The Woman Who Became Her Own Husband

Can you be one and the same person at the same time? … Maybe a person gets better by just letting herself be who she is.

—Ingmar Bergman, Persona

In my life nothing of the sort happened that, I can say, was unusual or was something that might not have happened to you—except the tale I am going to tell.

In the early ’90s, when I used to run a grocery store in the neighbourhood, a new family arrived to rent the vacant first floor in the popular Khan Sojourn at Jawahar Nagar. The Sojourn was across the link road, exactly opposite my shop. In the vicinity of the Lal Chowk market hub of Srinagar city, Jawahar Nagar was one of the buzzing neighbourhoods where people from farther villages of Kashmir would come to take refuge as tenants. The insurgency movement was more active in villages and the people would frequently become targets of Army retaliations. The situation was no good in the city either, but since the city was always on the media radar, and above all it was the city, it attracted students, government employees, blacklisted politicians, and even the ‘wanted’ insurgents from the villages.

I was, I must say, the famed local guide to people seeking houses on rent. I kept the update on all the relinquishments and ‘to-lets’. I knew the rent details, variable facilities, advantages, agreement policies and the temperaments of the owners. I was the trusted custodian of the neighbourhood. So I even kept keys of certain flats, of big houses like Yousuf Villa, Bhat Cottage, Khan Sojourn and many more. Almost all the flat owners and tenants were my regular customers. Some tenants would stay for years, some for several months, some just for a few. Some would vacate their flats without notice and become my absconding debtors for the grocery they would take on credit. I’d become family friends with many of them. Many friendships lasted even years after the tenants were gone. Some grew so attached to my family that now they are the only people who frequently travel down to the city to pay visits to me and my bedridden wife. But of them all, the tenant family I remember the most is the Zargars.

There were only three persons in the Zargar family: Tariq Zargar, his wife Ayesha and his old mother whose name I didn’t know, except the fact that everyone called her Aaapa Ji. Tariq and Ayesha, as I gradually learnt, were married for five years and still trying for a child. The Zargars took the first floor in the Khan Sojourn. I don’t exactly remember whether it was 1991 or 1992, but only that it was a certain year in the early ’90s and the month was February.

Tariq Zargar was a handsome man of medium height and moderate build. He had a sallow face with a smart-looking shot of well-trimmed, boxed beard and his hair parted on a side. It took me a month to notice that he had a congenital defect in his right foot. In order to lift that leg to walk, he had to give a slight flick to it. Yet his pleasant personality overshadowed this small. The most memorable thing about Tariq was not his defective foot but a lively smile he always wore. Tariq was a manager in the Jammu & Kashmir Bank. He had shifted from his native village in south Kashmir’s Islamabad district to Jawahar Nagar, pursuant to his transfer which, to get rid of the volatile situation in his hometown, he had himself volunteered for. He was posted in the Lal Chowk branch of the bank.

Ayesha was a pretty, fair woman, modest and modern and educated. She had lost both her parents in a road accident much before her marriage to Tariq. Her younger sister lived in south Kashmir and was married to a local contractor who lately had lost work to the volatile situation in the village. Soon after his marriage to Ayesha, Tariq’s father had passed away of lung cancer. His two elder brothers had renounced him and their mother. The most interesting thing about Tariq and Ayesha was that their marriage had been an arranged one and despite the fact, they loved each other as if they had been in love since childhood. Ayesha was a homemaker.

It took the Zargars only a few days to gel with me. Tariq would address me as Haji saeb, even when I hadn’t yet gone for Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Each time he came down for candles or curd or biscuits or bread or eggs or cigarettes, we chatted about the turmoil in his village and the situation in the city.

My shop faced the verandah of the flat the Zargars had put up in. I observed their movements and came to understand that Tariq and Ayesha were an ideal couple. I had never known as lovely a husband-wife pair as them. With time I was convinced that in that entire neighbourhood, they were an epitome of love. And eventually, the couples among the neighbours and the tenants living on the ground and second floors of Khan Sojourn would in their occasional trifles and family squabbles often refer to Tariq and Ayesha to cite examples of love to each other.

