I already knew before I began reading this book that I would have lots of very strong opinions about it. That was because every time I brought it up, everyone around me had not only heard of it, they were all very opinionated about it too. Even the people who hadn’t read it were aware of the particularly controversial bits about how both the author as well as her husband—the villain in this tale—had left their previous spouses to begin their married life, or how Durrani, whose narrative solely focuses on how marrying a feudal lord destroyed her life, then went on to marry Shahbaz Sharif, a man most people in Pakistan consider corrupt beyond belief.
So reading the book without having at least some pre-conceived idea of what it was about was impossible. But I tried to be as open as possible to my own reaction to the writing, which ended up being an account of one of the most unstable, unhealthy relationships I’ve ever read. Tehmina Durani, the teller of her life story, sketches in quite a lot of detail about her tumultuous marriage to Mustafa Khar, a Pakistani politician who is the epitome of every abusive husband ever. I already knew he would be horrible, but I had underestimated, even by my own very generous standards, how horrible he could possibly be.
Most of the beginning of this book feels like a Judith McNaught novel, in that everyone is filthy rich and ridiculously good looking except for our ugly duckling heroine. They all indulge in rich people activities and spend their time doing rich people things, with a whole team of servants and guards streaming behind them. A desire to copy the British lifestyle is evident in almost
all of Tehmina Durrani’s family, especially from the maternal side, members of
whom had provided loyal service to the crown in the pre-partition days, and
been richly rewarded for it.
The Hayat men pursued
the pastimes of the idle rich. They strove for sartorial elegance with their
classic, tailored clothes, played polo, learned all the latest dances, went on
shikar (hunting expeditions) and
threw lavish parties.
The author’s mother, who plays a huge part in how Tehmina turns out, was cold and distant and mostly responsible for inculcating really low self-esteem in the children she deemed unworthy of her approval. Mostly those were the kids with dark skin (including our author), who grow up in a household where fair skin – like the one her mother and her Pathan father have – are prized above all else.
Mother was not subtle
in playing favourites. Almost every word and action indicated her preference
for her white skinned children… Rubina, Zarmina and I – the darker daughters –
never seemed able to please her.
Wanting her mother’s approval and love is a pretty constant
theme within the narrative, and Durrani, unable to separate herself from the
idea of the young child who constantly craved for any sign of affection from
her strict mother, seems to be aware of it. Her first marriage to a man named
Anees, who woes her when she is sixteen with clandestine notes snuck in to her Convent
school, falls apart according to the author not only because she grows bored
with Anees—
“I probably do not
love you. I was only in love with the idea of love. I wanted to escape from my
family.”
—or because Anees is technically lower in social status, as
the author’s mother claims on her first rejection of the marriage proposal, but
because for Durrani, her mother’s withheld love triumphs all. This is the
set-up through which Tehmina meets Mustafa Khar, an upcoming politician who
could have walked straight out of one of McNaught’s aforementioned novels, in
that all the clichés about heroes seem to have applied to him. Looking at
pictures of present day Khar makes it hard to understand how a younger version
of him could have ever looking alluring or attractive, but whatever it was, for
the young and unhappily married Tehmina, who herself stated that by all
accounts her husband was a nice enough man (with whom she also had a baby), she
just never managed to love Anees. And in contrast, Mustafa Khar seemed powerful
and noble and charisma personified.
I was haunted by feelings of being a non-person and by extremely low self esteem. If Mother did not approve of me and love me, Anees’s weak opinion – and those of his lower-positioned family – was of little consequence.
Tehmina’s divorce, her first, and Khar’s plan to leave his heavily pregnant wife (his fifth) caused a shit storm, because in Pakistan all divorces are treated as worse than the possibility that a man might be abusing his wife. It is the ultimate dishonor, and Tehmina’s parents treated it as such. Especially her mother, for whom the idea of what people would say was more important than literally anything else. There must have been some irony in the fact that the mother herself was divorced, but how regularly do people forgive other people’s trespasses if they’ve suffered through something themselves? Very rarely, of course.
Despite the fact that our mother had divorced her first husband, we were taught that marriage was a sacred and irrevocable institution. If a husband turned out to be a brute, it was the wife’s duty to persevere until she changed his character. A broken marriage was a reflection of a woman’s failure.
