No sooner had our community in Karachi found out I needed blood than men arrived in a large open-top truck, all big guys, competing for the honor to donate their blood for me. As they put an IV line into my arm and gave me all the injections necessary to start the transfer of fresh blood, Ammi stopped me from looking. I never knew I was so loved.
It turned out that I had had a stroke. The doctors discovered a blood clot on the right side of my brain. Strangely, the blood clot looked old, very old, as if it had been there since my childhood. My extreme anemia, exhaustion, and stress had somehow aggravated it. My entire left side was paralyzed, from head to toe, and I was diagnosed with seizures. The doctors advised me to stay away from bright lights, loud sounds, and emotional stress. They gave me an antiseizure medication but had no prognosis for how long the paralysis would last or even if it would pass. The whole family was terrified.
Within a week, I had another seizure. People poured in from Balochistan bringing prayer water. Some prayed on mate (white clay that pregnant villagers eat). Once again everyone thought that I was on my deathbed. But as when I was an infant, indigenous wisdom saved my life. My uncle, a tribal leader in Balochistan, said I needed to do a traditional dakh rakh. This was an indigenous form of healing, where I would stay in a dark, soundless room, away from contact with any person, for forty days.
I spent forty days in seclusion. During that time, I was administered traditional treatments and prayers. A long red prayer string was tied around me. I heard my family outside the dark room’s thin walls, their voices fearful and full of sorrow. I heard my brother Ali sob—I had never heard him cry before. But whenever anyone came into the room to feed me or take me to the bathroom or treat me, they acted as if all were well. Part of the tribal healing process is to make the patient feel unburdened by heavy emotions.
When the forty days were over, my family members lined both sides of the door, and as tradition required, they raised their arms and locked their hands to create a tunnel. I emerged from the room and walked through the tunnel and into my restored life as a healthy person. My uncle’s prescription had worked. I regained control of my body, though I still experienced tremors. I had been granted another shot at life, and I intended to use it to do what was right.
FACING THE POSSIBILITY OF MY life ending humbled me and fueled the urgency and importance of what I was trying to achieve. I made three decisions:
1. I would do all I could to scale the idea that had so successfully worked in Balochistan, even if it meant focusing only on the issue of honor killings and creating the best solutions for it.
2. My message about unleashing the potential in women had to reach a wider audience. I would say yes to all the media interview requests and invitations to speak that had been piling up for more than a year.
3. I would bring Khadija’s other sister, Kalsoom, and her two youngest siblings to Karachi, even if that meant speaking to my uncle Liaqat.
I told Aba I needed to leave the other projects I was working on with him so I could focus exclusively on my strategy to end honor killings. I would create a platform, however small, for women only and fulfill my promise to end this barbaric practice and give all women a chance to live full and productive lives.
Our previous approach to ending honor killings had been to target women as victims, seeking only to rescue them. But achieving our goal would take more than changing laws or men’s behavior. Women’s mind-sets were also part of the problem. If women earned income, gained confidence, and knew of their rights and freedoms in Islam, their status and self-esteem would rise, allowing them to live according to their wishes.
I would take the Women’s Literacy and Skills Development Centers that we had established in Balochistan to the next level, calling them Sughar Centers. I chose the name Sughar because it embodied everything I wanted to see in women—skills and confidence. The word is not used a lot, but every time a woman is called sughar, she beams for months. I had seen it in my mother. I had felt it in myself. At the Sughar Centers, we would remind tribal women of their strengths instead of declaring their disempowerment.
We would use embroidery as a way to spread education and promote traditions, while keeping the men engaged through cricket matches and monthly gatherings. Here women could receive six months of training in skills development and entrepreneurship using traditional embroidery. We would help them refine their existing skills, then give them the tools and outlets to sell their handiwork. We would also educate them about their rights under Islam, such as their right to education, and the right to equal legal standing with their husbands, including the right to seek a divorce. The goal was to help them become leaders in their own homes, in their lives, and in their communities by unleashing their potential.
I asked Ali, who was now running a successful filmmaking company in Pakistan, to help me launch the Sughar Empowerment Society, a nonprofit organization. To make it official, I had to spend weeks gathering documentation, filling out paperwork, bugging uninterested government officials, and waiting in all kinds of lines to submit applications. Aba saw how troubled I was by the whole process and allowed me to use PDI’s platform to start my initiative. Despite my trembling left arm and my limping walk, I launched the Sughar Women Program within PDI.
We proposed a partnership with the International Labour Organization (ILO), and in June 2011, the project was approved. Using thirty trainers, our project would reach three hundred women in ten villages. Time was scarce, I felt, and we needed to act fast with a lot of women. So after the successful project in Balochistan, we began to scale our work into Sindh.
