Just Another Woman

re Shandana:

``how amusing that you should mention that. ``

-- mention what, shandana ?

one of the problems with being featured on chowk is that people have expectations of you.

-- So.... ?

for a woman like me, brought up in the same atmosphere that sheila was brought up in yet having chosen to be what i am, it creates BIG problems.

-- what are you talking about here ? If you were brought up in the same atmosphere as Sheila and if you are what you are, then i would only applaud your perseverance and your courage. Why should that create any problem, let alone BIG problems....

i guess i been `defanged`.

-- when were you fanged Shandana?

--You might want to read my previous comments on all your articles before you would jump into any conclusions about my intentions to fang/defang you.

Rishi

re slink

``does it make more sense this time around? ``
nope. i understood what you said the first time around. i still disagree with it.

i never used rich and progressive together. i used progressive as merely one example of good fortune.

just being pissed off at women like sheila doesnt help. you are suggesting they stop being martyrs and give themselves a chance. here is my suggestion, why dont women like you, who have `broken` from their conditioning give them a chance?

Let`s distill the issues here:

1. Sheila`s father was wrong to pressure her into an arranged marriage with someone she hardly knew.

2. Qaiser`s family was very wrong to pressure him into an arranged marriage when they knew he had problems to begin with.

3. Qaiser was wrong to take out his shame/frustration/anger on his innocent wife.

4. Sheila did the right thing by getting out of the abusive marriage. She had no obligation to try to `fix` him and no incentive to do so since she was not in love with him. She only stayed in the marriage for as long as she did out of a sense of duty and because she didn`t have any other viable options.

5. It doesn`t matter that Sheila and Qaiser are 33 and 40, repsectively. They might as well be 10 and 17 because in Pakistani families, children are always chamchay in the hands of their parents and elders. Parent-child relationships rarely mature into mutually respectful adult relationships, so the children always feel pressured to obey their parents and abide by their every wish in an over-exaggerated sense of izzat. How many Pakistani adults do you all know that can stand up to their parents and defy their wishes for their own self-interest? Expecting Sheila and Qaiser to stand up for themselves since they are adults and refuse to enter into an arranged marriage is rather unrealistic considering the nature of the Pakistani family.

Anne Shamim: Is Qaiser gay or not? I suspect that he is, considering the letter from his brother Ishtiaq which confirms Ishtiaq`s `lifelong suspicions` about Qaiser. People have `lifelong suspicions` about their siblings being gay, not about their being impotent.

Anne Shamim:

Well, I don`t blame you for reacting the way that you are doing to all the criticism. My point, however, was a fairly straightforward one and I hope at some point you will be able to absorb it.
Good luck.

Shandana:

Couldn`t agree more.

Saad

re rishi
ouch! ouch! that was GOOOOOOOOOD. i agree with you almost word for word.

re bg:

my point was simply this...
this was a badly written story with nothing going for it in terms of character,language, imagery etc. my comments were given in this context.
i was wondering how much of it was conditioning..spousal abuse..hip drawing room term..let us voice our support for the poor woman.
taken by herself there was nothing to sheila that justified such outrage..such anger at the fact that `just another woman` was getting what she was made for.characters like sheila (and yes to an extent women like sheila) piss me off because i know too many of them where i live which, as you so kindly pointed out, is karachi. you might be surprised to learn that for every two such women i know i know another one who has had the courage to be herself, rule herself and live the way she wants to. and (you might again be surprised) these women are not the daughters of rich and `progressive` parents who dont really lose anything by rebelling, these are women who are really putting their lives on the line by staking their claims to freedom of action and thought.
the other point i was trying to make was that choosing to go along with the choices others make for you is a choice in itself, the choice to be a pawn in someone elses game (in this case the fathers and the husbands). it might not have BEEN an individual decision, but it COULD have been an individual decision if she had had the courage to forsake security for condemnation. isn`t that the only way things here are ever going to change?
it is not a matter of `blame one person`. the blame for problems like these rest with the many rather than the few. sure men have oppressed women for centuries, and no women haven`t been `asking for it`(how you read that into my response i dont know!) but i just think its time for women like sheila to stop being martyrs and give themselves a chance.
does it make more sense this time around?