It was at this point that my opinions started to make themselves manifest. Usually when I review a book, I like to separate the book from the author: the author is dead, as Roland Barthes would say, and my job is to comment on the text without the contextualization of the author’s actions. Reviewing a biography, however, sort of makes that an impossibility, because what you are commenting on is the author’s life itself. One must also take into account the fact that any biography will feature a version of the events that puts its author forward in the best possible light. One of the most intense conversations I had during the reading of this novel was in questioning the veracity of the claims put forward by Durrani. According to her, her father was encouraged by Bhutto to secretly transfer state assets from East Pakistan to West before the 1971 separation. Her father’s refusal led to his being thrown in jail once Bhutto came to power.
When the dust settled
and Bhutto became President, one of his first actions was to dismiss my father
as Governor of the State Bank. He had him arrested and thrown into a
cockroach-infested prison cell on a trumped-up charge that he was in league
with the CIA.
It’s entirely possible that all of this is true, and since her father’s eventual imprisonment ended with a trial which exonerated him, it’s also possible that historical documents can attest to this fact, but narratives can be edited to a person’s benefit, this also is true. People can manipulate events to their benefit, this also is true. And no reader of history, especially in the form of a biography, should be naïve enough to assume that what they are reading is, in fact, what actually happened. Which was why I read the whole thing with a grain of salt, paying special attention not to the events that happened but also how they are presented.
Looking at the book from this light, the presentation of Mustafa Khar, the antagonist of this narrative, makes for a very interesting study. Since the story is very overwhelmingly about a woman’s escape from her abusive marriage, I had imagined the abuser would be painted with a very harsh brush. But this book flips the switch by not even taking a more diplomatic, distant tone, but rather coming across as —there really is no other way to put this—begrudgingly admiring. It sounds like how a person, horrified by someone’s cruelty and misogyny, is simultaneously awed by them and how, by indulging in their horrible behavior, the person has managed to gain and retain power. In multiple scenes, the ghastly things that Khar did are presented as an example of his prowess or his thinking abilities rather than as a testament to his foul personality.
Exhibiting a native canniness, Mustafa used the power of his office to re-establish his financial position. Over the years he had sold off much of his land holdings in order to finance his political aspirations. But now those who had bought from him found themselves hauled in by the police on trumped-up charges and coerced into returning his land. Before long, Mustafa had recouped almost all of his holdings.
What’s also very funny is the juxtaposition between the Mustafa Khar who is corrupt and uses his power to oppress those below him, and the Khar who gets the support of Zulfiqar Bhutto primarily because he is ‘a man of the country’, someone who has grown up within the feudal system and understands the fights of the downtrodden. This point is repeated again and again, claiming that Bhutto was convinced they could change the country together, but he was planning this with the same Khar who blew all the money his father gave him upon his election to the National Assembly on buying a cavalcade of ridiculously expensive American cars. That doesn’t exactly sound like a man whose main interest is the people.
Sherry theorized that he suffered from an inferiority complex. He resented women from our social background and made it his mission to subjugate them. He disguised his class envy by assuming a feudal air.
This connection between the Mustafa Khar that other people saw and the reality of who he was—a vicious and cruel person—seemed to be pervasive throughout both his political life as well as his personal. No matter how many times Sherry, Mustafa’s wife before Tehmina, tried to tell her that Mustafa wasn’t a nice person, Tehmina couldn’t believe it until she got married to him and was faced with his frequent bouts of utter rage, the casual way he inflicted violence, or his blatant disregard for the women in his life. For Mustafa Khar, his weak morals and his feelings of inadequacy were all inter connected with an inherent misogyny that patriarchy allowed him to cultivate to the best of his abilities.
She claimed that his political idealism was merely an attempt to gain access to our class and that his concern for the poor and the downtrodden was a sham. In truth, she said, it was a manifestation of his hatred for the lite. He wanted to demolish the structure that ridiculed his origins and lacked at his lack of breeding and style. Women were his obvious victims. He was out to destroy us.