I would have to hire and manage a large team of people on my own. I faced many challenges along the way, including losing my most beloved deputy to Stage 4 throat cancer. She hadn’t told any of us about her illness, throwing herself into the work without restraint. We only found out when, one day, she didn’t show up for work—she had passed away. Replacing her was a very emotional experience, but in the end, I hired a girl named Amina, from the town of Sukkur in upper Sindh. Amina had barely escaped an honor killing herself, for riding on a motorcycle behind a male cousin and putting her hand on his shoulder for balance. Her own brother was supposed to murder her in the name of honor. Her husband had saved her but had kicked her out of their house, saying she was unclean for him. Amina would become the heart of our organization. She would laugh so much she would cry, and she expressed joy and sadness in a big way. When she spoke, it was as if my own passion for this work were speaking through her.
Our Sughar Centers did well in the villages, and I finally felt I was getting traction with my goals. Then one day a rumor broke out in one of the villages in the Thatta district of Sindh that Sughar was teaching women Western thoughts and beliefs. Men noticed that their wives were laughing and talking loudly and even expressing independent ideas. Disapproving, some of them refused to let their wives and sisters and mothers come to the center anymore. Amina and I went to the village to fix the situation, to talk to the men. But we faced extreme opposition.
As usual, our driver parked the car far outside the village, to maximize privacy for the families. Amina and I got out, and as we walked toward the houses, I received a call from the driver. I looked back and could see him surrounded by several angry men. “Please come back quickly, Adi!” he shouted. “They are threatening to shoot us!” It was shocking but not surprising. In another village, men waved large axes to try to chase us away. Amina and I went into the village anyway. The women begged us to leave, saying we all would be harmed if we stayed.
That’s when we realized we had to come up with a new plan, one that could bring women back to the center without putting them in danger.
AMINA AND I MADE A bold decision to take the embroidery products that our women were making and try to sell them in Pakistan’s fashion industry. Up until that point, our women had been selling them in small exhibitions that we
hosted around the country. But that was not enough. If we could increase our sales and raise our prices, the women would earn more income and could help their families on a larger scale, which we believed would change men’s attitudes.
People told Amina and me that we were fools to get into such a complex industry, but I knew the women we worked with were true artisans and simply needed a platform for their work. Pakistan was on the fashion map, its models working all over the world and designers selling products globally. Pakistani designers even used patterns from indigenous communities, borrowing heavily from traditional designs. But in all our research, we came across few fashion brands that were owned by tribal women. We decided Pakistan needed a tribal women’s fashion brand that would benefit and represent indigenous women while being fashionable and accessible to mainstream consumption. Amina and I were the perfect people to launch it. We would take the women’s products to designers, models, and experts at high-end brands. We envisioned working with ethical fashion companies
But as we stared at photos of models with the most intricate dresses, the highest heels, and serious faces, we felt fully naïve. My own tribal dress—the traditional pocket dress—was beautiful but not trendy, and Amina simply wore whatever she found in the house. I knew that in order to be taken seriously in this mission, we had to spiff up our attire. First we slipped on some high heels, which was easy. (There is a joke that Balochistani women can climb mountains in heels. We wear them everywhere, even in the dirt and gravel.) The diva look was very fashionable, so we wore dark-colored dresses. Amina bought “cut-piece” fabrics, or remainders of beautiful chiffons, velvets, and silks, for cheap, then had them sewn for our meetings. She started wearing her hair in a puff, which looked sleek and modern. Now we could pass for fashionistas!
We met with industry experts, pretending to know what we were talking about. They drove or were driven in fancy cars to meet us, while we took rusted rickshaws (tuk tuks), praying that our hairdos didn’t come entirely undone en route.
We chose the name Nomads because many of the women’s designs were based on stories from nomadic tribes, passed down through generations. I reached out to a college friend who had become a great fashion designer, and together we planned a fashion show in Karachi. We launched Nomads in February 2012 to great fanfare, with a glitzy runway show. There the tribal women got to see models walking in their handmade creations, and we received international press coverage.
We managed to persuade an elite mall to give us a free space to set up our shop. It was in a brightly lit Western-style mall, so different from the small markets in Karachi where Ammi and I had shopped for groceries and clothes, where the vendors shout and you are expected to bargain. Now, as we stepped into that mirrored mall, I wondered if my shoes would slip on the slick floors. We walked down gleaming hallways lined with shops of international brands and food courts with Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, and KFC.
But the mall management wanted to be part of the change we were trying to make. We couldn’t believe it when they handed us the keys to twelve hundred square feet of glass-walled prime retail space. Here was proof that confidence and self-belief have tremendous power, are even the most important factor in accomplishing anything. Here we were, a handful of indigenous village girls, opening our own high-end shop in one of Karachi’s most exclusive malls.
Often entrepreneurs get stuck thinking and worrying about the cost of activities, the plans and budgets they put together. But when you take a step toward a goal with the unshakable belief that it will be successful, opportunities sometimes manifest in other ways.
We launched an e-commerce site for Nomads, then realized we needed good pictures of people wearing our products. We put out a call for models on Facebook and shamelessly made it clear that the winning model would receive only fame, because although we were convinced that this project would be the next big thing, we had no money. An incredible girl with a beautiful smile and a big heart flew all the way from Lahore just to help us, and a photographer from a local newspaper volunteered to take the photos.