this is getting hot!! what is all the big deal about, yar? a woman was in a bad situation and then got out of it.

here is my humble take on all this: as far as character develpmnet, and the quality of the writing, i didn`t really read this as totally a work of fiction or entirely real either. i think this is a work that is meant to bring readers attention to a very very serious problem in our society. and for that purpose the writing did the job. it was tight, flowed well, and the sentence construction was better than most of what appears on chowk.

Rishi: Thanks. ``Apologetic`` is certainly something I don`t want to be. Of course it hurts if somebody criticizes your writing--I won`t pretend otherwise. But in no way should freedom of expression and to voice opinions (especially about someone`s work, be it art or science or a craft) have to suffer because of it. We`re all grown-ups here. When I stated my evaluation of ``A Strange Love Affair,`` I did so with full realization (and a little hesitation) of the probability of the writer being ``hurt`` by it. But really, I think it would have been an injustice if I had stayed quiet. All too many of us (Pakistanis and maybe even Indians) suffer from the syndrome of being loath to point out that ``the emperor has no clothes on.`` I think the electronic medium makes us bolder in that regard, since we don`t have to do any of this face to face. So, it`s a great start for good, unembellished, (and sometimes brutally) honest criticism.

So, hit me, guys--I asked for it!

About the guy being a BAD guy. For Sheila, he IS a bad guy. A horrible turn in her not-so-great-life. You are right, he has his good traits, but as far as the thrust of the story--his role as a husband, his treatment of a ``weak`` wife--he is a villain. As a citizen of the community, he is wonderful, upstanding, generous. But as an abusive man with huge personal problems he really is a ``cut-out`` like so many others out there. The speaker is the one telling the story, and she definitely sees him as a villain.

Thanks so much for your smart, objective commentary. Support feels so good when it is presented the way you present it.

--AS

re slink:

``sheila comes across as a weak, feebleminded, indecisive creature who is 33, has gone to college,has an older sister who has been a good example YET she still lacks the courage to demand her rights but prefers living like an inflatable doll in somebodys house, letting the words of a perfect stranger shatter her self esteem.
why on earth should we feel sympathy for her?
most women here go through the same conditioning, the ones who break out of it break out of it
themselves.``

paaahleeez! its so easy to just blame it on her, isnt it? if i remember correctly, you live in karachi, right? last time i checked there were many like sheila in karachi, in fact, in many parts of the world. THAT should tell you something. that its not as easy as an individual/personal choice, but something that is systematic, persistent in society. so, blaming the individual woman is the wrong thing to do. what does it achieve anyway? in this case, it leave the 40-year abusive husband and the tyrannical father off the hook!

for women to assume that their personal good fortune -- progressive parents, for example -- gives them the moral high ground to judge other women as feeble and spineless is like rich people blaming poor people for their poverty. you may as well ask of all our starving country women and men: ``why dont they just work harder and take a shower?`` and of women who are raped: ``why did she wear that tight, short dress? why did she go out into the fields?`` or of sheila: ``why didnt she just break out of it?``

no one except someone who has never been married or been on crack while being married would call a husband, even an arranged married one, a perfect stranger. marriage, whether arranged or not, is one of the most intimate relationships, beyond the sex. and that is why, marriage makes even the strongest of women extremely vulnerable.


``qaiser..was meant to be viewed as some sort of villian as opposed to a man desperately in need of help. this is sexism in reverse, he must be an awful awful person hana? it is hard to reconcile that with the kind of adulation he inspires in his students.``

well, he is a villian. he is in his forties and educated AND he knows he has a problem. so, not only does he agree to marriage, he also blames sheila for his problem. how low is that? just because he is fuckedup he has a right to take it out on this woman, and because she is spineless just adds to the pleasure and ease of taking it out on her! and actually, many abusive men are quite charming and well-liked, so the adulation he inspires in his students is completely irrelevant to the facts of his marriage. how this is ``sexism in reverse`` is something beyond me. would you care to explain?

the writer was quite explicit about her bias. she is talking about her cousin, for god`s sake!

