HE WAS IMPRISONED YET AGAIN AND PLACED IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT.
My mother knew the climate wasn’t right to agitate for his release; she had nightmares in which he was hanged and she was taken to cut down his body with nothing sharper than her own teeth to sever the rope. So she turned her attention elsewhere. That’s when the third and final phase of her activism began, and it’s the phase people today almost always refer to when they talk of her life in the public realm.
In the wake of the Hudood Ordinance the women’s movement in Pakistan began to assert itself, though it wouldn’t be until 1981 that it went into high gear with the formation of the Women’s Action Forum. But as early as 1979 my mother was going from city to city, and often to smaller towns, sometimes covered up so no one would recognize her, and talking to different groups and individuals about the need to politicize women, to bring them together, to do something.
HE WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON SOME MONTHS LATER with the understanding that he had a week to leave the country if he didn’t want to be re-arrested
AND WENT INTO EXILE AGAIN.
This time my mother told him she was staying in Pakistan. But once he was in Colombia she began to pine — after all those months in which she’d borne his imprisonment with remarkable fortitude. ‘You yearn for his release so you can be with him — you fear that might never happen — but then he’s released and further away from you than ever,’ I heard her explain to Beema one day. So it didn’t surprise me too much when Rafael sent word the Poet was ill, that my mother packed a suitcase and left. She said she’d be back in a few weeks.
HE REMAINED IN EXILE FOR THREE YEARS.
And she remained there with him. She seemed to be on the move a lot during those years; often at conferences and the like, drumming up support for the women’s movement in Pakistan.
THE FIRST YEAR IN COLOMBIA, THEN IN EGYPT.
My mother insisted on the move — she saw that her own belief in secular jurisprudence was not sufficient to take on a government intent on claiming its laws were God-ordained, so she went to Egypt to work with women’s groups there and discover the feminist traditions within Islam which would allow her to battle the hard-liners on their own turf.
WHILE IN CAIRO HE WON THE PRESTIGIOUS RUMI AWARD, CHOSEN BY A PANEL OF POETS AND SCHOLARS FROM THE MUSLIM WORLD AND RETURNED TO PAKISTAN having received government assurances that he wouldn’t be arrested on his return.
It was 1983 by then, and the Women’s Action Forum, spearheaded by some of my mother’s closest friends, was taking on the military government with an astonishing show of bravery. Between the Ansari Commission’s recommendations that women should be barred from holding high public office, and the proposed Islamic Law of Evidence which equated the evidence of two women to that of one man, and the Safia Bibi case in which a blind eighteen-year-old girl who was raped found herself sentenced to a fine, imprisonment and public lashing on the charge of adultery, there was plenty of work to be done, and my mother rolled up her sleeves and entered the mêlée.
I decided to enter it with her. I didn’t tell anyone about it beforehand, but I managed to convince one of my cousins to drive to me to a rally to protest the Law of Evidence. There were so many people there that my mother didn’t see me, but I saw her as she addressed the crowd. Grazia, grazia, grazia. When I came home that evening, Beema saw the bruise that had been left on my arm from falling in the street while running from policemen who broke up the rally. We had the worst fight of our lives. Rabia, eight years old, phoned my mother to tell her what was happening, and Mama walked into our house in time to hear me say to Beema, for the only time in my life: you’re not my real mother, anyway.
‘Say that ever again and I’ll disown you,’ my mother said.
She told Beema she’d have no objection to having me locked in chains next time there was a rally if I refused to swear on the Qu’r̄an that I wouldn’t attend any organised protest unless Beema told me I could or until I turned eighteen, whichever happened first. So I swore, but I wasn’t happy about it.
Of course, there was never a rally that she didn’t attend herself. I remember going to her house one day and finding her with vicious bruises on her back and arms and stomach; and sometimes she was taken into police custody for anywhere between a few hours and three weeks, during which time Beema was almost constantly on the phone to her influential relatives. But despite how harrowing those days were there was an exultation about my mother; she had finally found an incarnation that suited her entirely. And there were significant victories too — Safia Bibi was acquitted by the Federal Sharia Court and the Islamic Law of Evidence was amended so that it was only in cases pertaining to financial matters that the testimony of two women was equal to that of one man (not enough of a victory, my mother said, but still significant), and the Ansari Commission’s recommendation never became law.
And the Poet, during this time
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW IF HE REALLY WAS WORKING ON A COLLECTION AFTER HIS RETURN TO PAKISTAN, AS HIS ADMIRERS SAY, OR IF FEAR OF FURTHER IMPRISONMENT MADE HIM STOP WRITING, AS SOME WONDER.
Oh, he was still writing. Writing feverishly, though not publishing anything — he said if he was going to prison again it would be for a complete collection, not just an individual poem.
I think both he and my mother were happier with their own reflections in the mirror at this time than at any earlier point of their lives. And I, too, remember the next three years as happy times, despite — and in some way, as a result of — all the mayhem wreaked upon the nation. There was such a headiness at the centre of all the anti-government activity.
But then
IN 1986, HE WAS FOUND MURDERED IN AN EMPTY PLOT OF LAND. NO POSTHUMOUS WORK APPEARED.
And Mama became so incapacitated with grief that Beema moved her into the room next to mine, in my father’s house, and she was there but not there for two years before she’d had enough, and left.
The paper in my hand started to blur. I dropped it in the waste-paper basket and sent an e-mail to the CEO saying: The bio’s fine.
Then I returned to the darkness and stayed there for the rest of the day.
VIII
Who was the most civilized Crusader?
a) Richard the Lionheart
b) Frederick Barbarossa
c) Bahemond of Taranto
d) Frederick II
Answer: d
The quiz show host raised his dyed eyebrows across the desk at me. ‘They’re very good questions except, as you know, for that last one.’ He put down the list of questions and slashed a cross over my Crusader question without any sign of irony. ‘But, as a matter of interest, why Frederick II?’
‘He was excommunicated three times by two different Popes. That seems eminently civilized to me. But he never got his due during his lifetime, poor man. Instead of waging war on the Muslims, as any good crusader should do, he decided to enter into diplomatic negotiations and won Jerusalem in that shameful manner, while also settling a ten-year peace treaty with the Sultan of Egypt. He was ridiculed throughout Europe for this unmanly conduct.’