Fahmida Riaz
Fahmida Riaz (1946– ) was born in Meerut into a literary family that migrated to Hyderabad, Pakistan, at Partition where she learned Sindhi, Persian, Urdu, and English. She earned her masters degree from Sindh University.
Riaz is a distinguished Urdu poet, feminist, and human rights activist. To date, no woman writer in Pakistani English literature has written either poetry or fiction with a voice as powerful, fierce, and outspoken as Riaz. The recipient of the 1997 Hammett-Hellman Award from Human Rights Watch, she has published many collections of poetry and prose; including Badan Dareedah (Maktaba-e-Danyal, 1973), which was Pakistan’s first book of feminist poetry and forged new directions in women’s writing in Pakistan. Her use of the feminine gender for a poetry form that was usually written in the male gender caused a furor, and Riaz was accused of publishing eroticism.
In the 1980s Riaz was persecuted by the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, which led to many years of political exile in New Delhi. Here she began writing an English novel because she felt cut off from Pakistan’s familiar Urdu milieu. Later she developed and published extracts of the novel as English short stories.
The English translations of Riaz’s work include a poetry collection, Four Walls and A Veil (Oxford University Press, 2004) and her famous trilogy of autobiographical novels, Zinda Bahar Lane (City Press, 2000), Reflections in a Cracked Mirror (City Press, 2001), and Godavari (Oxford University Press, 2008), all translated by Aquila Ismail; Riaz has recently translated the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi into Urdu. Riaz lives in Karachi, runs a feminist publishing house, WADA, and occasionally writes fiction in English.
In “Daughters of Aai,” a story told to her by her sister, Riaz explores a disturbing, worldwide, and little-discussed issue: the sexual exploitation of the mentally challenged. However, Riaz’s tale, set within the sociocultural context of rural Pakistan, assumes its own dynamics. Contrary to popular myths of cloistered, helpless women she describes a “typical village” where women retain a strong sense of gender and self, despite the patriarchal system within which they live. Her reference to the women’s chunri head coverings, gauzy materials with vivid patterns created by them with an age-old tie-dye technique, hints at their inherent creativity. The contrast between female ingenuity and male notions of what is permissible or not runs through the story.
Riaz juxtaposes the lack of modern institutional support, training, and facilities for the mentally challenged Fatima—and the sexual threat to her—against the act of great love and faith that enables Aai and the village women to find refuge in ancient superstitions and create a space and shelter for the innocent and the guileless who do not conform to society’s norms. Riaz also explores Muslim laws of inheritance and the mandatory iddat, the prescribed months of seclusion that a widow must observe immediately after the Qul, the final funeral prayer, has been read on the third day of her husband’s death. The iddat ensures that if the widow is carrying a child, no one can dispute paternity, but in Riaz’s hands, this seclusion leads to quite a different twist. The reference to Tolstoy transposes Riaz’s story, across the centuries, from the culture specific to the universal, because Tolstoy belonged to a similar feudal, patriarchal society and through the translations of his work, influenced many literatures, including Urdu.
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There they sat weeping, their heads buried in their knees, sometimes glancing at me with bloodshot eyes.
They were sitting in my courtyard, the women of her village and Aai. Her daughter wasn’t there, it would have been difficult to bring her. Perhaps she was in hospital, perhaps in a mental asylum. Even if she were still at home, it was difficult to bring her all the way to Karachi. She was pregnant again.
The village women had come to seek assistance from me. They sat on the floor gazing at me wildly. Their heads were covered with green, blue, orange tie-dye chunries. We sat gazing at one another: me, looking at their dark feet, their thick silver anklets, arms full of clinking glass bangles, and the glimmering, glinting nose-pins and heavy nose-rings.
“Why are you weeping?” I wanted to ask. “Is it only for Aai’s daughter that you cry?”
“What do you mean?” My sister, Shahbano, was wide-eyed, puzzled.
Aai bit her lips and wrung her rough hands. She worked at Shahbano’s house. My sister was married to a landowner. She lived in the farmhouse, surrounded by mango orchards, by the Asthla Canal. Beyond its tranquil cool waters, as far as the eye could see, stretched green fields. The colorful huts of these peasant women were scattered on the canal bank.
Aai lived in one of those huts. How old was she? No one could tell. Could be 35 or 40. Not a wrinkle on her smooth fair face. Slim and tall, with tight round breasts jutting out of her kurta. Hard physical labor had kept her fit. Her husband was a drug addict and did very little. Theirs was a typical village when, in the months between sowing and harvesting, all the hard labor was done by women. Once when Shahbano had taken me for a walk through the fields, I had been amazed at the sight of all the men relaxing on their cots. I exclaimed, “These men, what kind of work do they do?”
A woman, her bangles chiming on her wrist as she balanced a large bundle of dry twigs on her head, said, “Madam, the men halal the chickens.”