SR, yet again, is the voice of reason, who points out that sheila`s father should be called out for what he is -- a tyrant and a chauvinist and a control freak. i know far too many fathers like him to expect every sheila to just `break out of it`.

by the way, the anti-feminsit backlash is probably more popular than the `rights` bandwagon. heartening to see so many on it!

re : Annogul

How does it feel to be labelled a ``pitifully weak character development`` after you labelling ``A strange love affair`` as more than a little embarrassing....Funny how you and shandana seems to be in the opposite ends of the spectrum while criticising in both these articles/stories.....

I guess i am reading replies and articles in the wrong chronological order, being a couple of days away from chowk

Rishi..

Re : BG.

my thoughts exactly..

I posted my reply and only then read yours. made me think i wasted all those time in replying. You said it better than i could

Rishi

Re : SR.

As always a refreshing and true perspective. Almost makes me look forward to your replies.

No, I am not being harsh on Anita, just trying to point out that it is rather impossible to be objective in a story. History, Facts, Events, yes, one does have to be objective , but in a work which is essentially fiction, or pseudo-fiction , where the author has taken some event or issue and had made a story out of it, so as to point out certain maladies in the society, well, i`d care two hoots about being objective.......

Re : Annogul

You need not explain nor even remotely sound apologetic you know.. Actually you did not really paint the husband as a bad guy, let alone a ``bad, bad guy``. Or atleast my impression of him was never that. I too did view him as someone to be pitied. And that too as much as Sheila deserves it. And as SR points out, the people to be really blamed are the parents, and our society ( with all the excuses of them being uneducated and foolish in thought and action being counted in ). The point is such events are very normal in our society and this could be directly attributed not to any kind of ``male chauvinism`` but to the apparent lack of education and empowerment of women in our society. And your story successfully portrays it.

If someone else wants to flaunt their intellectualism by questioning ghosts not painted in the picture, to hell with them. They have their liberties to do just that. I cannot fathom how someone could question the author about the veracity of the story without knowing whether it is a fact or a fiction at all. Almost makes me wonder if there is a clique of sorts among pseudo liberal women writers alive in this forum .

I repeat ``you don`t have to explain at all``

Re : Anita Zaidi

Okay, i agree that i too see both of them as unfortunate. And i do not view the husband as the evil victimizer. So what ? . Inspite of the various scenarios that can be concocted to suit an argument, let me reassure you that every individual has the right to defend his/her own life and that is the course that Sheila has taken. Yes, probably she could have acted as the perfect eastern wife, noble in thought and action, pitied her husband for his faults and had taken strenuous efforts to cure him of his maladies. But she did not do it. If she opted to get out of her failed/failing/not-failed/temporarily failed etc etc marriage then so be it......

Reminds me of another argument where medical transcripts claimed that child molesters need to be pitied since they themselves would have suffered the same. But while they are being pitied and counselled , the molested child needs to be taken care of all the same. And the later would be the priority, not the former. One could understand it when it happens in one`s own family. The primary issue in any disaster is to damage control, tracing antecedants of the problem and prevention are issues which are far more important and long lasting but they are only secondary to damage control.... probably the author might even pen another article/story on how Qaiser`s family arranged for his medical examination and medical help and how he picked up his threads, married again and lead a happily married life.... but that is for another time and another place ...............About the ``libel`` issues........did anyone warn you after your previous articles, about their radical nature and how you might get a FATWA from the Purveyors of religious fascism.....Ch...Ch...where would you stop ?

Re : Shandana

First, Yes, sheila does come across as a weak, feebleminded, indecisive creature.. And nobody asks you to sympathise with her.

