The Nikkah
She bows her head slightly, intent on focusing on the object only a few feet in front of her. Looking at the photo, it could be easy to mistake her for any other Pakistani bride: early twenties, all wearing the same jewelry that was most likely passed down from their mothers, waiting to pass it on to their own child one day. Undoubtedly wearing the color red, blending in with the mehndii imprinted on her skin.1 All of them have a different story to share: only fragments of personality and experiences overlapii amongst the collectivist culture.2 Yet the details are lost, blending together in the herds of brides wearing jhoomar, tikka, and naths. Her name and the date are scribbled on the back of the photo so that when she is expelled from her family home, her mother and father and sisters and brothers have one sense of permanence: the memory of her eyes, the curve on her nose, the way she purses her lips. This is how they will remember her: a flash of a bride, a wife, a girl now becoming a woman, and inevitably, a mother.
She was one of the luckier ones. I had access to her name. Her family's wealth gave them access to a camera, the documentation of the ghost soon to be reincarnated into one of the five boroughs.
The dupatta draped over her headiii for the entire ceremony.3 I may have been able to catch a glimpse of her face if I went back in time and insisted she lift her chin. She hears shrill laughter all around her, but a deeper laugh stands out, sitting directly on her right. She resists the urge to look up at him. Her mother, sisters, cousins, and neighbors have been peeking at him, making remarks about his looks, work, and family.
Did you see the Baraat? He came with horses.
So pyaara, his skin is so saaf.
She has not yet seen any of it, however. She has seen as much of the groomiv and his life as we see of her in this photo.4 Without a name, or maybe another photo, we would be trapped in the oblivion which is the fate of a minority woman.
The Nikkahv is over now, and her dupatta lays at the back of her head.5 Her head remains low, averting her gaze from all cameras. She can't let her family or community think she's pleased to be married, or shipped off to another family. She knows that after this night, she will not see her family for years to come.vi In a world where unmarried Pakistani women smell of dhai and daal in the morning, it will smell forever of chaat, the house of her in-laws.6 She knows that this is the singular day when she can express her emotions before the rhuksati. Raw aluminum is dropped into her lake of emotions. It simmers deep in plunging water until the pressure of its decomposition bursts higher than the Steamboat. She cries that day because she is allowed to without consequences. Her family goes up in turns, giving her bites of ladoo and gulab jamun. When it is her sister's turn to feed her, she feels a shard of glass slip into her handvii while no one is looking.7 She can't help but divulge her curiosities, to see if the words of her family and friends are true about her new family. She angles it to see her groom for the first time, the archetype of all that is destined to take over the lives and existence of Pakistani girls. She felt what thousands of girls felt before her: the feeling of a boulder laying on her chest, and the feeling of another falling deep into the abyss of her stomach.
She is defined now by her husband's first name, here in Karachi, and later by her husband's last name,viii in the land-to-be.8 Not that she knows that. She will be spaghettified when she arrives, losing her spirit to the gravitational pull of surname customs. Her name will no longer be a luxury that is afforded. Her only remains left to be studied would be the tidal disruption events from the black hole that elongated the stars.
Enmeshment
“No people can live off of flowers, nor gain strength and robustness by devotion to beauty. No people can get their living and build themselves up by refined style and glittering fashion, or addiction to harmonies, colors, and delights that please the senses.” 9
She despised the propensity of excess, of desiring too much. It was the activity of reckless American women who excused passion for vulgar pleasures. It demanded a higher imagination for those who didn’t require practicality as an awakening for survival. That was all a lie, she knew. A misstep that would lead to her plunging into the entrapment that she had once secretly hoped for: an opportunity for sensory experiences that consumed her, free of tragic moral bindings that adhered to her domestic duties. Her times for sarees and shalwar vanished the minute she stepped foot on foreign land.
