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Sadika's Way

A Novel of Pakistan and America

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Her name was supposed to be Sadik, and she was supposed to be a boy. Her parents, Akbar Khan and Bilqees Beebee, had done everything humanly possible to ensure the right sex before she was even conceived. The name Sadik had been placed along with heartfelt prayers at strategic places in the Koran. And before and throughout her pregnancy Bilqees Beebee had been adorned with special amulets from various holy places.

As soon as he heard the good news of his wife's pregnancy, Akbar Khan arranged for a special pilgrimage to Daataa Darbaar Lahore, the final resting place of one of the holiest men ever to live in the sub-continent, Daataa Ganj Baksh. Once there, he prayed for an entire day, eyes closed, head bent, hands outstretched; at times demanding aloud that the spirit of the great Daataa grant him his dearest wish. For extra insurance, he pledged that if a son were born he would give the poor a daeg, a special twenty-gallon cauldron of food.

To cap it all, every month during the last two trimesters of pregnancy, all the pious ladies of the neighborhood had come to the small Khan home to pray as a group for a son for the family.

It was all in vain.

Sadika — as she was called, since no one wanted to waste energy thinking up a more appropriate name for a girl-child — was born on a cold winter day in 1969 in Jogiapur, a remote village near Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, to the accompaniment of her mother's hysterics and threats of suicide.

She was the third daughter born to Bilqees Beebee. The first two had not survived, but evidence was mounting that Bilqees Beebee was incapable of bearing sons, which would make her no more worthy of respect than a barren woman. After the high hopes and expectations of her pregnancy, she found herself on the bottom rung of the womanhood ladder.

Even worse, it had been such a long, horrendous labor that Bilqees Beebee thought of doing something drastic to herself. After twenty exhausting, painful hours, as the mother's strength ebbed away, there was still no sign of the baby. Some village elders convened and decided that the only hope of a successful delivery was to frighten Bilqees Beebee's body into doing what it was apparently incapable of accomplishing on its own.

In accordance with the advice of Fakeer Baabaa, the wisest of men, the top two marksmen of the village were summoned to Bilqees Beebee's bedside with their guns. There, as they had been instructed, they fired shots into the air as close to her head as was safely possible, scaring her out of her wits.

She had scarcely had time to recover from the noise, and another contraction was coming on, when the well-meaning villagers administered yet another shock. Dressed in rags and looking as though they had freshly arisen from a muddy grave, an elderly man and woman appeared from nowhere. Fixing their fierce gaze upon her, they began speaking to her in the voices of long-dead ancestors. "Shame on you, girl, for making us come from the dead to do your task for you. You dared to disturb our peace and we are upset. Have that baby at once so we can go back to the quiet of our graves. Otherwise get ready to face the consequences."

When the terrified Bilqees Beebee did not respond, they furiously repeated their command. "Do it now, so we don't have to come back as evil spirits and inhabit your body to make you do it!"

God only knew whether her ancestral ghosts had a hand in it, but after the next few strong contractions, Bilqees Beebee was convinced that her dead ancestors were making good on their promise to take up residence in her body, and were painfully clawing their way out from the inside. Thus Sadika made her debut into the world.

Just as Bilqees Beebee was losing consciousness, she heard her mother-in-law Maanjee say contemptuously, "It's only a girl. A scrawny ugly one at that. One would have thought that after all that carrying-on, she was giving birth to at least one son, if not two."

To Bilqees Beebee, every one of the newborn's cries seemed to sound more and more like the music that would accompany her husband's second wedding. She knew very well that after this reproductive disaster, no one would could possibly object to Akbar Khan marrying a woman with a uterus more favorable to the conception of sons, if he chose to do so. Perhaps he had already told his mother of his intentions, she thought, as she lay distraught. Maanjee certainly appeared to be carefully assessing every young woman of marriageable age in the group gathered around the new mother's bed.

Bilqees Beebee did not realize that it was all a charade; that the vindictive old woman was well aware of her daughter-in-law's fears and was having the time of her life playing on them. It was not often that she had the opportunity to enjoy such power. Bilqees Beebee heard Maanjee ask about Akhtar Khatoon's two daughters: "How are dear Sughra and Kubra? I always tell my daughters and everyone that the home those two marry into is going to sparkle like polished silver." Bilqees Beebee knew that their mother was upset because these two girls were not yet married.

It was therefore not surprising that Bilqees Beebee refused even to look at the baby or nurse her, let alone think of an appropriate name for her, since that would only make the child's presence more real. She would be a permanent fixture in the household, a constant reminder that Bilqees Beebee was a miserable failure at the only major task that society had assigned to women like her: the production of a son.

