Quicksanded

It’s miserable for people whose actual real lives sound like ludicrously implausible badly-written over-the-top melodramas.

Yasmin only got a husband because after a night of drinking and smoking and playing cards her brother Ikram asked his best friend to marry her and Iftikhar was drunk enough to say yes.

Under ordinary conditions she’d’ve been a highly desirable match but the provincial politics were so crazy at that point that every possible bridegroom from within or outside of the family was afraid to become Inayatullah’s son-in-law. It was regarded as a guaranteed life-limiting event.

Iftikhar had been one of my own bridegroom’s friends who came to congratulate us on our marriage which could’ve been its own life-limiting event considering how my new in-laws had taken it. My husband told me at some point during our honeymoon period that he’d have to leave me, but I shouldn’t think he was giving them any satisfaction; he’d kill himself at his mother’s feet and that would fix everything.

That didn’t happen and eventually we left for New York and I didn’t see Iftikhar again for sixteen years. By that time it could be said in a certain sense that my in-laws had accepted the persistence of my marriage and when we came back we stayed in their compound in Dera.

Baba was a great lifelong friend of Inayatullah and you’d think his daughter would be shown great honor in our house but one of my sisters-in-law who was visiting us at the time was brutal in her estimation of the couple though she acknowledged their little girl was cute.

It’s true by that time Iftikhar seemed to have had every bit of initiative and liveliness leached out of him. It wasn’t Yasmin’s fault. She had elegance and taste and though I admit she did have big teeth she was otherwise an attractive-enough woman, and working hard to make the best of an impossible situation.

My husband had asked Iftikhar to join him in starting up a business and Iftikhar had agreed and then after a few months or so abandoned everything to his older brother so he could go back to sleeping all day and playing cards all night and generally existing in a state of extreme depression. Arif his brother made a very capable partner but that meant he controlled all the revenues that were his family’s share and Yasmin was absolutely frantic about it.

She’d call my husband at the office and cry and beg him to light some sort of fire under his friend for the sake of decency. A woman of her status, coming from the family she did, was always being invited to social events for which respectable gifts had to be given and she never had any money. In that culture it was a terrible disgrace to show up the equivalent of as they’d judge it empty-handed, and especially her being Inayatullah’s child and the sister of her equally powerful brothers.

I’d visit her as often as I could; I wasn’t in wonderful circumstances myself so we had a considerable depth of understanding between us.

Iftikhar’s father had put almost all the family wealth into building a big house in the city and had no intention of spending a further rupee on his family so the only one married out of the ten kids, all of them adults, was Iftikhar. The boys except for Arif who was middle-aged then were in various stages of ruination and the four daughters were approaching the fragile emotional state of Victorian spinsters. The eldest of them was the principal of a government girls’ school but you shouldn’t suspect from that any degree of liberality in her. She used to insist to me that the Quran made the raping of one’s maidservants lawful.

Whenever I visited Yasmin we’d have maybe five or ten minutes before the sisters started trickling into her room and sit. When it was prayer time the eldest sister would round everyone up and then we had a little respite since at least they didn’t perform their devotions in Yasmin’s room too.

Even when she had a miscarriage Iftikhar barely took notice. He was too lost in his own somewhat self-imposed despair.

I’d’ve liked to have stayed in touch with Yasmin after we went home but it wasn’t as though I could offer her any comfort from so far away. But at least in that household the atmosphere got a little easier once her father-in-law died. Arif got married and then he married off the eldest sister and I think eventually the younger ones too.

But tragedy never let up. Inayatullah died peacefully enough at the age of eighty-five a few years later, but one of the sons was assassinated in 2013 and then Ikram himself was assassinated in 2018. When I read about that I felt sorry I’d given away the folk dolls he’d once sent with my husband as a gift. It seemed disrespectful of his memory but then I’d’ve had to know for sure what was coming and you never really think it will.

Yasmin isn’t even listed on Inayatullah’s Wikipedia page as being a daughter of the house. He’s only credited with having sons.