Conformed through appearance, she concealed also the deep emotions that stirred in her chest, pressuring them into her bones. Yet the contempt she felt toward the excessive would momentarily get lost in her admiration for Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan. She wondered what it was like to be her, to be airily dressed in the mesh and layers of a flying saree in the wind, to travel to Farâfra and have the softness of her skin and the thickness of her hair to be flaunted on screen. In this, she could not think about her life at all, but rather, imagined the glamor and appeals, transported into grand palaces, and conjured promises of contentedness. It was the opposite of staying in the 18.6 square-meter studio she was confined to,ix one square foot for each person her duties carried her to.10 She felt exhausted in the cramped rooms of Brinkerhoff Avenue, pretending to be satiated, so resigned to her life that gratefulness no longer came to reason. She yearned to be free of the burdens in all ways except for the privacies of her mind. It was the only thing she never envied about Kajol.
As the image dissolved and reality set back in, she realized she had only been 600 kilometers away from Farâfra on her honeymoon. She never looked back on it as if they were her memories. She was always another person in another place, reminiscing on a young woman with a minuscule gleam in her eye rather than the blank blink that came with the city of dreams.
In a flash of self-value that was less––not a woman that is herself, now a Paki, or a lonesome thing that lacked the independent womanhood she craved but also the steel rod of emotional connection that once grounded her. She gave herself to these excessive imaginations, but in a singular, unassailable moment, it was crushed down to her pelvis by the fears of actuality in her mind, and replaced by a sensory imagination that was not excessive, but achievable. The bridge from destitution to wealth was not a foolish ideology. She began to build it with an arch; things with no ability to bend tend to break, releasing their burdensome load to another painful abyss. She bent her very existence so that her coming out of destitution could give her space. Space was the achievable imagination in her drive. With space, she could separate herself from the inescapable encirclements of disaster that posed themselves in her studio,x if only by meters.11 Even with the hostile stench of trash cluttering the streets, the rackety voices lugging through the cracks within her establishment, and overcrowding down to her portion of the 18.6 square meters, space was achievable––and not just in the prospects of what he could offer her, but what she would do for herself.
The Legacy of Intergenerational Trauma
Never say the name Bin Laden. They start off all nice: “Except when they can’t pronounce your name, and so they change it for you, calling you Joe instead of Jawed, Bell instead of Belqeesa. Except when they mixed up your races and ignore it when you tried to correct them. Except when they thought Bin Laden was your grandpa. Wallah. There’s nothing funnier in the world than when they ask you where your grandpa’s hiding, so that they can go kill him, thinking that's supposed to make you mad that they want to kill Bin Laden. Sometimes they'll act like they're joking, or like you're in on the joke with them, but, sometimes, after they're done laughing, it's like they're standing there, looking at you, not saying anything, like they're actually waiting for you to tell them where Bin Laden is. So that they can go and kill him.” 12
I’ve never been insulted in the streets, but my daughter has. White boys and girls that make suicide jokes and mimic bomb threats. She went to school in an area where they still put up confederate flags. Not that she has any specific attachment to it. But it's the principle of its existence within a space that is supposed to be her home. But I know Paki’s like us always get put in the same different category. Oppressed. Terrorist. Sand n*****. It’s not good enough to explain to your children the world and your world inside it. They find it soon enough, in all its angles of confined opportunities.
How do you explain to your children that the White man is the only thing that stands between them and their future? You don’t. Their tree of supremacy will continue to grow in arrogance and ignorance. All you can do is water the roots of yours, and find that yours makes it further in the end.
It was better to withhold the stories and say nothing about what the world could do to you. If you keep your shell on tight, and your head down low, no one will notice you. No one notices a turtle, not until they’ve already made it past the finish line, shocked that something that had never been worthy of attention before had already made it. Then they will try to hurt you in open rebellion, but it won’t matter anymore. You learned the secret of the quiet insurgency, the soft chipping of the bricks until there were none left, nothing but the space you had ached for so long. You learned to maneuver in silence long enough to know when to say your name aloud, your face printed abroad, and as a result, have your power thrive within the social upheaval of succeeding as the other.