They all burst out laughing. I too had laughed. How could I forget! It always took a man to say, “Allah-u-Akbar,” to decapitate a chicken or goat, to make the meat halal. Women could not perform this important religious task.
Aai had seven children. Her eldest daughter was severely handicapped mentally, the rest, simply malnourished. What cruel tricks fate plays: a female child and mentally handicapped! Fatimah was a beauty, growing up so fast the hand-me-downs from the landlord’s house could hardly keep up with her filled-out curves.
Fatimah could not speak; she could only mumble like an infant. If you saw her you would never think that this village beauty was not like any other young girl. But when she walked you noticed the disharmony in her movements. She veered and lurched, vacantly smiling, spit dribbling from the corner of her full red mouth.
When she was fourteen Fatimah began to menstruate. Aai and the other village women tried to teach her to use cotton pads, but she only laughed and tried to play with them. Aai wept bitterly. The village women shared her grief. They made it their collective responsibility to cope with Fatimah at her time of the month. They couldn’t let her wander around in that state. The men would see her soiled clothes: They would laugh their obscene laughter, point to her, and look at other women meaningfully. This would humiliate all of them. Since all the women went out to work seven days a week, the one working closest to Aai’s hut would take Fatimah inside and change the cotton pad as she would an infant’s nappy.
(What dirty, disgusting details! But I remember what Leo Tolstoy says in one of his essays. “Write down everything, however shameful, however painful, because it is all worth writing about.” But Tolstoy was not a woman, otherwise he would have known better.)
Between Shahbano’s house and Aai’s hut wild reeds grow in abundance. Aai would leave her children to play there and cross the reeds to come to work. One day she came weeping and told my sister, “Fatimah is pregnant.”
“Who did it? When did it happen?” Shahbano was shocked and in tears. She slipped out of her house and went to see Fatimah. Several village women had gathered in that modest dwelling. All aghast, whispering quietly.
Aai had beaten Fatimah mercilessly, questioning her, “Who was he? Who did this?” The village women were caressing Fatimah’s bruises, rubbing hot mustard oil and turmeric on her swollen limbs, and weeping, weeping quietly.
Fatimah mumbled and smiled.
It was decided quietly that the pregnancy be aborted at once. Aai took a week’s leave and went to the next village with Fatimah to pray at the shrine of a saint—this is what they told the men in the village: It was important that they not have an inkling of the catastrophe that had befallen Fatimah. It would be a matter of their honor. They would come out with their axes and there would be several murders. The last time an illegitimate pregnancy was discovered here, two clans had fought for a year. There were several killings, leaving behind widows and orphans and prolonged court cases that had drained the last rupee from the village.
Aai came back with Fatimah after the abortion.
“Madam, please send her to an orphanage,” she wept and pleaded with Shahbano.
My sister kept visiting me in Karachi, insisting, “Baji, you are a writer and so many people know you. Send her to the right institution where she will be safe.”
I held my head in my hands. Yes, I am a writer. I also know a few things about these institutions. “Where?” I would ask. It is well known that women in such institutions are sent out for prostitution. Normal women! And she, this unfortunate mentally handicapped girl! How would I guarantee her safety from sexual abuse?
The village women prayed. They prayed to Almighty God for a place, any corner in the world where a mentally handicapped girl who cannot speak would be safe from rape. In this great creation of the Almighty they needed men who, when they saw a beautiful, young, mentally handicapped woman in a lonely place, would not begin to lust after her body or use the first opportunity to drag her into the reed grove to satisfy a passing whim, who would look at her with compassion, would lovingly feed her, give her clay toys to play with, would hold her hand, cross the reed grove, bring her safely home—and leave.
In this great wilderness, where were those men? Ya Allah! Where were they? Or did You, in Your great wisdom, forget to make them?
Not a year had passed and here they were again, the village women—sitting in my courtyard. Fatu was pregnant again.
Dear God! Who was this monster? He satisfied his lust with this helpless creature and did not care a whit for the consequences. After all, did her child not have his genes, his nutfa? What could we do now?
“Another abortion?”
“It is too late. . . . She is perhaps seven months gone by now.”
“Why didn’t you do something earlier?”
“We never found out. Her time of the month has been irregular since the abortion. She wears such loose, big clothes. She was vomiting a few months back. We thought it was a stomach upset. Everyone had gastroenteritis in the village. The water is so polluted.”
Aai wept inconsolably.
“If the child is born how will we bring it up? The whole village will inquire about the father.”
“After the first abortion, why didn’t you take her to the family planning lady? She visits the village once in a while.”
“I did,” said Aai. “Unmarried women are not operated upon. It is illegal.”
Shahbano was wiping her tears as she told me, “The administrator in the mental asylum agreed to take her but on the condition that she would first have an abortion—even though she is seven months—and an operation to end all chances of future pregnancies. They said they simply could not afford the nuisance of childbirth inside the hospital.”