However, it would be an understatement to claim that Khar was merely misogynistic. For him, wives were perfectly acceptable venues for expressing his anger, laying his hands on, exerting control over. At the beginning, he was portrayed as merely passionate: to Tehmina, who started her affair by sneaking around behind everyone’s back and watching how Khar manipulated the events around them so he could spend time with Tehmina, he seemed fascinating. Eventually though, once they are married, the reality started to set in. And what’s fascinating about this marriage is that our protagonist had five other examples – all of Khar’s ex-wives – to show her what kind of husband he was, except they were clearly not on her mind, proven by the bare minimum attention paid to them in this telling. All of these women are mostly insignificant except for the fact that they caught Khar’s eye, and his spur of the eye decision to marry them resulted in their subsequent signing off of all their power to a man who was a true description of the term feudal lord. His first wife, older than him and handed to him on the authority of his father, he ran off to the city to escape after impregnating. There he married a friend’s divorced wife who bore him another child. He then married an air hostess, and a few years after that a prostitute. The last wife before our author was Shehrezad, a beautiful, highly accomplished woman whom Khar married because he had to meet US delegates and wished to impress them with his trophy wife.
Bhutto discerned
intelligence and native cunning in Mustafa, although it was unschooled. The
younger man understood the plight of the illiterate, impoverished masses. Both
men, even as they enjoyed the trappings of power and prestige, ached to move
Pakistani into the twentieth century.
This sort of intertwining of the personal with the political is a thread that runs throughout the book, primarily because Mustafa Khar was a politician. Which is why one of the reasons I liked reading this book was the historical perspective it provided. Biased or not, history is always more interesting when reading from the point of the view of the figures involved, rather than from a dry, date-by-date account that our course books usually espouse. Since Mustafa Khar has always been such an important political figure, when Tehmina Durrani sketches his background she touches upon a number of major points in Pakistan’s history. This is made all the more interesting for any Pakistani reader who must judge for themselves how true to history this narrative really is.
Within a year, fueled by the hostile press, mainly in India and Britain, the battle for the liberation of Bangladesh had begun. The west seemed to have misread the plight of the East Pakistani people. West Pakistan was attempting to stop the Indian government’s dismemberment of their country, but it was projected as though we were the villains by not allowing autonomy to a people demanding their rights and freedom.
This manipulation of events proves that within the narrative there is an obvious bias towards the things that Tehmina Durrani believed or knew. So how do we look at the rest of the story: do we believe that she portrays herself as the victim, or do we look at it as an account of a vile man who was as evil as she clearly told us? Because even though a lot of people think it must have taken a lot of courage to write what she did, and a lot of people also agree that it’s shocking that Khar managed to carry on for so long (and still does) until Durrani took pen to paper, the criticisms that this book faces still exist. And without fail each criticism, contentious and strongly worded, is tinged with hints of ingrained misogyny.
It’s impossible to not encounter deeply held patriarchal beliefs when discussing this book in public. Most people, even the highly educated ones, held on to some strand of victim blaming, questioning why Tehmina chose to stay with Mustafa or why multiple women kept marrying him even with his cruelty widely known. Even in stories which so clearly try to explain how the man was abusive, basic sexism made it instinctive for them to question the woman’s actions instead of the man. And this question, about why she stayed with him, is one of the most commonly asked ones about abusive marriages: why does the woman (or, in some cases, the man) stay with their abuser?
Given my faulty knowledge and my position of privilege, it really isn’t fair for me to try to answer this question, but only to empathize, to place the fault where it belongs: with the abuser. Because for those who haven’t suffered the abuse, it is unimaginable, a horror of the highest order, and we think that if we were ever in that position, we would walk out, we wouldn’t stick around to bear another second of the indignity. But the reality of it is different, must be different, must be an existence that from us, the privileged, commands only empathy. In this book in particular, there is a vicious cycle of dependency, a particular hint of obsession and an inability to let go of each other. Even after Mustafa Khar starts to have an affair with Tehmina’s sister Adila, which would require another whole ten-thousand-words review to discuss properly, even after all the torture and rape and assault, Tehmina continues to fight to stay with him. Why? I certainly don’t know.
He spoke of the Adila episode, and was convinced that the Devil had entered him. He knew that he had imprisoned me in loneliness, and now, he believed, God had punished him with imprisonment while I was free. He had thought that he had lost me forever, and all he had was this room and God. He now realized what it must have been like for me when I was isolated and alone.
