by Nafisa Haji
I nodded and watched him flip a switch, put the record on the turntable, and carefully place the needle to fill the room with the sound of “All Shook Up,” making school and the reverend mother seem suddenly a lifetime ago.
Then Akram came back toward me and held his hand out, like a hero in a movie, an unmistakable gesture that made his next words unnecessary, “Would you care to dance, Mrs. Mubarak?”
I took his hand and let him take me in his arms, dancing with a man for the very first time, fast, then slowly, and then fast again, matching the pace of the rhythms and melodies that filled the room, an unexpectedly lovely prelude to what followed. As the record ended, he led me to the bed and lay down next to me.
“What is your favorite Elvis song?” he asked me.
“ ‘Love Me Tender.’ ”
“Can you sing it for me, Deena?”
I did, while he kissed and caressed me and began the journey of consummation. How overblown had been my fears of that first time! Akram was sweet and soothing and gentle through the whole of it, holding me in his arms afterward.
Falling victim to the illusion of closeness that such moments foster, I asked, “What is yours? Your favorite Elvis song?”
“ ‘Wooden Heart,’ ” he said, before singing it to me—the words of the song seeming a heartfelt plea, from Akram to me, to safeguard his heart, making my own fill with tender, protective urges.
How overrated physical intimacy is; the more preciously guarded—virginity and chastity sacredly preserved—the more false its promise. Physically, I had never been closer to anyone else in my life until that night. It made me believe what wasn’t true—what could never be true—that I understood something of the man I married, that I had begun to know him, his mind and his heart, as a wife should. It made me able to put aside Sharif Muhammad Chacha’s words, releasing the breath I had held since he’d uttered them. I knew that what he’d said had been untrue.
But I knew nothing. Absolutely nothing.
For the days that followed, a strange routine was set. Mornings, when Akram and his father left for work, were excruciating. There were too many servants for any work to be left for me to do. My mother-in-law spent the mornings in her room, breakfast and tea delivered there daily. I should have been happy with all that time to bury myself in books, the way I had scarcely had time to do since Abu’s death. But I wasn’t. Leisure is only fun in contrast to its opposite. In the afternoons, I joined Akram’s mother in visiting or receiving visitors—there were condolence calls to be made, and congratulations to be offered for engagements and weddings, duties I had never had to perform before, because my mother’s social circle was smaller and, until I was married, I was exempt from such grown-up obligations. Every day, there were petitioners who came to seek a share of the Mubarak bounty—mostly former servants and employees who had fallen on hard times.
It was the evenings I looked forward to, when Akram came home bearing even more gifts for me—flowers, chocolate, perfume, and jewelry. At night, we were the guests of honor at dinner parties all over town, where I wore the outfits and jewelry that Akram enthusiastically laid out for me. After the parties, our bedroom was a sanctuary from the strangeness of becoming part of a new household, a rich household in which I wondered whether I would ever feel comfortable. There, it was just Akram and me, in retreat from others, resuming what had begun on our first night of marriage. Music and dancing and pillow talk filled those nights, pleasantly at first. Eventually, exhaustion would overtake me and I learned to fall asleep to the sound of his voice talking or singing along with the records he played. It took a while for me to notice that there was something wrong. That after I was asleep, Akram would get up and pace the room. As the nights passed, when we measured the time of our marriage in weeks instead of days, his pacing became frantic. He stayed awake, drawing up itineraries for the honeymoon he was planning for us, a trip to Europe, a few months away. On more than one occasion, he woke me up, dragging me out of bed to go out and look at the stars, or go for a drive, so late that even the nocturnal streets of Karachi were deserted.
I didn’t understand the clues that my in-laws eventually noticed, casting looks at their son filled with more and more worry as the days passed. The accelerated rate of Akram’s speech turned into frenzied monologues. When I was too tired to dance with him at night, he danced by himself, long after I pretended to be asleep. Within three months of our marriage, I knew two things. I was pregnant. And what Sharif Muhammad Chacha had said about my husband was true.