"Keep that ill-fated creature away from me!" she would cry in a high- pitched voice, if she so much as caught sight of the baby. The small mob of women surrounding her, relatives and neighbors, would try to calm her down, while the younger girls lingering outside the room giggled. This was the most entertaining event in their village since the fair had come through nearly a year ago.

Akbar Khan did what he could to help create the illusion of a crisis. By nature quiet and passive, he was doing his best to play the part of a man who had been wronged. As it was, he felt burdened with the responsibility of having to marry off his two sisters, Gul Fatima and Taj Fatima. And now his burden was heavier still with the arrival of yet another female. However, he was not a very good actor and his fits of temper were unconvincing and caused more amusement than terror.

"I will murder both those females with my bare hands and throw their bodies in the woods for wild animals to feed on!" he shouted menacingly, trying to imitate the volatile hero of the Punjabi movie that had been running in the neighboring outdoor village theatre set up by the Gilleet Company. Unfortunately for him, everyone had seen that movie, some more than once. How could they not have? It was the talk of the town for more than three weeks. It became an even juicier topic of conversation when the mullahs of the local mosques met to discuss the social effect of this outrageous film, which they declared reflected a conspiracy by the West to infect the rest of the world with its sinful ways.

"Today they are promoting the clean-shaven look of the West; tomorrow they will promote their corrupt morality," the head mullah of the biggest mosque of the area had said in his sermon just last week after the Friday prayers.

"Otherwise, why would they be offering free razors with a month's free supply of razor blades? They are not your uncles from either your father's side or your mother's side. People! If you do not want your wives and daughters to end up walking half-naked in the streets and your young people to produce children out of wedlock, you had better boycott the Gilleet movie and forbid your families to view it. Any man who does not do so is not a man at all, but a jackal with his tail tucked between his legs, and an ostrich with his head buried in sand!"

People tried not to laugh whenever Akbar Khan said something that sounded like the movie hero. This was even better than the Gilleet movie, in which the hero, after shaving his chin with a gleaming Gilleet blade and mounting a white horse to track down the villain, roared ominously, "Let my woman go, or I will break both your scrawny legs like toothpicks and throw them out with the rest of your puny body for wild animals to snack on!"

Fortunately Sadika seemed to thrive without much nurturing or warmth from her parents. Her mother's hostility and her father's apathy seemed only to make her stronger. In the years that followed, she grew like a hardy weed, despite the increasing number of household chores and baby-sitting duties thrust upon her. She did not seem to be adversely affected by poverty, by childhood infections, or even by neglect.

In April of 1974, when the family of Akbar Khan moved to Islamabad, Sadika, five years old, had three siblings: Asghar Khan, a boy of four, and two girls, Zafary, three, and Sajida, two. Bilqees Beebee was now called "Khanum" by her neighbors in Gulmushk Mohalla. Akbar Khan had been allotted a small home there by the government because he had secured a job as a chaprasee, a kind of gofer, at a local federal office. While his family was preparing to leave Jogiapur to join him, he had moved into the new house by himself. When several of his new neighbors learned that he was a Khan, and married with four children, they had invariably asked, "So when is your Khanum coming to join you?"

By the time Bilqees Beebee arrived with her children, she had become Khanum in everyone's mind. She certainly did not object to that. The name "Khanum" was so much more sophisticated than "Bilqees Beebee." Besides, it was the last name of the country's most popular ghazal singer, Farida Khanum, and it implied that she was an equal partner to Akbar Khan, something that greatly pleased her. In fact, she liked it so much that after a while she asked her husband and children, too, to call her Khanum.

Sadika and her sisters Zafary and Sajida were at this time thin, wiry little girls. Although they were not weaklings, they did not brim with health like their brother Asghar. In actual fact, Asghar was nearly obese, because Khanum considered him her salvation. The girls were simply a drain, because dowries had to be accumulated for them and their reputations protected if they were to make acceptable matches. Thus, Asghar was his mother's only strength, the sole balm that could keep her marriage intact and preserve her status. Naturally, she wanted more boys.

Each time she had given birth to a girl, Khanum had been plunged into deep depression. "God!" she would rage after the Isha prayers, sitting on her prayer mat, hands outstretched, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Why are you punishing me this way? Don't you realize what a living hell my life will become if I can't bear at least two sons? Akbar Khan will surely get a second wife. We're barely able to feed ourselves now, so tell me, how can I be expected to survive?"

