I have hated the night chowkidar for as long as I have known him, which would be just over six years. It is not that he is rude, or incompetent or cruel to animals (though he is also all of those things), it is because when he needs the residents of C-4 to sign a circular he will say ‘Saab yeh dekh lain’ to my husband and ‘lay, tu idhar sign kar’ to me. Living as I do in a society where gender discrimination is a national institution, it seems like a petty reason to hate someone. You should know that I come from a line of people who would probably pick ‘I just didn’t like his/her face’ in a post-homicide multiple-choice interrogation.

While I have in the past spontaneously taken on family, friends, teachers, strangers, and once even a stuffed animal for sexist behavior (I didn’t like the way its beady eyes were fixed upon my chest) my hatred of this odious odious man simmered beneath the surface of my generally unruffled exterior for a long long time. When I say unruffled, you should know that simply means I don’t wear ruffles, or frills, or even pleats. The other interpretation of unruffled has never, in my knowledge, been applied to me.

Despite constant provocation ranging from poorly worded demands (neechay pani leak ho raha hai, toonay tap khula chohra ho ga as opposed to the less imperious neechay pani leak ho raha hai, aap kay ghar main koi nalka to nahin khula?) to baleful stares and deliberately misdirected or returned mail, I let this man be because the loss of a piece of my mind big enough to impact him would leave a hole in my head large enough for a Chinese acrobat to swing through. Some people, I thought, aren’t worth that much effort.

I was right.

I live in a small apartment complex with four chowkidars. The lady downstairs has two teenage daughters. They are no ‘nek perveens’ but their comings and goings are with the full knowledge of their parents. Four friends, two boys and two girls, had come to pick them up and were waiting on foot at the bottom of the stairs that lead into our block. The chowkidar came up to them and told them they should either be inside the door of the apartment or outside the compounds gate. He was his usual abrasive self, and the resultant outrage on the part of the urban teenagers and their mother was fully justified. There was no rule in our complex code that disallowed visitors to wait inside the compound if they were on foot. Other people’s visitors had full and unquestioned access; why was he singling the girls out?

I met the mother on the landing on her way back from lodging a complaint with the committee. “I’ve told Mr. S (the committee head) but he doesn’t seem too pushed!” she told me. We bonded briefly over A’s treatment of women as we looked down at him waddling happily around the compound looking for a cat to kick, no doubt thinking of his customary Friday night assignation behind the shed in the back with the servant girl from E-4. Would I tell Mr. S I had had a problem with A too, just so he knew it wasn’t one ‘hysterical’ woman? I promised I would.

I found Mr. S engrossed in rapid-fire conversation with the A-hole himself. Interrupting in English, I added my two cents to the complaints already filed. Rude. Misogynistic. Deliberately obtuse when asked questions. Willfully returning mail and turning away male visitors with claims I didn’t exist unless asked for as so and so’s wife…I felt better after reciting my litany of woes. But not for long.

The rudeness, I was told, was because of the dialect. My questions of how the other three chowkidars, who shared the same ethnicity and dialect, still managed to be courteous were ignored. And the returned mail? The turning away of male visitors with claims Shandana Minhas did not exist? First name familiarity with a strange woman, the gentleman went on, was against the chowkidars culture. Full name of residents and their apartment numbers, I replied, was an integral part of his job. Perhaps, it was suggested, my name was just too difficult. Interesting, I replied, since it was from his dialect. Maybe, he said, I should ask my husband to talk to the man? Realizing I was barking up the wrong tree, I thanked him for his time and walked away.

Later that night the oldest resident of the complex, the venerable, well-educated, sophisticated widow whose husband had run the complex for the twenty five years before his death last year (and hired all the chowkidars) was approached for her advice. After listening to the allegations of incompetence, insolence, misogyny etc she had only one thing to say.

“It is not in our culture for men to know the first names of women.” The drums of war sounded in my head when I heard that, wanting more than anything to pick up a rock and bash the unholy triumvirate senseless with it.

I wondered if it was the Pathan in me.

*

The next morning I watched Ovidio Salazars ‘Al Ghazali the Alchemist’, showing at the fifth karafilmfest. Salazar, once series producer of the BBC’s Faces of Islam, had created an interesting documentary on the 11th century spiritual and legal philosopher, using original locations and lush costumes to recreate the his spiritual journey. A good documentary, coherent and inspirational. It featured a cast of nearly 50 extras. Forty-nine men, and one woman. She played Al Ghazali’s wife and was a statuesque beauty with glossy, sorrowful eyes. Excellent casting really, since all she had to do was stand in this corner looking sad. Then stand in another corner looking worried. Than stand in a doorway looking at her husband lost in the throes of spiritual and mental turmoil. I walked away from it resolving to find out more about the man, and wondering why there were such few women mystics or scholars in Islam, or indeed any other major world religion.

Was it that we were not tempted to shed the wrappings of the material world and walk into the desert in search of Him? I knew that was not true. Or was it that, assuming the route of submission was really the only route to reach Him, our path to him was laid into us post-birth, when the sex of the fetus was decided. What was motherhood but the ultimate act of submission? Was this, this abundant, accessible inward journey, His gift to us, in return for the constant sacrifice of physical and intellectual freedoms his followers demanded from womenfolk?

“Sure”, said my husband, as he looked away from a documentary about the women of the Holy Kingdom, “you know in Saudi Arabia women have to clear things with their male guardians before they do anything? So from now on I think you should ask my permission before using words like womenfolk.’

*

Auratzat is used frequently only by one woman I know. Farah the cook, my mother’s latest employee. A healthy looking widow in her mid-thirties with eight children, Farah has been with them for a few months now, except for break of a month when she was fired for never coming on time and taking too many holidays. Her excuse then had been that she was a ghairatmand woman, unused to work, and hence often fell ill from the sheer stress of it.

Farah’s deceased husbands family, she said, considered it very bad for their women to work. That, she said, was why she wore the head to toe burqa, the gloves and the socks in which she reported for work, so she would not be recognized and reported.

Her cell phone was nicer than mine. She went out to the backyard when she got a call, and we could hear her giggling and tittering inside. Men from around the neighbourhood started to display great interest and concern for the well being of the musloom, volunteering to drop her to the stop, carry her bags, etc. After overhearing one particularly loud phone conversation in which she skillfully negotiated time and place to meet a client, I decided to have a chat with my mother.

I found her upstairs putting a load in the machine.
“You know that Farah?”
“What about her?”
“She’s a hooker.”
“A what?”
“A prostitute.’
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“Hmmm.”
She turned back to her laundry. After a while she said, her nut-brown forehead pleasantly creased, “you know your father is always right.”

Reality is like a steak. You’ve got to cut it up to swallow it.