Second, the cardboard man in the story need not be viewed as a villain. There are events where Qaiser is portrayed as a very nice human being, supporting an old women he does not even know, being kind and helpful to his students etc. The author could have very well portrayed him as an evil, drug trafficking, child molesting person. That she did not chose to do so, but chose to highlight his goodness points out that she was probably not trying to villify him .. Rather she only succeeds in pointing out the existance of dual personalities in our society where a perfect son is not a perfect husband and vice-versa. Atleast that is the picture that i get, since the author in being defensive has restated the same.

And you say that the story has a ``pitifully weak character development``. This inspite of all that phantasmagoric , supposedly psychedelic nonsense that passes for works of poetry and fiction in chowk. Atleast there was some character development. Not some nonsense about how some girl butchered her lover to buy some hairdye.........makes me squirm to read those lines......

Rishi

slink: Thank you for your comments. I beg to differ on the ``weak character development`` part--at least partially. I think Sheila`s character development was not weak--SHE was. I agree with you there. But you are totally dismissing the CAUSES behind that weakness. THOSE are the real issue here. Wouldn`t you agree that there are hundreds of thousands of Sheilas out there, totally incapable of ``standing up`` or ``breaking out`` as you put it? Her older sister was the EXCEPTION, not the rule. And you might be right about the man`s character being a ``cardboard cutout.`` Unfortunately, there are a lot of such cutouts in our culture, and this whole piece, was meant to draw attention to that.

PSEUDO rights???????????????? My god, slink, what`s so ``pseudo`` about women asking for some kind of respect, asking to be treated more fairly? What`s so ``pseudo`` about the fact that most, and I repeat, MOST of our men are just that--TYRRANICAL CHAUVANISTS. And I wish it weren`t so, but it is. You or I may not be in such a situation, we may not have had to deal with the egregious panderings of such male egos, but that gives us absolutely NO right to put down the countless number of women that do. Not only that, it would be grossly short-sighted of us to just overlook all that and make the absurd proposition that they ``eat cake.``

And for those of us who can`t (or don`t want to) feel sympathy for Sheila must surely feel some sympathy for a painfully dysfunctional system that churns out such Sheilas by the millions.

And you ask, ``what is wrong with this picture?``

Plenty, my friend. And THAT is the whole point.

SR: THANK YOU! In all this ruckus, I had almost forgotten about the father! Without question, he shares a BIG chunk of the blame here.

BG: Thanks, babe. You said it!! (And said it with with such vociferous eloquence, I might add. Thanks again.)

--AS

anita and saad:

exactly.

anne shamim:

you`d like us to remember that this is a story and should be judged as such..
pitifully weak character development,it`s almost as if you took a couple of cardboard cutouts and pasted them up and then, on the basis of the kind of psuedo `rights` rants that are doing the rounds these days, expect us to go `oh hai hai poor woman hai baichari..`
sheila comes across as a weak, feebleminded, indecisive creature who is 33, has gone to college,has an older sister who has been a good example YET she still lacks the courage to demand her rights but prefers living like an inflatable doll in somebodys house, letting the words of a perfect stranger shatter her self esteem.
why on earth should we feel sympathy for her?
most women here go through the same conditioning, the ones who break out of it break out of it themselves.sheila is not a child.
second, i have a big problem with the fact that while we were meant to feel sympathy/pity/outrage for sheila, the cardboard man in the story..qaiser..was meant to be viewed as some sort of villian as opposed to a man desperately in need of help. this is sexism in reverse, he must be an awful awful person hana? it is hard to reconcile that with the kind of adulation he inspires in his students.
there was some very powerful material in this story...its a story where there no winners only losers..your admitted bias made it into `just another ho hum tale` about `poor poor weak weak women.`
`Even as I write, a nagging guilt is creeping up on me, since this is yet another account that only exacerbates the awful stereotype of Eastern men as tyrranical chauvinists.`
you said it for me.
another problem i had with this story were the assumptions behind it. since you had set the stage for a `selfish husband doormat wife` you didn`t bother delving into the issue, it seems as if its enough that one wield the spectre of `rights`for (of course) everyone will automatically line up behind it.

pat shah:

i dont think anita meant only women shouldn`t have the right to divorce because their husbands were impotent.

