(You can read some of the earlier parts of this memoir here and here and here.)
“We’re going straight to hell,” I told Rashid.
The platterful of tiny braised corpses perfumed the whole house and defeated all my principles. Those miniature curved necks looked like victims of a dollhouse massacre.
“God has made them lawful for us,” he said.
It was migratory season and all over the country people stretched nets to catch quails. My husband had been given a sackful and he brought it home at lunchtime.
I’d begged him to let them go and he’d said stop being a baby and went back to work.
The sack hung quietly in our pantry all night. Perhaps they thought themselves safe in that strange dark nest.
You might think I should have freed the birds myself.
Then Rashid would have called my husband to ask for more housekeeping money, and my husband would’ve come home in a fury to provide it and Rashid would’ve walked up the street to catch a rickshaw in this scorching heat and gone to the market to buy something else for our dinner.
If you have any pretension to giving a damn about the poor, you don’t make their lives harder.
Rashid promised to save out a pair and take them home to his children when he went on leave.
The rest were slaughtered, plucked and skinned by the time I got up the next morning.
***
In those days I still believed a little truth remained to the mythic recounting of my marriage, that we’d been the ones to escape. For sixteen years my husband had sworn he'd shed his first confining skin.
But his mother must have kept it folded up in one of her battered trunks, and day by day he shrank back into it.
***
The photo is a lie, like the set-up shot in an ominous French movie.
A man and woman stand in the sea off Clifton. They are a finely-matched pair, tall, both handsome, holding a baby and laughing as their bodies incline towards each other. The camera shows us a vivid exemplar of joy.
When the man in the photo became my brother-in-law sometime in that same year, he threatened to throw himself under a train if my husband didn’t divorce me. You can be responsible for my wife and my son, he told my husband in the letter.
But before that he took the train all the way from Karachi to demand that my husband divorce me. Demanded it while sitting in my own baithak, drinking chai I made for him in the little crappy kitchen of the flat we had in Peshawar. Demanded it for hours while I sat in my bedroom because I wasn’t a necessary party to the conversation.
Of course my husband hadn’t been too stalwart in dealing with our marriage either. Took him a month to let his parents know and after I kept insisting, he finally called one of his sisters and asked her to convey the news.
Almost everyone’s reaction I’d fairly well expected. But after a week or two of all sorts of people being angry or reproachful or even frightened, like the registrar who’d stamped our nikah with his official seal and was so threatened for doing so by Baba that he came to my office to beg me to renounce the marriage, my husband told me he would, indeed, have to divorce me, because otherwise everyone would blame him for being the death of his mother.
Don’t worry, he’d said; they won’t win. I’ll kill myself at her feet.
Now it was seventeen years later and Khawar and I were all happy friends and his wife Shaheen was like my own sister and my husband and our son and I were living with Baba and Ammi.
***
For the second time in these sixteen months, I’d left Baba’s house with my son and gone to the house of my sister-in-law who lived up the street. My husband had been angry because I’d asked his partner for details of the business so I could understand our financial position, and it was maybe the fifth time, in all those years since the first time, that he declared our marriage was over.
I flushed my gold wedding ring down my sister-in-law’s toilet, which got everyone upset because you really don’t treat gold that way, and she phoned Khawar in Karachi and he told me not to worry about anything, he’d talk to my husband, and I told him that if he hadn’t been able to fix his own marriage in all those years, how did he think he was going to fix mine?
Never mind, said Khawar; you and my nephew come stay with me and Shaheen and the kids in Karachi for a few weeks and we’ll sort everything out.
I had my ring back by the time we got on the plane. My sister-in-law up the street made one of the little servant girls search through the plumbing to find it.
***
It was a great relief, much later, to have learned that nothing I could ever do might have changed the natural course of this river my life was caught up in. It hadn’t been because I was a gori ferangi pardesi or indelibly a Jew, though I was still being a Muslim then, or being older than their son or just a mongrel of no importance, that Baba and Ammi treated me as they did.
Shaheen was Baba’s first cousin, and his daughter-in-law. Ammi was her aunt—her mother’s sister—and her mother-in-law. Shaheen’s younger brother married my husband’s third-eldest sister.
