The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan

by Rafia Zakaria

Overview

A memoir of Karachi through the eyes of its women

An Indies Introduce Debut Authors Selection 
 
For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country’s former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi—Bhutto’s birthplace and Pakistan’s other great metropolis—Rafia Zakaria’s family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her Uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death. In that moment these twin catastrophes—one political and public, the other secret and intensely personal—briefly converged. 
 
Zakaria uses that moment to begin her intimate exploration of the country of her birth. Her Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, escaping the precarious state in which the Muslim population in India found itself following the Partition. For them, Pakistan represented enormous promise. And for some time, Zakaria’s family prospered and the city prospered. But in the 1980s, Pakistan’s military dictators began an Islamization campaign designed to legitimate their rule—a campaign that particularly affected women’s freedom and safety. The political became personal when her aunt Amina’s husband, Sohail, did the unthinkable and took a second wife, a humiliating and painful betrayal of kin and custom that shook the foundation of Zakaria’s family but was permitted under the country’s new laws. The young Rafia grows up in the shadow of Amina’s shame and fury, while the world outside her home turns ever more chaotic and violent as the opportunities available to post-Partition immigrants are dramatically curtailed and terrorism sows its seeds in Karachi.
 
Telling the parallel stories of Amina’s polygamous marriage and Pakistan’s hopes and betrayals, The Upstairs Wife is an intimate exploration of the disjunction between exalted dreams and complicated realities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807080467
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	01/05/2016
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Rafia Zakaria is an author, attorney, and human rights activist who has worked on behalf of victims of domestic violence around the world. She is a columnist for Al Jazeera America, Ms., Dissent, and DAWN, Pakistan’s largest English-language newspaper. Zakaria was born and raised in Karachi and now lives in Pakistan and the United States, where she serves on the board of directors of Amnesty International USA.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter 1: "The Return" 

As we entered this Karachi the easy, smiling contours of my mother’s face pulled tight and then even tighter. She had fought for this, learning to drive just so she could take us to school, to the best schools, insisting that it could be done and that she could do it. For this she had sat awkwardly between my father and my grandfather, arguing her case against their objections. For this she had tolerated our crying chorus, every Monday and Wednesday, when the instructor from the driving school showed up at the door at 9:00 a.m. sharp. For this, she had tolerated the weeks and months of my grandfather Said, insisting that he, who could not himself drive, must nevertheless accompany her on every trip, because a woman, even one with a driver’s license, could not be trusted to drive alone. Her battle to be permitted to drive had not been an easy one.
 
Five years had passed and now she was allowed to drive alone and without my father or grandfather correcting the timing of her turns, the certainty of her navigation. But despite her victory, the descent into this other Karachi, the sweaty, angry, male Karachi, was still my mother’s daily test.
 
Because children never pick the right moment to burst in, I blurted out a question that appeared on the periphery of my mind: “Is Uncle Sohail dead?” My twin brother, Zaid, turned around to glare. I wanted an answer, and so I asked again: “Is Uncle Sohail dead?”
 
My mother did not respond when the light turned green, or at the next light, or as we descended even deeper into the city, onto roads flagged by beggars and hawkers and aimless men hanging around corners. She was quiet as we drove past the row of cinemas, the Capri, the Nishat, the Regal, the Star, past the bloody face of Sylvester Stallone, the jutting hips of a Punjabi actress stilled in midgyration. We passed the electronics market with its unlit neon signs (Hitachi, Sanyo, Toshiba) exposing their wiry entrails.
 
It was only as our car pulled up before my brother’s school that my mother spoke. “No, Uncle Sohail is not dead,” she said in the tiny moment before the gates would shut and leave my brother punished for being tardy. “He is not dead, but it would have been better if he were.”
 
These words, my mild-mannered mother’s wishes for a man’s death, tumbled out behind us, stumbling into our lunch boxes and schoolbooks. I carried them into my classroom, where I took in a lesson on the Indus River valley, where I completed a test on fractions. I said them to myself in recess as I tried to swap my jam sandwich for a carton of fruit juice: “He is not dead, but it would have been better if he were.”