Very quickly, I was educated on the technical terms to describe what ailed him. He was a manic-depressive—what they call “bipolar disorder” today—now flying high in a hyperexcited state that his father finally challenged in a conversation I overheard from the hallway outside of the lounge.
“What do you mean? You stopped taking your medication?!”
“I mean what I said.”
“But— why? Why, Akram? You were doing so well!”
“I was dead, Papa. My heart was dead.”
“But, Akram—you heard what the doctor said as well as I did—it’s dangerous to stop your treatment this way. You know what can happen, Akram, please. Be reasonable.”
“Don’t you see, Papa? I was dead! A puppet! Made of wood, with a wooden heart. No joy, no life in me. That is not the way I want to live. It was my wedding time, Papa, and I had to experience it. Fully. Alive. With a heart of flesh and blood. Alive and beating, not numb from drugs. Dangerous? What is life without danger? Without risk?”
“Akram, stop it. Please! You know where you are headed. You know what will happen.”
They knew. Akram and Abbas Uncle. Sajida Auntie and Asma. But I had no idea. How low Akram would fall from his heights. When it happened, it was so bad that drastic measures had to be taken. For Abbas Ali Mubarak’s son, the psychiatrist made house calls. He came, with his machine, his wires, his rubber bands, and his assistants. He gave Akram electroshock therapy. Again and again, over the course of a few weeks. By now, no one pretended any longer that this was something they hadn’t known about.
“We had hoped,” Abbas Uncle said, “that this would never happen again. He was doing so well.”
Sajida Auntie sniffed. “I thought his marriage would be the end of these episodes.” There was an accusation in her tone. The line was drawn between her and me—never to be erased. I was somehow responsible, in her eyes. I was to have been the cure for her son—one of a series she had tried over the years, from herbal medicines to hakims, faith healers, and quacks. In her eyes, I had failed him just as all the others had.
After I lost track of the number of electroshock treatments the doctor administered, Sajida Auntie said to her husband, in tears, “Enough! We have tried all these doctors. None of it works. This time, we will do as I say.”
“As if we haven’t tried things your way already,” Abbas Uncle said, without looking at me.
“We will take him to Karbala. On ziarat. We will go on pilgrimage, to give our salaams to Imam Husain, who will cure him. I know he will! If we have enough faith.”
Abbas Uncle said nothing. In a week, he had arranged for the trip. They would go—Abbas Uncle and Sajida Auntie and Akram—on pilgrimage to Karbala and Najaf in Iraq. Because I was pregnant, I was not allowed to go. Instead of going on the honeymoon that Akram had planned, I went home to Ma.
Ma asked me what was wrong. Again and again. I said nothing. Merely the facts, with none of the details. “They’ve gone for pilgrimage to Karbala. I couldn’t go. I’m pregnant.” Finally, frustrated, she sent Macee to visit her brother, Sharif Muhammad. To find out the details I wouldn’t share. After that, Ma left me alone.
When my husband came home from pilgrimage to Karbala, nothing had changed. More electroshock treatments. So many that his memory was broken. He didn’t recognize me when I put my hand on his cheek, didn’t even know who I was. Finally, Abbas Uncle sent him away. To the clinic in Switzerland, where he’d been treated before. Uncomfortable
in my in-laws’ home, I went back to stay with my mother while he was gone, heedless of the gossip that this must surely have caused.
What people were saying didn’t matter to me. I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t see anyone. Except Asma, who came to visit me a few times. She was pregnant, too. We should have had much to talk about. But we didn’t.
The day I first felt my baby—Sadiq—move inside of me, as soft as the flutter of a bird’s wings inside my belly, was the first time in a long time that I was happy. I wasn’t alone. In that instant, I knew I would never be alone, no matter what else happened.
Akram came back to Pakistan when I was only weeks away from delivering Sadiq. I went back to be with him. He seemed better, able to smile again. But not at me. Toward me, his eyes were those of a stranger. I slept alone, in the room where Akram had danced with me less than a year earlier. He slept in the room that had been his as a boy, the room that was to be our child’s room when he was born.