I sat there, trying to hold back my own tears.
Aai began to slap herself and beat her breast, screaming, “Why does she not die! Why? I will kill her myself.”
The village women were startled. They held Aai’s flailing arms. One of them said, “Don’t talk nonsense. Why hurt Fatu? She is sinless. She is above this world of sin and dirt. God has cast His holy shadow over her. Let the child come. We shall see.”
Surrounded by the women, Aai went back to her village.
I kept pondering over what those women had said. In their artless innocence and ancient vision, they regarded Fatimah as pure and holy. She was holy and pregnant.
What my sister later told me was like a Hindi film story. She said that it was during this period that a big landlord in another district happened to die. A year before his death, Noor Mohammad Shah had taken a second wife, a young girl from a poor family of his tenant farmer. No sooner was the recitation of the Qul over on the Soyem of Noor Mohammad, than his sons and his first wife began plotting to throw the second wife, Mumtaz Begum, out of the house.
Noor Mohammad’s lands and houses were to be divided among the family, but to deny Mumtaz Begum her inheritance they claimed that her marriage was never solemnized: She was merely the landlord’s mistress. Mumtaz Begum’s only hope lay in having a child by Noor Mohammad. She had to observe four months and ten days in isolation as iddat; her late husband’s first wife and family hardly ever saw her. In sheer desperation, Mumtaz Begum (whom everyone called Mummo) pretended to be pregnant and shocked her stepsons into silence. It was then that she heard of an unwanted pregnancy in Shahbano’s village, from a woman whose daughter was married to a man of her clan, who lived in Noor Mohammad’s village and worked as the driver of her Toyota Corolla. Mummo saw Fatu’s plight as a ray of hope. She sent an urgent secret message to Aai to wait for her.
After her iddat was over, Mummo drove down to Shahbano’s village with her mother and elder brother. They had Mummo’s name registered in the maternity home of a nearby town and rented a flat for their family and for Fatu. For the last two months of her pregnancy, Fatu was treated like a princess. She was given the best food and drinks and was very well looked after. When the child was born, a baby boy, Mummo brought Fatu back to Aai and whisked away the baby, protected by a birth certificate from the maternity home that said in a quaint scroll, “Son of Noor Mohammad Shah and Begum Mumtaz.”
“Incredible!” I exclaimed when I heard the whole story.
“Yes,” said Shahbano. “Life is stranger than fiction in our village.”
“Did the village women know about this contrivance?” I asked.
“Yes,” Shahbano laughed. “Many were active collaborators. They had to explain Fatu’s sudden departure and reappearance in the village.”
The village women did not abandon Fatu. When she returned from the town she was much weakened and her breasts ached horribly. They fomented her breasts and declared to all and sundry that she had been possessed by a Djinn and was a Holy Woman. They built a seat of bricks and cement for her to sit on by the village well under an old banyan tree. Now Fatu sits there all day, leaning against soft pillows, surrounded by children and visiting men and women, who come to her for solace and blessings. They bring her food and leave coins and rupee notes for her in a tin cup embedded in the ground. Fatu plays with the coins sometimes, but sometimes she gets tired of sitting and tries to walk away. The women gently bring her back again. When she has to go to the fields, one woman leads her there, washes her, and brings her back to her seat. By sunset Aai returns and takes her home along with the nazrana—the offering—jingling in the cup.
“So the village women are pretending that she is possessed by the Djinn?” I asked.
“No,” said Shahbano. “They really believe she is God’s woman, an Allah-wali. For them she is not beyond, but above, Reason and therefore pure and sinless.”
I was confused. While the brave new world had so little to offer Fatimah, the old superstitious one could still make room for her!
Shahbano reflected sadly. “At least for the time being. . . . What will happen to her eventually no one can really foretell. She is restless and fidgets all the time. Sometimes she bays like an angry wolf. In her condition, perhaps the best hope is an early menopause. Aging would be bliss for her. Then she can walk around in the reeds as freely as she used to before all this happened.”
“Aging is bliss for every woman in our part of the world,” I muttered. “Perhaps then people will stop talking about her ‘morals.’”
Shahbano smiled.
“Till then,” I added, “a kind of solution has been invented by these daughters of Aai.”
I meet them sometimes when I visit my sister. Early in the morning you can see them in their colorful dresses, streaming out of their shanty huts like so many fluttering butterflies, crossing over the bridge on the canal, jumping over small shrubs, picking flowers to sell in the market, reaping grass, hoeing the fields, separating the chaff from the corn, singing at their work, tying innumerable bundles, large or small.
This story would have become great in the hands of Leo Tolstoy. He was a great writer. What difference does it make that before turning to religion for redemption and taking up the toilsome life of a cobbler to replicate Jesus Christ, he had sexually exploited a serf woman in his house, made her pregnant, and abandoned her, completely destroying her life? On this subject he has written a heartrending novel, which is now a world classic.