Asghar's was the only name which was left as originally planned. "Sadik" had had to be turned into Sadika, "Zafar" into Zafary and "Sajid" into Sajida. Now it was Asghar, apparently destined to be the only son, who would have to compensate for all the grief Khanum would unquestionably have to suffer from her daughters. Perhaps the bride she selected for him would provide a sizable dowry to help compensate for some of her losses.

How she wished that she belonged to one of the families in the frontier region, where instead of the girl's family providing a dowry, the boy's family had to pay the girl's family a large sum of money at the time of marriage. Then she would already have been ahead of the game. The prettier, younger and more innocent the girl, the bigger the dowry that could be demanded. And Sadika, Zafary and Sajida were not bad-looking. Families with many pretty girls to marry off had actually gotten rich. But since unfortunately that was not the custom where Khanum lived, she lavished all her maternal affection on Asghar, the only one of her offspring who had any material value.

Sadika, Zafary and Sajida envied Asghar's special treatment, but they were resigned to it. In fact, it seemed to them to be the way things were meant to be. They saw often the disappointment of neighbors who had just given birth to daughters, and the jubilation that greeted the birth of sons. They heard the women, including their own mother, commiserating with the aggrieved wife, telling her in detail about their own many disappointments in having produced girls. "Behen, sister, I know just how you feel," Khanum would say. "I've gone through this myself. God must be testing you: to some people he sends sickness and disease; to some, money problems; and to others, daughters to raise. But everyone has to have their share of misery in this world."

The only time the three sisters had thanked God for making them female was when, at the age of four, Asghar was circumcised. It was the first big occasion their family had celebrated after moving to Islamabad. But it was not the festivities that Sadika, Zafary and Sajida remembered. They sat huddled together outside his room in the tiny courtyard, frightened out of their wits by the little boy's terrible screams. It sounded to them as though Asghar was being slowly tortured to death. They thought their turn would come next: if the tip of a boy's penis was superfluous, maybe some of their female parts were equally disposable.

They felt enormous relief when they learned that only boys had to go through this ghastly ordeal. Relief even enhanced the taste of the delicious yellow dessert that Akbar Khan and Khanum had bought to be distributed in Gulmushk Mohalla to celebrate the joyous occasion. Their beloved son was well on his way to manhood. Once there, he would provide them with comfort and strength in their old age — unlike the daughters, who would weaken them and age them prematurely.

Asghar's elevated status in the household was very evident in the responsibilities and privileges given to the four children. While the three girls, even little Sajida, were kept busy with cooking, cleaning, sewing and other chores, Asghar was free to roam the streets of Gulmushk Mohalla, to play stickball, wrestle, and fly kites with other boys. "My boy is more masculine than three neighborhood boys put together," Khanum often commented with satisfaction when Asghar limped home with disheveled hair, torn clothes and skinned knees.

The girls started each day with a breakfast of thick wheat bread and strong tea sweetened with solid sugarcane juice, while they cast envious glances at Asghar, who was eating cream mixed with pure cane sugar given him every morning by his doting mother. They could never openly look at Asghar while he was eating, because it upset Khanum. "Don't cast evil eyes at my son, bastard females, or he will lose his appetite!" she would shout, hastily putting an old towel or sheet around the boy to shield him from invisible harm. "If he's not strong enough, who will take care of me when I am old? Your husbands?"

Even meals were planned around Asghar's activities. Khanum subscribed to the popular belief that one's daily diet should correspond to the part of the body that would be used most that day. If one were going to do mental work, he should eat calf or goat brains; if he wanted to excel as an athlete, he should be served the legs of chickens or goats. Since Khanum wanted Asghar to be better than everyone else physically as well as mentally, all brains and legs were always reserved for him, leaving his sisters to fantasize about how delicious they must be. Why couldn't they have just a taste, they wondered. After all, they helped with most of the cooking.

At dinner, while Asghar polished off roast chicken thighs and drumsticks, the three girls ate gravy flavored with chicken feet and other scraps of leftover meat. Asghar devoured calf brains in a gravy with fresh coriander leaves, and the girls were given soup made of the calf's skull bones.

The second largest portion of food went to Akbar Khan. Khanum usually ate with the girls in the kitchen, sharing leftovers with them. She was not as hungry as they were, since she did considerable sampling when she cooked. She did not of course admit that. "You should learn to be content with what you get," she frequently told the girls. "When you're married, you'll have to make sure that your family is fed before you think about yourselves."

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Excerpted from Sadika's Way by Hina Haq. Copyright © 2004 Hina Haq. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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