When my birth pains began, I went back to Ma. It was tradition—for me to go home to give birth, to stay in my parents’ house for forty days after. It was a relief, too, to be away from Akram and his stranger’s eyes.
Sadiq was born, filling the hole in my life with a purpose that I clasped close to my heart, making everything else fade in importance. Abbas Uncle and Sajida Auntie came to visit. Asma was at their home, having given birth to Jaffer a few weeks before. Her new home, a brand-new house that her father had built for her and her husband, across the street from her parents, so that she would never have to live under the rule of her in-laws, was ready for her when her forty days was up, a few weeks before Muharram was to start.
When Muharram was about to begin, Sharif Muhammad Chacha came to fetch me and Sadiq. I had spent more days of my marriage in my parents’ home than in my husband’s. It was strange to go back there. But I had no choice. Sajida Auntie’s Muharram gatherings were to begin. And she was worried about what people would say if her daughter-in-law was not present. About what more they would say than they must have already.
Sajida Auntie hired an ayah to take care of Sadiq. “Let her take care of the baby. You must try to make Akram remember. That will be easier without Sadiq always in your arms.” This was not something I could do. Sadiq was mine. He knew it, too—crying in everyone else’s arms, soothed and sated only in mine.
Akram had begun to interact with his parents. Around me, he was still quiet. And Sadiq was of no interest to him. Sajida Auntie tried to convince him, to remind him, of who we were. Abbas Uncle said that the doctors in Switzerland had reassured him—it was an unusually long-lasting effect of all the shock treatment, this loss of memory. That in time, he would remember. But it wasn’t in time.
On the second day of Muharram, just as I recited the last words of my favorite noha at the gathering of ladies in Sajida Auntie’s grand hall, bereft of furniture for those ten days, Akram came into the room, a man trespassing on the space of women. He was agitated, looking for something. His eyes caught mine. He marched up to me and shouted, “Your brat is squalling!” In that second, I saw Akram’s mother step forward. She hesitated, the calculation of her thoughts clearly visible on her face. How to rescue the situation? How to stop Akram without giving him away? But Akram wasn’t finished and that hesitation of hers was enough to let him go on, too far, too late. “Go and shut that child up! And then take him and go back where you came from! Take your brat—that son of who-knows-what and get out of my house!”
I put my hand up to my mouth and sank to my knees. My mother was there to see the whole thing. All the women of the community were there to hear what my husband said. Ma came to my side and lifted me up.
“Enough, Deena. It has been enough. Go and get your son. I’m taking you home. This time for good.”
I was not alone. I had Sadiq with me. Two weeks later, a few days after Ashura, Sharif Muhammad Chacha came to tell me that Akram was dead. That he’d hung himself in the beautiful bathroom of our wedding suite.
I went to my dead husband’s house, a widow at nineteen, where people were gathered to give condolence, some of them the same women who had witnessed my humiliation two weeks before. Sajida Auntie, driven by grief, I know, shrieked at me to get out of her house. The same way her son had. I understand. Now, at least. What grief can do. How hungry it becomes—when combined with bitter anger and denial—how blind, looking for a target at which to cast blame. I was merely that—a convenient target—chosen without regard for fact or reason.
And I was not alone. I had Sadiq with me.
When Ma died, Sadiq was eight months old.
But I was not alone. I had Sadiq with me.
Abbas Uncle came often, urging me to return to live under his roof. But I told him what Ma had said before she died. That Abu would have wanted me to stand for myself. That my life was my own and no one else’s. God’s gift to me. Not to be squandered.
It never occurred to me. That Abbas Uncle would later use the name of that same God against me. That he had consulted with lawyers and mullahs—all of them men. That they had told him that Sadiq belonged to him. That after he was weaned, I had no right to my own son.