Victim blaming is a pretty common theme running through most of these critics’ arguments: Didn’t Durrani already know he was an abusive man? This, coupled with the fact that she then married Shahbaz Sharif, (current Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly of Pakistan) thereby jumping back into politics. Most of the people who read this book state pretty much the same thing: that they loved it when they read it, but now that Tehmina Durrani has married Shahbaz Sharif, they can’t believe she would marry into the same social circles, and that she probably deserves any more shit she gets, for choosing to marry such a corrupt man.
In his dealings with
Sherry, Mustafa exhibited extreme impatience. He treated her with contempt and
abused her with filthy language that made my ears burn.
I think we need to have a very honest conversation about why we assume patriarchal notions won’t exist where they do, and how stereotypes can plague even those who mean well. So, for example, with women who have been through abusive marriages, we expect them to have magically unwritten all the years of patriarchal conditioning they’ve been through, and accept that some men are trash, but of course it doesn’t work like that. When a women works, we expect her to be a champion for the rights of all working women. A women who has had kids must be able to understand when another mother wants a break. One who has been restricted by the community’s concepts of modesty must understand why another would want to break out of them. This very basic logic, that once you’ve suffered through something, you must be able to empathize better with those who are oppressed by the same rules, unfortunately doesn’t translate into real life. because the truth is that humans are complex, and by complex I mean capable of very easily carrying entirely conflicting opinions.
Consider, if you will, all the women who very regularly
share jokes where wives are a nagging burden on their husbands. Do most of
these women, some of whom are happily married, believe they themselves are
nagging burdens on their own husbands? Most of them don’t, and by virtue of
being the exception, reduce all others of their gender to being the punchline
of a joke. Either that, or they genuinely do believe that they themselves, like
all other women, are worthy of being so dismissively laughed at, which is an
outlook of life that years of conditioning can lead to you, because how we
think isn’t necessarily a product of our own mindset but of the society around
us.
Describing her ‘perfect’ relationship with Mustafa, (Sherry) laced her conversation with barbs, such as: “Mustafa says women who have affairs with married men are sluts.” Such words were met with sniggers and nudges, all directed at me.
Misogyny is hard to recognize for most people, and even harder to unlearn. And for most of this story, it is misogyny we must encounter, in the characters as well as in ourselves: Tehmina’s adultery, Mustafa’s horrible behavior towards his pregnant wife; Mustafa’s mental and physical torture of Tahmina; his affairs with Tehmina’s sister and her own reactions to it, blaming the sister but not her husband; her parent’s divorce; the treatment of Mustafa and Tehmina’s children, poor souls caught up in a family drama being played out in front of newspaper reporters and the world. All these things are intense and involve patriarchal notions in all forms, which means it involves a careful untangling of your own horror as a reaction to the story.
The good thing was, I had lots of friends on whom I could rely upon to provide me with smart insights. One of them, working on a paper about Saving Muslim Women and how Islamophobic narratives are used to justify military interventions in Muslim-majority countries, wrote about American anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod. Abu-Lughod described pornographic pulp ‘non’-fiction as a literary genre based upon autobiographical accounts of Muslim women’s oppression. According to my friend’s paper, the enduring legacy and bestselling status of books such as this one are dangerous indicators because they ‘feed shallow generalizations about Muslim societies instead of informing the reader of the ‘radical specificity’ of each case’. This, I think, was fascinating for me, because my reactions were purely class based: this must be the norm for all poor households, my privileged mind thought, but of course abuse is different in all its forms. Of course some are worse than others, and that doesn’t mean those aren’t more acceptable. It’s just that this story is hell on earth, and reading it gave me all sorts of feelings, half of which I still haven’t been able to sort out.
When I was trying to convince my best friend to read this book, she expressed doubt about wanting to read a bad book. But whether this is a good book or not is hard to say, since (unlike fiction) nonfiction, and especially biographies, must be reviewed in a manner completely different to what I am used to. Does one judge a biography on how faithful to reality it is, or how comprehensive in containing the life under discussion? Even after writing a 4000 word review I can’t properly decide how I feel about it. As a closing argument, I think this book is a must read. I think everyone should definitely read it once, and then engage in a long, healthy debate about all of the things that surround it. Recommended.