Ayesha regarded me as a father figure and respected me more than my own children did. Early each morning, she would come out on the verandah, lean over the rail topping the grille along its verge, and greet me with a salaam and ask me about my and my family’s well-being. Then she would squat on the verandah, polishing her husband’s black brogues, slant the shoes against the wall in a patch of sunlight to shine. And Tariq would sit in a basket chair—the upper half of his body hidden behind an Urdu newspaper—smoking his morning cigarettes, rustling the paper every now and then, turning the pages, his legs crossing each other. Minutes later, sounds of clanking ladles, sizzling skillets and hissing pressure cookers would come from the gauze door of their kitchen. The smell of fizzling omelettes would waft across the road and reach my shop. An hour later, she would again arrive on the verandah and give one more hard burnish to the sun-glazed shoes. Dressed mostly in a navy blue suit, carrying a briefcase, Tariq would emerge, ready to leave for office. She would help him with his shoes and he would always withdraw and insist that he do the laces himself and that she shouldn’t spoil him like that. But she wouldn’t listen to him and continued with the laces, and all the while he would try to pull his feet away and laugh, and she would laugh back, as if it were a game of tie-my-laces-if-you-can, and she would hold one of his legs, pinch its calf and laugh again, send him screaming and hold the leg steady in the crook of her arm, and he would give up and laugh again.

While dusting the shop, stacking the bricks of bread loaves into a block on the front counter and hanging the net baskets, full of packets of potato chips, on the hooks outside the shop for better display, I’d furtively notice these sweet exchanges between Tariq and Ayesha almost every day. And as soon as they became conscious of my presence, the couple would shyly pull themselves together and donned a serious demeanour. Ayesha would rearrange her dupatta and Tariq would clear his throat, and both would regard me respectfully with the loveliest of smiles. Long after he would disappear at the turn off on the link road and take the main road, she would look fixedly at him. Most often he would forget his wallet and she would loudly call out to me from the verandah and request me to stop him with my finger whistle. He would be about to disappear at the turn off, but he’d stop. She would run out barefooted with his wallet. I’d envy their love and narrate it every day to my wife, expecting to convert her. But nothing would change her and she would still be the same as she always was—grumpy. If I forgot my credits’ account ledger sometimes while leaving for the shop in the morning, my wife would curse my poor memory and endlessly nag me once I’d return home in the evening.

Ayesha’s mother-in-law preferred to live indoors. I rarely saw her come out on the verandah. She would sit in the basket chair for some five minutes or so and slip back into the flat. Around noontime, after spreading Tariq’s washed laundry on the clothesline strung across the verandah, Ayesha would come to my shop to buy vegetables. Every day she would choose a different variety, but potatoes were be a daily affair. ‘Whatever the main dish for dinner, but Tariq saeb has to have French fries. He loves them,’ she would say, picking and choosing the fresh ones.

On certain evenings, Tariq returned carrying plastic bags full of gifts for his wife and his mother. Probably clothes or shoes. Yet before entering Khan Sojourn gates, he would come straight to the shop for his pack of cigarettes. He would also ask for a dozen unwrapped khoya lozenges made from milk and coconut. ‘Ayesha is crazy about them,’ he would say shyly, while taking out the lozenges from the jar on the counter.

One day there was no movement on the verandah, no sounds or smells of cooking came out. I grew curious, and after waiting till afternoon, I worried so much that I pulled the shutter half down and went into Khan Sojourn. I found Ayesha ill, bedridden and restless with high fever. Tariq was dabbing her forehead with a wet cloth, trying to subdue the fever. And the little time I stayed beside her bed solacing her, I heard Tariq countlessly saying bala’i lagai (may your illness shift to me) or zuv wandai (may my life shield you against illness) to her. And each time, she would feebly and shyly respond with ‘don’t say that’. I envied this too. Never in my life had my wife said such things to me. Never had she responded to my ‘bala’i lagai’, however, shyly I had tried to say it to her. Whenever I caught a cold or something, she would blame me for the illness, rather accuse me of being careless with weather; she would curse me for not taking necessary precautions. I would feel more unwell by her constant taunts than by my illness.