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1
The Return

CHAPTER 2
Birth of a Nation

CHAPTER 3
The Scent of Other Cities

CHAPTER 4
A Suburban Wedding

CHAPTER 5
Half a Wife

CHAPTER 6
The Woman in Charge

CHAPTER 7
The Graveyards of Karachi

CHAPTER 8
Loving and Leaving

CHAPTER 9
A Return to the Original

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Editorial Reviews

"The Upstairs Wife” does manage to cover so much ground so skillfully, casting a sharp eye on complicated personal politics and affairs of state alike."
—New York Times

"The Upstairs Wife weaves emotion, historical fact, and a young person’s wonder at her world into an exquisite tale of patriarchy, conflict, love, hope and hate… The story that unfolds is both memorable and magnificent.”
—CounterPunch

“A dense, carefully rendered work of minute, memorable detail.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“In this emotionally generous, beautifully written memoir, Rafia Zakaria tells two stories that are really the same story. One is the descent of Pakistan into violence, poverty, corruption, and extremist Islam; the other is the smoldering misery of family life in which women have little power, except, sometimes, over each other. The Upstairs Wife is a revelation.”
—Katha Pollitt, poet, essayist, and columnist for The Nation
 
“Rafia Zakaria’s gorgeous prose and brave storytelling transported me into the center of a region I’ve struggled to understand in a way no newspaper article or history book ever could. Better yet, she made me love the women there—their woundedness, their resilience, their uncertain future. The personal and the political collide in this beautiful memoir of Pakistan.”
—Courtney E. Martin, author of Do It Anyway
 
“From a window in the upstairs of her family’s house, Rafia Zakaria parts the curtain, looks down on Pakistan, and writes its history. The Upstairs Wife roams between the lives of a family and the life of a nation—and finds itself in the heart of a society that is much maligned and little understood.”
—Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations
 
“What a tour de force! Rafia Zakaria’s The Upstairs Wife is a masterful tapestry. Through the eyes of Karachi’s women, the beauty and horrors and mysteries of Pakistan are laid bare. Zakaria elegantly weaves personal memoir with historical treatise, showcasing a breathtaking literary talent.”
—Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink and author of Drone Warfare

“Zakaria captures polygamy’s emotional toll on wives: the depression, self-doubt, and jealous calculations that poison the politics of intimacy.”
—Ms. magazine

“If it weren’t for the personal bravery of women like…Rafia Zakaria, and the countless other Muslim women fighting hard to reclaim their rightful space in public and private, as well as —personal and political arenas, the no-go zones for Muslim women would continue to expand.”
—Sampsonia Way

From the Publisher

…The Upstairs Wife…manage[s] to cover so much ground so skillfully, casting a sharp eye on complicated personal politics and affairs of state alike. In the end, Zakaria discovers how deeply entangled her family's fate is with that of her country. Together they are "knotted and inextricable, inside and outside, male and female, no longer separate."

The New York Times Book Review - Mythili G. Rao

2014-11-20
One woman's personal agony reflects the enormous chasm of inequality between the sexes in Pakistan.A Pakistani journalist and human rights activist now living in America, Zakaria tells the disheartening tale of Pakistan's history of military rule and Islamist misogynist oppression through the stories of her own family members, especially that of her Aunt Amina, who was forced to accept her husband's marriage to a second wife in 1986. A clan of Kokani Muslims from Bombay who migrated to Karachi in 1950, just after partition, Zakaria's family lived in a close-knit community that kept largely to itself within the strangeness of the new country, where the military was exalted above all and women first voted in the election of 1970, which brought Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to power in an ethnically divided polity. Amina was the first of her family to attend college at that time, when the country erupted in ethnic war between East and West Pakistan and Bangladesh emerged from the ruins. An arranged marriage to Sohail promised stability and prosperity, yet no children arrived after a decade; Sohail met a woman at his bank, added a floor to his house, and installed Amina at the top and his new wife on the floor below. A week-on-week-off schedule alternating with the new wife became the humiliating compromise for Amina in her status as "half a wife," scandalizing the community and disgracing the family. Nonetheless, the strictures of tradition prevailed, much as they did for another tragic daughter of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, who wed a Sindh landlord and attempted to rise above the feudal expectations of a woman of her class and lead her country fearlessly into the modern era. Zakaria chisels away chronologically at this relentless, cyclical history, and while readers continue to hope for a glimmer of positivity for these heroines, it does not come. A dense, carefully rendered work of minute, memorable detail.

Kirkus Reviews