by ramming twigs up herself and drinking herbal concoctions—and I could ask her for help.

  Osman said he’d heard there was a nurse in the Old City who performed abortions, charged ten thousand rupees, and was reputed to be safe. I flinched as he uttered the “A” word with such obvious relief. I began to cry. This situation was my fault: I was a wicked person who had deceived her parents, and Allah was punishing me.

  I heard my mother hollering for me. I hung up on Osman, dried my eyes as best as I could, and went to my mother’s room.

  My mother was clutching the second cordless phone. In a deathly still voice, she asked, “Are you pregnant?”

  I nodded slowly. I was faint with relief at my mother having found out even if she was looking at me as if a snake had bitten her. I wished she’d hit me or scream at me; anything other than that stricken stare. I wished she’d hug me like always and tell me Allah would solve every problem and that all I had to do was pray.

  Finally, she managed to say, “Your father will die if he finds out.”

  My mother began to cry as she told me I was an impure woman, one that even Allah would forsake given the fact that I’d had relations outside of wedlock.

  “You are worse than a prostitute,” she said.

  A deep disgust for myself took root in me. I had defiled myself with my eyes wide open, and yet, had I not gotten pregnant I would still be with Osman. My mind reeled with contradictory thoughts.

  “You were going to tell the cook, a servant, about your situation.” My mother cringed. “We would have become the talk of the town. Do your friends know?”

  I shook my head. Scared of their reactions, I’d not told them about my situation.

  “Is the boy from a good family? How old is he? Is he financially stable enough to marry you?”

  When I made it clear that marriage was not an option, fresh tears engulfed my mother. I tried to kiss her, beg her forgiveness, but she pushed me away as if I was impure.

  I was impure. And dirty. And disgusting.

  “You were going to let that boy take you to an unhygienic abortionist in the Old City. She could have stuck hangers up you! Given you poisonous herbs! You could have died, do you understand, you could have died and I wouldn’t have even known.” She began to wring her hands. “Who will marry you now? Who will marry you? And even if someone does, once he discovers you’re not a virgin, he will divorce you.”

  What had I done to myself? How had I allowed myself to ruin my life?

  “You have broken my heart,” my mother said. “You have broken my heart forever.”

  That evening, after my father returned from work, my mother said she was ill and took to her bed. Alone with my father, I kept looking at his unsuspecting face as he regaled me with tidbits from his day, and, when he kissed me good night and told me I was a good daughter, my heart broke.

  I spent the night on the prayer mat begging Allah to forgive me and to put me back on the siratul-mustakeem, the straight and righteous path from which I had obviously allowed the devil to lead me astray. I begged Allah to help my mother overcome this shock and I promised that, in return, I would do everything my parents ever asked of me.

  Osman kept calling. I kept hanging up. My mother’s stunned face coupled with my father’s trusting one broke any spell Osman had over me.

  The next day, my mother made discreet inquiries at her workplace on the pretext that a servant needed help. A colleague who’d aborted her pregnancy because of financial struggles informed my mother of a cheap and efficient doctor who lived by a well-known bridge. We were going to check this doctor out, my mother informed me. In order to look married, I was to wear a heavily embroidered outfit, gold earrings and bangles, and my diamond pendant that spelled out Allah in Arabic, and to apply kohl, a bright lipstick, and rouge.

  We drove to the bridge in silence and found the doctor’s house. A girl who looked around my age was squatting in front of the main door and vomiting into a potted plant. For the first time I realized that my mother’s presence could not keep me safe from harm. For the first time it struck me that while Osman was probably sitting in his room watching a movie, I was about to undergo something potentially fatal.

  My mother told the doctor I was newly married and had recently discovered my husband was a heroin addict, and therefore we wanted to terminate this pregnancy and perhaps even the marriage.

  The doctor smiled. “Our menfolk are useless,” she said, “but it is the mother’s duty to make sure daughters do not get married unless they are able to stand on their own two feet.”

  At that moment I promised myself that, come what may, I would study and become independent. My mother asked the doctor if the procedure was safe. The doctor replied that while the procedure was safe, death and mishaps were in Allah’s hands, but that my mother was to feel free to call her at any time with any questions. My mother handed three thousand rupees to the doctor’s helper while I climbed on a gurney underneath a wall with a massive black-and-white clock.

  My mother recited Qur’anic verses from across the room and blew them over me to keep me safe. I wanted her to hold my hand, but when the doctor injected a narcotic into my leg, my mother turned away as if she could not bear to see me in this state.

  I turned my face toward the wall. It didn’t hurt that much physically and by this time I was so exhausted by the past few days that I was numb to the emotional pain; I just closed my eyes and repeated surahs from the Qur’an and prayed to Allah to protect the soul of the unborn child.

  When I returned home, I phoned Osman one last time to tell him that my mother had found out and that we’d taken care of it. Before he could respond, I hung up.

  I thought life would return to normal after the abortion. But a new nightmare began as my mother constantly feared that, upon marriage, my husband would discover I was not a virgin and divorce me. For the first time in my life my grades dropped over the anxiety of being married and divorced on the same day. I found solace in reading the Qur’an and praying for hours on end—my mother thought I was turning into a religio
us nut, “going from one extreme to another,” she called it—but I was praying to Allah that, were I lucky enough to get married, my husband should not find out that I was not a virgin.

  Finally, I told my mother to agree to the very next proposal I received. I wanted to get my wedding night over with. She found someone for me, and I met him once before we married. He was a billion times better looking than Osman and intelligent too.

  All my high school friends, including a girl named Sarai, attended my wedding. Sarai had dropped out of school to get married, and though we’d envied her love marriage, I recalled my bewilderment, at the time, over her decision. But now, as I sat on the dais in my wedding finery, I wondered about what might have caused Sarai to leave school for marriage.

  On my wedding night, terrified out of my mind, I received proof of Allah. There on the white bridal-suite sheets were spots of blood. I thought all my fears were over, but Khadijah ended up married to Omar, who told her about my abortion. Given Khadijah’s propensity for gossip, I became increasingly paranoid my husband would find out and, despite the child we now had, divorce me. In order to avoid this catastrophe, I urged my husband to find a job overseas, far away from Pakistan. And he did.

  I still live abroad. A home and a husband and children: many would say these are all the requirements for a happy life. And I am happy. As happy as I deserve to be. In loving my husband, I realized I never loved Osman. He was a crush, one that would have died a natural death had it not been for my pregnancy accelerating events.

  I will say that as grateful as I am to my mother for being there for me, I wish she hadn’t made me feel that my virginity was everything. I also often wonder if, had we known about hymen reconstruction, how different my life might have turned out. I still harbor hope that, inshallah, God willing, one day I will return to studies and have a career. Osman completed his studies in a timely fashion and is an engineer.

  Sarai, 1999

  I fell in love with L because he was sweet and sexy. But I married him because I wanted to escape the oppressive atmosphere in my home. My father and stepmother fought constantly, and too often my stepmother turned her anger on me. Minor transgressions such as leaving my shoes in the wrong place could ignite massive fights. She would always end by saying she couldn’t wait for me to go to my real house, for in Pakistan a girl’s home is not considered the one into which she is born but the one into which she marries.