He didn’t say any of this out loud. To me, he said, “I cannot force you, Deena. To come and live with us. Even though that is the way it should be. You have suffered enough. But we have suffered, too. Your mother-in-law was bitter. And wrong to blame you. Time is what is needed. For all of us to heal.”
Time was what he promised. And time was what he gave. More than five years. He must have planned and plotted for all that time, mercilessly torn between his guilt and his grief. Between what he owed me and what he wanted. To take back his grandson, who was mine, no matter what his mullahs told him.
In those years, amazingly enough, I was happy. I lived with Sadiq, alone in the house where I grew up, with only Macee for company. Every week, dutifully, I took Sadiq with me to visit his grandparents. I never begrudged them that right, no matter how painful it was for me. No matter how much I would have preferred not to go there.
I put up with Sajida Auntie’s barely veiled dislike and resentment—something she swallowed at the end of the first year of her grief, coming to see me. Urging me to attend her majlises when Muharram came again. It was an act of atonement for what had happened in the weeks before Akram’s death—carried out not for me but for her grandson, whose legitimacy her son had put in question, repudiating him in front of the busiest body of witnesses to be found. She made a great show of walking me into that first gathering, her arm around my shoulders. Perhaps it made a difference in the way some of those women perceived me. I wouldn’t know. I shunned them before they could shun me, interacting with them with only my voice, in the nohas I recited. Those were for the love of the Imam. Those were not subject to their approval. And the grief we shared, together, made those gatherings neutral ground. There was room for me there.
I miss that—the special power in those congregations of women. I have been unable to find a replacement for it over the years in this country, where women have to enter the mosques from back doors and sit in the less favored spaces of worship because the space and time for worship is shared and women often get the shorter end of the stick as a result. In Pakistan, we were so separate from the men, our gatherings held at different times and in different spaces, that we didn’t have to share anything with them. Space, time, power. The spirit of Bibi Zainab was there when we gathered, the sister of Imam Husain—you know the story? All of it? Of Karbala? Sadiq told you that, too? It was Zainab that everyone turned to after that day of tragedy—Ashura. She led the captive women and children, gave them comfort, and spoke for them in the court of the tyrant, her feminine voice bold and strong for the cause of justice.
But in all those five years, when I attended majlises at the home of my in-laws and visited them with Sadiq, there were signs I should have seen and been prepared for. How often Abbas Uncle and Sajida Auntie would complain—about how much Sadiq depended on me, how much
he needed me. How unhealthy it was, that he should be afraid of them and everyone else. I remember how upset Abbas Uncle was when Sadiq cried inconsolably on his first outing without me. It was Muharram again. And Sadiq couldn’t bear to be with the men in the Muharram procession, afraid of what he saw there. Abbas Uncle said that he was too sheltered in my feminine shadow. That children, especially boys, had to exit the womb, after all, in order to survive in this world. But I didn’t understand what he was getting at. How could I?
I was there the day that Umar came home, on the terrace with Sadiq. I had no idea. That what went on in my neighbor’s house, in the home of my old friend, would have such an impact on the life I was living and which I thought, with no complaints, would never change. From Macee, who heard it from the washerwoman who worked for Umar’s mother—that Wahabbi woman, Ma had called her, always with an angry shake of her head—I learned that Umar was home for six months. Done with his studies in America, with a job as a professor waiting for him when he went back. A great success, by all measures. That he was still unmarried, his mother anxious to change that, the reason he’d come home.
I had no interaction with him. None whatsoever. In fact, unconsciously, I avoided the terrace altogether, drinking tea in the lounge, letting Macee hang the laundry to dry—normally one of my favorite chores, as the line was there, on the terrace, where I’d spent so many happy hours of my childhood. So, I was shocked by what Abbas Uncle came to say one morning, while Sadiq was in school.
“Your neighbor—the woman next door, Mrs. Yusuf—has come to see me, Deena.”
“My neighbor?”
“She’s very angry. An emotion, it seems, that she is on very familiar terms with.”
“Angry? With me? What on earth for?”