Inspiration
In her counter-narrative, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, Saadiya Hartman made use of “a vast range of archival materials” to recreate the voices of young Black women and “inhabit the intimate dimensions” of their lives at the turn of the twentieth century.13 Hartman accomplishes this by using her primary modes of writing: weaving together archival research, the investigation of the archival documentation, and critical fabulation, a semi-fiction that attempts to resurface suppressed stories through research of archives and scattered facts. She utilizes these truncated archives to illuminate the rebellious, anarchist lives of ordinary African-American women who have been so neglected that their stories are borderline unimaginable. In a world that always writes about the Caucasian, ethnocentric, and privileged perspective, their abundance of longevity-filled stories was told in brief flashes, “unfit to be written in history and destined to be minor figures.”14 Connecting the bridge between history and imagination, Hartman attempts to assemble a “richer picture of social upheaval that transformed Black social life”15 from city to city where the African-American populace was growing in search of better lives than their ancestors. She emphasizes the “wild” idea that young Black women were radical thinkers who imagined better ways to live while being hegemonized through White legal authorities and social reforming institutions. Adding elements of fiction to her archives allows Hartman to speculate true African-American rebelliousness critically. In combination with her unorthodox analysis of the criminalization of Black women who acted against heteronormative “outsiders who fail to capture it,” Hartman revives the glimpse of the “terrible beauty” that is all the ways Black women “create life and make bare need into an arena of elaboration.”16 Instead of giving into popularized presentations of African American women who are sanctioned by conforming to White standards and succeed using Caucasian morals despite them, Hartman calls these Black female characters “rebellious” by focusing on their new goals and new means of Deviance Typology. By anchoring young Black women's untold nonconformity, she defines the “other,” beautiful and experimental way to live that does not include White main cultural customs.
Reflection
In my critical fabulation, I used Hartman as my inspiration. As known minority figures,
South Asian people are underrepresented in modern-day society. Muslim South Asians face even more marginalization due to being further removed from the core of narration, or Caucasian ethnocentric perspectives. This allows generations of lives to be tainted by racism and Islamophobia, a story never told from the perspective of the self and only the "other." This prospect continues to constrict when considering Muslim South Asian women, who have been deemed too unsuitable and unworthy to be documented throughout history, whether in writing or photography. A hegemonized way of life is demanded of women, and they face ostracization if cultural and religious conformity does not occur. Pakistani weddings embody this idea, often arranged by parents on behalf of the woman. Since women’s lives were still centered around domestication (either from their parents, in-laws, or spouse), marrying a man signified a turning point of importance for the woman’s life, which ultimately began as a new chapter for immigrant assimilation and spousal and parental adulthood. I focused my critical fabulation around these ideas, divided into three parts, using my mother's wedding photos as a primary source.
A part of Pakistani culture regards insubordination and tribulations to avoid any sense of imperfection, which is profoundly taboo. Ultimately, the voids in the tales of Pakistani women are refutably untold from the external world as well as self-inflicted restraints. The Partition of India in 1947 has particularly encouraged this unhealthy mode of repressed narratives and indirectly affects Muslim Pakistani Americans to this day. As a result, their transformation for new goals had to appear in a muted insurgency, finding a balanced scale between cultural anchoring and experimental risks in the new world (India to Pakistan and, later, Pakistan to the United States). Therefore, their fate is then harbored through generations of oral traditions, passing on shreds of anecdotes until all the components are inevitably lost or forgotten. Within my critical fabulation, I attempted to gain historical integrity, combining oral tradition passed within my own family, archival research found in Pakistani documents, and peer-reviewed research articles. A formal interview with my mother, with a mix of specific experiences, influenced my writing. By unraveling the intricacies and multidimensional stories, I attempt to bridge the crevice between cultural knowledge, storytelling, intuition, and factual evidence to portray the life of Pakistani women without the stereotypes of Western views.
Works Cited
Asad and Bina Ahmed’s Wedding Ceremony in Karachi, Pakistan. January 30, 1986. Photograph. Author's personal collection.
Ahmed, Bina. Personal Interview. November 20, 2022.
Critelli, Filomena M. “Between Law and Custom: Women, Family Law and Marriage in Pakistan.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 43, no. 5 (2012): 673–93. Accessed November 17, 2022. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23267840.
Hartman, Saadiya V. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social
Upheaval. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Husain, Yusuf Jamal. “The Story of a Wedding in Pakistan.” Asian Folklore Studies 26, no. 1 (1967): 119–27. Accessed November 17, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/1177702.
Kochai, Jamil Jan. 99 Nights in Logar. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.