`Sometimes I can’t believe that my uncle and my father were raised by the same parents in an identical environment.`
if indeed they were, and your father is significantly different from his brother, that only proves the point that each person controls who they are and what they want to be.courage to surmount the odds and do what you think is right is not something you are born with or something that can be handed to you, you must must find/nourish/create it in yourself.
`For all of Sheila’s resistance to the idea of a divorce, the notion of immediate escape from this suffocatingly hopeless environment brought relief to her face. She didn’t argue, and the next day we left.`
first her father told her what to do
then her husband told her what to do
then the narrator told her what to do
she was 33 years old
her sister had defied the norms and survived
what is wrong with this picture?

shandana

My, my. All this hullah gullah over an issue which I thought was an open and shut case. Well, to those who think I`m being unfair to the poor man (and NO he isn`t a teacher at a university in Karachi...etc. etc.), here goes:

The marriage in question lasted as long as it did (over a year in reality) because ``Shiela`` wanted to give it everything she had. The ``poor`` man was content in having her live in a separate bedroom, never talking to her, ABUSING her when she wanted to say something even as innocent as ``why don`t you come back to our shared bedroom,`` etc. etc. All this while she was cooking and cleaning for him, ironing his clothes, and leading a pretty miserable existence, all in all. She even proposed that SHE WOULD LIVE WITH HIM WITHOUT SEX--in essence, give this marriage a facade of normalcy to save face (both his and hers) in society IF ONLY HE WOULD TREAT HER LIKE A NORMAL HUMAN BEING.

But, as the story shows, he didn`t.

So, let`s, for argument`s sake, FORGET that he GAMBLED on an unsuspecting woman`s life,

FORGET that he wasn`t decent enough to own up that there just might be a problem here (rather than dumping it on his wife, crushing down every last iota of her self-esteem)....

The fact remains that he mistreated her, inflicted terrible pain on her, and basically made her life a living hell.

And if that`s not a bad guy, god knows what is.

BG, jollymullah: thanks for your comments and compliments.

Anita Zaidi: Look, this is a story (based on true events, but that is really IRRELEVANT), and as such, you`ve GOT to judge (if making a judgment is ultimately your goal) based on what the words in the story are. EVERY story EVER written is written with a bias--the author`s bias, the speaker`s /narrator`s bias, etc. Here, I CHOOSE to make the man a bad guy--a very very bad guy. Maybe in real life he COULD have sex, but say, maybe... okay only once a year. Say in real life he was otherwise a gem of a husband. I CHANGED all that. ``QAISER`` is a different character altogether. So, real life and how Qaiser`s real life counterpart behaved is totally besides the point. This is it-- whatever you`ve got in print is all you`ve got on these people.

Shafqat: See above.

Pat Shah: THANK YOU!!! Anita Zaidi brings up a somewhat good point about the ``disposibility`` of a husband or wife. But my god, it wasn`t as if ``Sheila`` came in, saw damaged goods, and immediately resorted to ``returning`` them. Yes, that would be somewhat callous. On the other hand, since arranged marriage is such a ``marketplace`` anyway, ``why the hell not?`` is right.

Nasreen and random: Thanks, guys. My thoughts exactly.

--AS

random: i don`t think anyone is saying that anyone has a the right to abuse anyone. The issue is understanding, through understanding we might be able to prevent abuse from taking place in the first place. If the *only thing * we do is assign blame, then abuse will continue; along with blame there has to be also an approach to understanding and attempting to figure out why abuse takes place. Another option is for men and women to stop living with each other, that way we`ll do away with this kind of abuse anyways. According to native american (Navajo) legend that took place a long long time ago, things didnt quite work out to well in that arrangemnet either...