Why women in my stories are not victims but survivors
Not a cliché of an eastern woman losing her identity in the cacophony of roles
Once upon a time, in a land not very far away, was a village, silently nestled in its vanilla complexity, traditional uniqueness and nondescript rigidity.
A square mile after a square mile of crops, orchards of oranges, a mango grove near a muddied pond, narrow streets of lines of houses made of brick and clay, and three havelis standing next to one another, close yet as detached as spouses estranged after a bad marriage.
Three wives of a very powerful feudal lord lived in those structures of varying majesty, clinging to memories of bygone glory as tightly as vines hugging mossy walls, old pillars, recurring dreams. One of those women was my Bobo, my maternal grandmother, who was loud, wise, very huggable, aggressive, generous, and a storyteller.
The two stories Bobo used to tell often was the love her very handsome and dashing husband had for her, and the last days of his life in her haveli. He died awfully young for a man who owned more land than most people in nearby villages, travelled to Simla for summer, was a member of the pre-Partition Legislative Council, and believed in marrying women rather than indulging in sinful liaisons with them.
When asked by his first wife, who lived in the fanciest of the three havelis, why he preferred his youngest and third wife, he looked at her with an eyebrow that was arched in haughtiness that couldn’t be aped: “If I ask you to throw away the pebble you are holding, you refuse. If I ask her to throw away the pearl she is holding, she does it in a heartbeat.”
Bobo’s pride in her wordless submission to her husband was as strange to me even when I was a child — a precocious one of course — as her strength raising her three school-going children on her own, standing tall in her 5’2, overweight, frizzy-haired splendour. Without knowing what it was, Bobo came to be the first representation of what a woman in early 1970s was in my world: an outwardly old-fashioned traditionalist, but equipped with more resilience and wisdom than most men around her. The power of adaptability to achieve the impossible.
In 1972, Ami, my mother, left my father’s house after the birth of her fourth and youngest child, my younger brother, after merely eight years of marriage. She lived with Bobo, and her two younger brothers (both married, both stereotypical male siblings in a feudal set-up) in the village haveli, while all her four children studied in cities away from her.
Her life was conditioned to our school calendars, her summers long and bright with our noise and endless demands for food, her winters short, shadowy and lonely, punctuated by our rowdy games and big bags of jalebi, barfi and moong-phali.
Ami from the age of 32 when she separated from her husband, her one true love, to 60 when she died suddenly and silently, never gave us a lecture on submission to a man or ways of adaptability to society. Her solitude was painful, but her advice was never to be silent. Follow your heart even if it breaks so many times all you feel is cello-tape and Super Glue when you touch it. The power of dreaming, and to never stop dreaming.
My life from my mid-20s to mid-40s was always as a single woman despite being married until very recently. I raised my child as a single parent, but with financial and emotional support from my long-distance husband. Hailing from a very conservative family I managed to create my own world despite the pressure of an expectation to succumb to conform to a societal expectation of how a woman should live. I stopped giving explanations a long, long time ago, wearing my “strange” life as easily as a well-worn night robe. My answer was my life: simple, following a pattern that was of my own making, and raising a child.
I gave my all to my child for 17 years of his life, ensuring that despite growing up in an unusual set-up his life was as normal and as stable as any child growing up with both his parents. His father’s long-distance but constant presence kept him grounded, and, touchwood, he is grown up to be one of those rare young adults who despite being a product of a broken family is happy, confident, very kind and very independent. The power of love.
Through the ordinariness of my ordeals, I learnt to appreciate the small things that have big stories. All around me is the extraordinary of the ordinary. Lives that are special while originating within the societal demarcations of the right and the wrong, the do’s and the don’ts, the accepted and the forbidden, and moving beyond it all. My stories are not about women who were handed privilege on a platter of entitlement and went on to do what was expected of them. Or those celebrated heroines who conquered the world hoisting a flag on the Everest, or don a spacesuit for a mission to Mars, or find a rare mutation of cervical cancer that only afflicts South Asian women, or head a multi-billion dollar company, or win a Nobel award for a Physics breakthrough. These are the obvious heroines, and much is written about them.
My stories are about the unsung heroine, the unassuming female, the aam aurat, who has achieved a Wonder Woman type of heroism all on her own. She has written her own story superimposing it on that she was born with. The power of the ordinary that is extraordinary.
In a patriarchal society like mine, women exist as someone’s daughter, sister, wife, mother. Women are defined by male relationships, struggling to find a voice singularly their own. Women are conditioned to excel within the borders of the picture that comes with the instruction of connect-the-dots. Interestingly, despite subliminal and blatant conditioning, and manipulations to mould into the ideal form of a female made to follow a linear narrative, women in Pakistan have always had a voice. It is just that the voice was on mute. Women existed in almost every field of life, from building a home to heading the state, but their achievements were celebrated as the exception. The woman I write about is the norm. Or at least is striving to be.
The Pakistani woman. Not a victim but a survivor. Not a cliché of an eastern woman losing her identity in the cacophony of roles that are invented to define her. Not a pushover but a strong individual secure in her femininity, who is real, identifiable, relatable yet unique in her euphony of influence.
Not to forget, there are many women whose brilliance is supported, magnified and eulogised by the family, the spouse, the ones who matter, but there are also many who do it on their own. Each success story has many unseen characters that are happy to stay in the shadows, hands that held tight, shoulders that were always there, love that was unconditional, support that was never patronising, criticism that was constructive, and praise that acted as an aphrodisiac to do better.
My paternal grandmother raised my younger sister and me. All my school and college holidays were spent with my Bobo and Ami. My sister’s daughter, 23, is my best friend. My life, uneven, good, uneventful, chaotic, flawed, happy, melancholic, in disarray, on the right path, has been deeply influenced by women, shaped by their strengths, honed by their weaknesses, tried by fire and tribulations. I watched ordinary women in awe, trailing them like a shadow, and from afar, who, broken by a familial tragedy, or shaken to the core by a societal attitude, rose from the ashes of their tragedy, resplendent and stronger than ever. Knights, not in shining armour, but battle-tested survivors.
I observed with keen interest those who take a gift they are born with, a talent they unearth within themselves, and rise to a height that is a benchmark of excellence in itself. They reinvented themselves, worked hard, touched lives, and made a difference. Flawed but magnificent, living within the lines drawn by society, they, masterfully, splendidly, moved the lines and formed new mosaics, filling the societal blanks with colours that are uniquely their own. They did not let one aspect of their life become their entire story. They assumed control, recharged, smiled, and became the author of their own stories.
My stories, even some of the ones yet to be worded, find their beginning, middle and end in those stories.