One more interesting thing about the couple was that they responded to anyone’s question or query in unison. Both spoke at same time with similar response or answer or opinion or solution, same set of words, same syntaxes in their sentences, and in a similar tone and tenor. It was surprising to see, that though spontaneous, how perfectly matched their thinking was, how perfect the timing of the delivery of their words, how coincidentally their minds worked: simultaneous bargain rates proposed to vendors of blankets; same complaint to the milkman for adding water to milk; equal questions to me, enquiring after my and my family’s well-being.

These things and many more made Tariq and Ayesha an extraordinary couple. Yet fate didn’t seem to like the love between the husband and the wife.

Lately Srinagar had grown intensely turbulent. Day in and day out there were curfews, shutdowns and crossfires between the troops and the insurgents. Many men from Jawahar Nagar had shops or business establishments at Lal Chowk. Offices of several others were situated around the place. One day the neighbourhood folks returned early to their homes from work. They stopped at my shop to tell me that there had been a severe gunfight on Residency Road in Srinagar.

On the verandah, at that unusual hour for people to return home from work, Ayesha too stood, expecting her husband early. Tariq didn’t turn up. As it grew dark, and Ayesha could no longer bear pacing the verandah while waiting for her husband, she came downstairs, her right shoe in the left foot and vice versa. Impatient, she stood outside Khan Sojourn, steadily gazing at the turn off and wringing her hands in restlessness. It grew darker. I shut my shop and joined her at the Sojourn gate, consoling her, and assuring her that her husband was on his way home and he would arrive any minute. Soon, she began enquiring about Tariq’s whereabouts with the returning neighbours. They said that they hadn’t seen him. Moments later, she started asking every unknown passerby about Tariq. I repeated the question each time she asked a stranger about her husband. I did it in order to make it known to the people that she was really worried and not odd. In the greyish darkness, I could not see her anxious face properly, but as a figure in the night she looked gaunt and attenuated. She seemed bereft and cold. I just kept consoling her and promising that Tariq would return. Her eyes were fixed on the turn-off, apparently set on an imaginary, empty shadowy figure in which Tariq was going to appear any second. The shadowy figure remained still empty.

It was quarter to ten in the night, I remember, and the last remnants of returnees were passing, talking about civilian casualties at Lal Chowk. Now she didn’t dare ask any details of any passerby. By now two ladies from the other flats of Khan Sojourn and my wife had joined us in solidarity. It was so cold outside that Ayesha’s teeth would sometimes chatter while talking. Tariq’s mother was silently kneeling over the grille of the verandah. She was well aware of the situation, but vaguely enough not once did she ask us anything. When she was tired of leaning, she sat down on the edge of the verandah, coughing incessantly, intently looking in our direction through her glasses. We could later see only her silhouette there.

My wife went over to Tariq’s mother to console her. And one of the ladies fetched Ayesha’s shawl. I cued her to correct her shoes. In a matter of moments, the three of us, Ayesha, the lady who lived on the ground floor of Khan Sojourn, and I, set out, piercing the pitch-dark cloth of the night with a sharp shaft of torchlight, towards the main road, looking for Tariq. All the way, as we walked quaveringly, all that we heard was barking of dogs and nothing else. Every shop was shuttered, each gate was locked, each house blacked out, each window shut. At a few places, one could only hear a faint hum of families coming from the windows of houses which were close to the main road. To reach Tariq’s office, the Jammu & Kashmir Bank, on Residency Road, we had to cross the Jhelum by boat. And finding a boat at that hour was dead impossible. The river flowed gently near Lal Mandi, the ghat where in daytime boats could be hired to ferry you across. It became impossible to take the longer route because Zero Bridge was very far from Lal Mandi and at that late hour, in that situation in the city, it was very risky too. Another way through Amira Kadal Bridge was the most dangerous. There were several bunkers on the way to Amira Kadal and the biggest of them all was on the bridge itself. We promised Ayesha that we would try again the next morning. I persuaded her, saying that Tariq might have taken refuge somewhere after the encounter. She was reluctant to return home, worry had singed her face. But somehow we managed to take her back to Khan Sojourn. That whole night, my wife and the two neighbourhood ladies stayed back, consoling Ayesha. I returned home. It was just half a dozen houses away from my shop.

