I Bring You Good Tidings of a Tubal Ligation: When the Dictatorial Angel Came Calling
Those three years I lived in Peshawar, I was peculiarly situated in every possible way.
I found a job as the secretary to the chief project engineer of an American consulting firm partnered with the Pakistani power authority, but I’d been hired locally so wasn’t an expatriate employee.
The project paid me in rupees under the civil service paygrade scale; if I’d been a local woman living at home with her family it would’ve been a nice bit of money.
I was living with a pair of doctors and their kids. They were cousins of my friends. These friends treated me like family but most of them lived in a village up in the mountains so I couldn’t live with them.
The doctors introduced me to their neighbor who was friendly with the American engineer and asked him to grant me an interview. This made the common idiom the neighbor’s mother used pityingly towards me—because anyone could see I was a lost hopeless mongrel—even funnier; its full meaning is poor helpless useless thing who doesn’t even have any work.
The Pakistani office staff was split between Punjabis and Pukhtoons. The Punjabis had been transferred up here from Lahore and were miserably unhappy and the Pukhtoons like to hate everyone. But they all knew how to tolerate Americans, because Americans eventually always go home.
But I was an American of undecipherable status, the only woman in the office, and a Jew.
Then I became a Muslim and turned into everyone’s sister.
The colleague I asked to take me to the masjid and act as witness to my formal acceptance of Islam was by reputation the most badmaashi miscreantal guy in the office.
His brand-new expensive leather Peshawari chappals were stolen from the steps of the masjid while we were inside doing what God is here said to have wanted.
What the Almighty may possibly have thought about all this only the Almighty knows. But the imam was extremely upset about the chappals.
Here or back home, the expatriate wives and I would’ve been foreign to one another. In Peshawar I had a little respectability from being a sort of part of the doctors’ household but nothing else to offer since I didn’t play bridge.
Then I moved out, and eventually moved into my office. Now I was living in the same sort of nice big bungalow all the other Americans lived in. It had servants’ quarters too.
***
It was Hamid moving Beidi and the kids into the servants’ quarters that gave me a crash course in Urdu.
(Later I married into a family of poets whose exquisitely refined pronunciation could never overcome the earthiness of the way I learned to speak it.)
Hamid was our office electrician and a Punjabi from a village near Lahore. He spoke good English; he’d worked with Americans for a long time and he was enterprising and persuasive and he got permission from Gene, my boss, to occupy the quarters rent-free.
He persuaded Gene’s wife Jacque to pay the school fees for his two eldest kids.
Beidi was still nursing the fifth when I first met them. Hamid always joked he wanted a full dozen. He must’ve started working at it when Beidi wasn’t more than fifteen and I think he was about ten years older. They were first cousins. When they weren’t up here they lived in Beidi's mother’s compound.
With my own circumstances as they were, I told Hamid that if Beidi would include me in the family’s meals I’d pay for the food for all of us and it was an arrangement that made all of us happy.
It takes a little time, if you’ve come from a place like New York, even if you come from people who’d lived through pogroms and being smuggled across borders and surviving the Great Depression, to understand what poverty is for millions and millions of other people. Somewhere else, with the skills and intelligence both of them had, with the values and drive to push their kids higher, Hamid and Beidi would’ve been solid working class.
But here, even with Hamid being a government employee with regular pay and doing as much after-hours work as he could; even with Beidi able to quote classic couplets and having an elegant sense of style and wanting all her daughters and sons to be educated—here her children were getting to each eat an egg every day for breakfast because the friendly gori farangi pardesi gave her husband the money to buy them enough good protein.
A cordially transactional relationship sometimes grows into something more. It can be great good fortune when people start to really like the people who do them a service.
It’s true Beidi had rarely any other women to talk to, and it’s true that my friends everywhere in the country had busy lives of their own that I could be only tangentially a part of.
Maybe there’s no category we could fully fit ourselves together in. Just say we felt like real friends to one another other too.
***
The next year Beidi gave birth to her sixth and Hamid laughed and said he was halfway to his goal, and no one could deny that between them they made beautiful kids.
The year after, Beidi had her seventh.
Hamid had gotten Jacque to pay for him to rent private quarters away from the office so his family would have more privacy, and unrelated to that, and for complicated reasons, Beidi and I had had a bad falling-out and I hadn’t seen her in months.
But Jacque had gone to the hospital when Beidi was in labor and persuaded whoever it was necessary to persuade that they should do a tubal ligation at the time of the birth.
Hamid was really upset about it but he’d invited Jacque deep enough into their lives that he hadn’t been able to keep her out.
Not long after, that newest little baby girl copy of Hamid died.
I was told about it but there were reasons I couldn’t just go and offer my condolences. Then—I think it was our office driver who told me—he was the brother-in-law to my naughty witness to piety—that Beidi wanted to see me.
So I went to their house and she grabbed onto me, sobbing, and as one says in these situations, I kept saying the baby was with God now, she was right up there in heaven and we both cried because heaven was pretty far away and down here right now Beidi’s arms were empty. And whatever else might fill them, it would never again be a new baby.
***
It took me many years to recognize that whatever one thinks, in the real world in which we live, Jacque did the right thing and she’d been the only one with the power to do it. Beidi hadn’t even been thirty when she had that seventh child and the beautiful brown of her face had already taken on a gray underpallor.
Hamid, for all of his hard work and his enterprisingness and his charm and the truth that he loved his wife and his children—in all those years of marriage and steady work they still had no real home of their own. Sometimes love is useless if it doesn’t come well-fortified with common sense.
All this happened a long time ago so I don’t remember everything so clearly, but I’m pretty sure Jacque had first arranged for Beidi to get Depo-Provera first and it had made Beidi feel ill and she hated it.
Sometimes, in this real world we live in, moral clarity is a luxury to be debated over theoretically while people actually die in the meantime.
I know as well as I can know anything that Jacque saved Beidi’s life; that she saved yet another soul from being born too tiny and frail to sustain itself in the body its mother was able to make for it and to die therefore in great suffering before it had even the littlest chance to perceive for itself any of the beauties of the world.
***
I didn’t see Beidi and Hamid much after that. Soon I was married and Beidi gave me some sage advice; she told me to give my new husband a son and he would never leave me, and I laughed and told Beidi the poor baby would come out and see me and say hi nani, but where’s my mother, because I was pretty aged already according to local conventions, but it turned out Beidi was right.
In the end it worked out, for me and my son both, though not in the way any of us would’ve imagined it. I’m sorry there isn’t any way I can tell her all about it.
Holy shit. Seven. Yes, Jacque saved Beidi's life, and maybe prevented their poverty from grinding even harder.
Beautifully recounted memories.