And the World Changed (19 page)

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.

MEETING THE SPHINX

Rukhsana Ahmad

Rukhsana Ahmad (1948– ) was born in Karachi, attended schools in many Pakistani cities, and earned degrees at Punjab University and at Karachi University. After marrying, she migrated to Britain and earned further degrees from Reading University and The University of the Arts.

Ahmad is a novelist and playwright. She has also translated into English a volume of women's protest poetry in Urdu,
We Sinful Women
(Women's Press, 1991), and an Urdu novel,
The One Who Did Not Ask
by Altaf Fatima (Heinemann, 1993). In 1984 she joined The Asian Women Writers Collective in London. Her short stories have been anthologized extensively. She has published a novel,
The Hope Chest
(Virago, 1996), and is working on her second,
Sins
. She is particularly well known for her many plays, including the recent
Mistaken . . . Annie Besant in India
(Aurora Metro Publications, 2007), and for her work adapting plays by other writers for BBC Radio, such as Jean Rhys's
Wide Sargasso Sea
, Nawal El Saadawi's
Woman at Point Zero
, Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children
, and Nadeem Aslam's
Maps for Lost Lovers
. These have achieved nominations and short lists for many prestigious British awards, including the Commission of Racial Equality Award, the Writers' Guild Award, the Sony Award, and the 2002 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. To promote Asian women playwrights, in 1990 she cofounded the Kali Theatre Company in London with actor Rita Wolf. She is the chair and founding trustee of the South Asian Arts and Literature in the Diaspora Archive in the United Kingdom (
www.salidaa.org.uk
), and an advisory fellow for the Royal Literary Fund at Queen Mary's College, University of London.

“Meeting the Sphinx” challenges the certainties of British narratives around notions of “academic objectivity.” The resentment that Sam, a distinguished white British Egyptologist, harbors against Happy Dossa, an Asian woman colleague, illuminates structures of race, class, and gender in British academia. Ahmad's story specifically challenges many assumptions in David Mamet's play
Oleanna
(1993), which revolves around a university professor accused of sexual harassment by his female student, Ahmad says,

               
Understandably, Happy reminds Sam of Oleanna but my story is an attempt to avoid the somewhat stark polarities of the play. It was prompted by a student lockout following a long-running dispute between leftists and fascists on a campus in North London. The row was reported in the press briefly. Despite that subject matter it is not a story about campus politics but an exploration of the roots of prejudice and our encounters with the Other.

                     
I thought I was writing about our own hesitation
in dealing with someone like Happy whom we cannot place easily in terms of social or racial geographies. Although Sam and Happy echo similar power relationships to the duo in the play I do believe Happy is not in the least like Oleanna, who, in fact, symbolizes rather well the Western liberal's paranoiac vision of a feminist (“harpy”) with access to real campus power through her political machinations. For me, that play was a landmark in the turning of the tide against “political correctness.” Attacks like that soon became a convenient way of undermining the women's movement and union power. Hopefully, the tide will turn again one day.