Early next morning, the neighbourhood was yet to come to life, when two men on a motorcycle arrived at Khan Sojourn. I was at the gate and the women, leaning over the handrail of the verandah, were intently peeking from above. In a very low voice that couldn’t reach the women, the men asked if anyone by the name of Tariq Zargar lived there. The daunting way this question was asked made my hamstrings melt, and I felt I was crumbling like some fragile tower. A certain spasmodic bowel movement surged up and receded down to the last bit of my gut. I replied in affirmative. The men wanted me to accompany them. Gauging the urgency of the moment, I straddled behind them on the edge of the seat, leaving trails of doubt and uncertainty for the women on the verandah. My heart swelled with foreboding.

As the bike whooshed on the main road, a nippy wind began to take my voice away. The cold wind stung my eyes. It began to dry my face up. Two trails of already drying tears streamed towards my temples, defying gravity in the wind. Tariq was no more, the men announced and quietly rendered me to chew my lips behind them and wince.

The men surmised that Tariq had just left office when the bunker outside it was attacked, and of all the passersby present around, he was the only one unable to run for his life. The only person on my mind now was Ayesha. Not Tariq. He quickly faded out of my mind with the news of his death. The only thought nagging at me was a question: what will she do now?

Soon I found myself in the small, mud-plastered mortuary of the Srinagar Police Control Room.

Tariq looked like he were sleeping. His well-ironed, striped grey suit had absorbed the blood that had oozed out of his body. Both his legs had bullets in them and one had sunk into his neck. I signed some paper and immediately took charge of the body. It was placed in a large blue police truck. As the truck neared its destination, my gut began to rumble with fear. But when the chaos of a sloganeering crowd loomed in the distance, I heaved a sigh of relief. The news had already hit the neighbourhood. Khan Sojourn was abuzz with angry protestors. I thanked God for sparing me the task of being the first person to break the tragic news to the neighbourhood and above all, to Ayesha.

Ayesha drowned in a river of women. As the truck trundled, reversing close to the house, I could hear a faded wail thicken and roar at the sight of the visible dead body in the back of the truck. It took me a while to spot my wife. She seemed struggling with Ayesha who was hidden behind a wall of women. I thanked God for not being able to spot Ayesha because I didn’t want to see her and I wished I hadn’t known her. I imagined her in many ways. Crying or laughing or slapping herself, beating her chest, pulling her hair or shocked into silence. I couldn’t see Tariq’s mother at all. For sometime I had forgotten her.

I busied myself with the elders from the neighbourhood, making necessary arrangements to carry the body to Tariq’s hometown, sixty kilometres away from Srinagar. The wails and protests grew louder each minute, and the loudest around noon, when Tariq’s brothers, their wives and Ayesha’s sister arrived. And it was then that I spotted Ayesha. Surprisingly, she looked normal. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The neighbourhood women, my wife, Ayesha’s sister and her sisters-in-law were begging her to cry, but she didn’t react. Finally, I found Tariq’s mother; she was bareheaded, with not a trace of tear in her eyes, but only wailing. And her wailing sounded more like grumbling. There was a fresh wound on her forehead, a slanting slash surrounded by a crust of gore. Perhaps she had banged her head against something hard and sharp. Women were applying turmeric paste to her forehead.

Later that afternoon, quickly after the zuhar prayer, a caravan of small trucks and buses was loaded with mourners, supporting neighbours and Tariq’s body, and flagged off to Islamabad. We reached in the evening and directly headed to Tariq’s ancestral graveyard in Mattan. The whole village had come down for the funeral. Just after the burial and fateha, we paid a visit to Tariq’s house to assess the situation. The evening was relentlessly turning into night. My wife and a few more from the neighbourhood of Jawahar Nagar stayed back with Tariq’s wife and his family. Some fellows from my neighbourhood and I returned home around midnight, crossing a dozen identification parades on the way. There was no cell phone then and landline, too, was rare, so I couldn’t inform my wife about my reaching back safely.