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ONE MORNING THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I was preparing to lead a staff meeting to discuss the next steps on what seemed like the path to exponential growth for Nomads, when Amina walked in. She told me that her husband who had once kicked her out of his house had come to get her. His mother was dying and wanted grandchildren. So even though he had thrown her out in disgrace, he had decided to take her back and start a family. She agreed to go with him.
I was stunned. I told her she couldn’t go, that it was a trap, that she should seek a divorce, that she wouldn’t be safe with him.
“I will go back with my husband,” she said, emphasizing the word husband. “Adi, this has made my whole family happy.” For the first time the calm on her face irritated me, and I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shout at her.
“I can’t talk about this right now. You are not going, and that’s that,” I said to end the conversation.
This young woman had become a leader whom people listened to and admired. She spoke to reporters, sang joyful songs, and cried with happiness at even our smallest success. She had become a sughar woman through and through: holding her head high, feeling proud of what she was doing and what she would do next to fulfill her potential. I was afraid to let her walk back to a life of fear and violence. How can she sacrifice her potential for a man’s wish? Especially the one who threw her away? I couldn’t let her sacrifice herself. If she met the same fate as Khadija, I would never forgive myself.
To my horror, by June 2012 her decision was final: she was going back with her husband. Like a woman in a village, she would submit herself for the happiness of her family. I raged like a madwoman. I talked to attorneys about her divorce, praying that she would have some sense. Every day I went to the office only to plead with her to change her mind.
My father got angry with me for interfering in someone else’s life so intimately. Calling attorneys to intervene when she didn’t want it was going several steps too far, he said. For the second time, he lost trust in me. “Who do you think you are?” he asked. “Someone wants to go back to their husband, and you want to stop them?” He told me I was being unreasonable and selfish and too emotional. But what I couldn’t make him understand then, and still struggle to make him understand even now, was that without my emotions, I wouldn’t be doing any of this work. And that it was my unreasonableness that got things done.
In July I received an award for entrepreneurship from the Women Development Department in Sindh, Pakistan, alongside Malala Yousafzai. During the award ceremony, I got a call: Amina had left. In a dreamlike state, I walked up to the bathroom at the venue, sat down on the floor, and sobbed into my knees. I felt tired and defeated. I had just received an award for being a woman leader, I had spent time with Malala, I felt inspired and successful, yet all the while my own team member was sacrificing her life for a man’s wish. I cried for Amina, for Khadija, and for every woman I had been unable to save. Later that night, my heart still aching with sorrow, I called Aba. I wanted to hear some words of consolation and encouragement from him. But instead I just heard sternness. He ordered me to think rationally, to find some practicality in my world of dreams.
Amina was gone, and so was my father’s trust in me. At the same moment, my cousin Kalsoom called to say that she and her siblings were ready to move to Karachi.
KALSOOM HAD BECOME AN ADULT at the age of twelve, on the day she sat with her sister in that dark room of the haveli in Kotri, unable to save her from her fate. The events that followed made her tough and unbreakable. Soon after Khadija’s murder, their mother, unable to bear the sadness, passed away. Kalsoom’s father died shortly thereafter, leaving her and her two younger siblings alone in the world. Then Uncle Liaqat arrived and took the children under his wing. He saw no irony in the fact that he was the reason they had lost their fami
ly and needed a new father at all. To him, this was all part of upholding the honor of the family.
Every time I thought about it, my chest filled with sadness for these children. Every single day, they had to see the face of the man who had destroyed their lives. But when I made that promise to bring the three to Karachi, I knew I had to include my uncle too, whether I liked it or not.
I had to be very clever about it. After all, I was talking about changing a lifestyle that his family had participated in for hundreds of years. I remember that first conversation I had with Uncle Liaqat. He had developed a certain pain in his abdomen that would send him sprawling on the floor for hours. He had visited doctors, taken medicines, received injections to fight the pain, but nothing helped. I told him that he had to come to Karachi to find better doctors than those in Kotri so he could recover fully. And I offered to pay for it.
My second step was to convince him to bring Kalsoom to Karachi too. She could cook the foods he needed to eat, I said, since my mother was already cooking for us eight children, and he needed a special diet. Kalsoom knew how to be a nurse and had taken on the role of caring for him, so he liked the idea. He agreed to bring her with him for an extended stay in Karachi. That opened the door for me to discuss their moving permanently. “I will give Kalsoom a job at Sughar. I have a position for her,” I told Uncle Liaqat. “The children would go to better schools here, and I will find a house to rent.”
During all these calls and conversations, Aba had shown concern and disapproval about what I was doing. This time I understood why. Aba had run away from the village, come to a world with fewer restrictions, started at the bottom and worked hard. Only by making these difficult decisions had his daughters been able to prosper. Now here I was threatening it all by bringing the one person who had authority over him, the only person who could give him an order that he would have to obey.
I Should Have Honor Page 10