Everyone had wanted Shaheen and Khawar to marry; it was a love match too, despite Khawar trying to run away the morning of the wedding and his brother having to fetch him back.
None of this mattered. Baba and Ammi spent their lives destroying everyone in reach of their grasp.
***
It was just before Rashid started working for us that my husband slammed me onto the floor in front of a roomful of people.
Shakil was our servant then, and he came running to tell me that Ammi was sick.
She was frequently on her deathbed but this time, when I went to her room, I could see she was the color of an overwashed sheet. My husband sat next to her, pressing her hands.
Baba stood there, and my husband’s nephew, and whichever servant was working for Baba and Ammi at the time, and everyone but Baba was worried. Baba was mostly annoyed. But they stood there helpless, all of them except the servants educated men and used to commanding others.
I told Shakil to bring one of those dissolvable aspirins they had in the house, and a glass of water, and my husband got his mother to drink it, and then I told them to take her to the hospital.
And Baba said his car was at the mechanic’s. It was the car my husband used too, when it worked, because our own car had been burned by a mob the previous October when the war in Afghanistan started.
I told them to take our nephew’s car; his compound up the street had as many cars available to them as anyone could need for anything; up and down the street we could borrow any car we wanted.
And Baba said Faisal's car is not for my wife, because Baba was always in the mood to disparage the household of Faisal’s mother.
She was his second daughter but the one he’d married off first, at fourteen, to the son of the richest family in the district. She’d sat for her matric exams in the morning and had her engagement in the afternoon and had Faisal when she was fifteen.
She’d been the one to face all the yelling and crying when she walked up the street to inform her parents of her brother’s marriage, all those years ago. She was the one who’d warned my husband not to make us live with Baba and Ammi because, she’d said, they’d gone entirely rotten.
But I could see, this time, that Ammi was really sick, and it was true she’d had a heart condition for years, and in front of everyone I called Baba an asshole, that English word, and my husband hit me so hard I was on the floor before I’d even seen him raise his arm.
I stood up and went back to our bedroom, in the other house, and he followed me, despite the urgency of the matter at hand, and we stook looking at each other and I saw him hesitate, that second in which you are actually deciding which fork in the road you want to take, it was written so clearly on his face I almost expected him to ask me to help him pick the right one.
Then he called me a bitch and slapped me.
And it was at that moment I saw he'd become too small even for that skin his mother had saved for him all those years.
That was part of the fury of it to me; he had made himself so small that it was beneath me, beneath my dignity and self-respect, beneath my own decency in that moment when I knew he was so worried about his mother, to hit him back.
Then he went back to his mother’s room and they took her to the hospital in Faisal’s car.
I was too angry now, I’d seen something I could never unsee and I needed to be out of this house and not anywhere on this street, and I got my nice embroidered chador and started walking to the house of our friend Qaiser and his wife. Qaiser had met me as a bride in Peshawar, and here, during these sixteen months in Dera, I’d become friends with his wife, and their children.
I’d only ever been to their home by car but I had a vague idea that if I cut through the little cemetery between this neighborhood and the beginnings of where the Shias lived, I might be able to find their street.
It was just about the only shred of character my husband had left, that he never dropped any of his Shia friends.
Things had started to go bad for the Shias after General Zia came to power in 1977, but now members of prominent local families, especially lawyers and judges, were being assassinated all the time, and daily life for less privileged people was a nightmare.
It was the noon heat of August and most people were inside sleeping, and the only person I encountered was a woman old enough not to need to cover her face in public anymore, and I asked if I was heading in the right direction. Everyone knows everyone in their own neighborhood.
She was tall and measured, one of those people who think that even though they are poor, dignity is a luxury they can afford, and she looked at me consideringly and asked who I was, because I was a stranger to her in a Shia neighborhood and even if for no other reason it was reasonable for her to ask.
Everyone in Dera knew Baba and I said he was my father-in-law.
Achha, she said—a word that means anything you want it to—you are our own, then, using the familiar—the intimate—form of you, and she pointed ahead, that I just needed to keep going.
In a place where people rank your value not just by religion and caste and clan and family but by what side of the family you come from, mother’s side or father’s side—even in a place like that, a stranger once looked at me and did me the courtesy of calling me one of her own.
Being treated kindly by a stranger is a blessing.