Early next morning, I made another long journey to pay a visit to Tariq’s bereaved family. All the way, in my mind, I turned over a load of many memories of Tariq and Ayesha.

This time I could see Ayesha closely, yet I couldn’t dare say a word of consolation. She looked normal as usual, but completely silent. I could only put my hand on her head and she didn’t even glance at me. Tariq’s mother was still grumbling tearlessly and the wound on her head was now an angry clot. A sing-song dirge continuously resonated in the house full of mourners. A hall was packed with Tariq’s friends and colleagues from the bank. Later that afternoon, my wife and I returned to Srinagar, not speaking a word but heaving deep sighs all the way.

The locked flat in Khan Sojourn, its barren verandah and the potatoes and khoya lozenges in my shop began to haunt me. The whole neighbourhood in Jawahar Nagar was disturbed by Tariq’s death, recounting and stoking anecdotes about the lovely relationship Tariq and Ayesha had shared. Many began to believe that their relationship was so exceptionally beautiful that it couldn’t resist falling prey to an evil eye.

On the ritualistic ‘fourth’, and the last, day of mourning, we paid another visit to the bereaved family. This time it was strange to see Ayesha. Silent, though, she didn’t stay put but paced here and there in the room, where people had come to pay condolences, limping exactly the way Tariq did. At first I thought she was relaxing a tingled leg or so. Then I thought she had injured it. But the relatives said that her leg was all right. We left, befuddled. On the way to Srinagar, my wife made several wild guesses about the limping, but we still couldn’t get it.

A week later, I was surprised to see Ayesha back in her Sojourn flat. She was accompanied by her sister and a few other women I hadn’t seen before. I was pleased to see her, but it was also strange to find her the same way as I had seen her on the last day of mourning. I learnt from her sister that she was still in shock, and bringing her back to Srinagar was an experiment to see if the flat and its memories would snap her out of the state. Upon hearing about Ayesha’s return, gradually, the neighbours in Jawahar Nagar began to throng Khan Sojourn. But Ayesha was completely indifferent to everyone.

The next day was more astonishing than ever. She stood on the verandah, leaning on the railing over the grille the way Tariq did, smoking a cigarette exactly in his style. Standing in the same posture and in the same manner as that of Tariq, she greeted me in a man’s tone. Some days later, I saw her hair cut like Tariq’s. She paced the verandah, limping like Tariq. The ladies quietly watched her, crying behind her back. An hour later, she came down limping towards my shop and stood across the counter just like Tariq used to, asking for khoya lozenges. Taking out the lozenges from the jar on the counter, she said shyly: ‘Ayesha is crazy about them.’

The ladies in the flat tried their best to keep her indoors because day by day Ayesha was turning into a spectacle for the neighbourhood. Another day, I found her dressed in Tariq’s navy-blue suit, smoking a cigarette just like him, wearing his pair of brogues, carrying his leather briefcase, limping down the lane for ‘office’.

A fortnight might have passed and then one morning, while opening my shop, I found a big load carrier parked outside Khan Sojourn. I went upstairs and saw Ayesha’s sister and the other women packing the belongings of Ayesha and Tariq. Two labourers were loading the items into the truck. Ayesha was inside. Her sister said that it was a coincidence that I had come to see them because she was otherwise going to come to settle the final rent and their account at my shop. I collected the rent and electricity bill and quickly left. In a few hours, the load carrier was chugging to leave. An Ambassador car had already arrived for the ladies. Ayesha’s brother-in-law was sitting beside the driver. With staggering steps, I went to bid farewell to a feverish Ayesha, half dressed in Tariq’s clothes, being seated in the middle of the rear seat. I couldn’t say anything except praying for God’s mercy on her and placing my hand on her head. Ayesha’s sister extracted a promise from me of occasional visits. The flat was empty now and conversations between the labourers began to echo.

A small crowd gathered to bless Ayesha. My wife and some neighbourhood women began to sob and snivel softly.

In the last twenty-three years, my wife and I have visited Ayesha countless times in Islamabad. And on each visit, we found her dressed like Tariq, limping down the lanes, being followed by giggling and curious children. And in these twenty-three years, my wife has responded to my bala’i lagai without fail.