Meanwhile, Ozi was having a ball. He enjoyed building tax shelters in exotic places. His clients took an instant liking to him, and his golf game improved. His friends at the office said he might even make partner. And he loved his son. He would come home exhausted, much too exhausted for sex or a quiet conversation over a glass of wine, but not too exhausted to play with Muazzam until he went to bed.
I felt neglected, resentful at being the one left at home when I hadn’t wanted to have a baby in the first place. Things came to a head when Muazzam was six months old. I decided I wanted to work full-time again. Ozi was shocked. He said Muazzam was too young. I said if he felt so strongly he could ask for paternity leave. But he won the argument. He won it with a low blow. He looked at me like I was a stranger and asked if I loved our son at all. The question destroyed me. I started sobbing and I couldn’t stop.
I’d done everything I was supposed to. I’d played with Muazzam and read to him, even though he couldn’t understand a word, and bought him clothes and fed him with my own body and cleaned his shit with my own hands. I felt so guilty. I knew there was something wrong with me. I was a monster. But I didn’t want to be. Staying with my baby was the right thing to do, what everyone expected of me. My mother would agree with Ozi. Even my friends. So I gave in. I said I’d write freelance from home.
I didn’t tell Ozi why I’d cried. He didn’t ask. He just hugged me. And even though I needed him to, it felt empty. Ozi had found my weak spot. He may not have understood why, but he now knew he could make me do things I didn’t want to do. And that’s an awful power to give one person in a relationship. It killed our marriage. I think it would kill anyone’s.
But it takes a long time for a good marriage to die, and even a dead marriage can pretend to be alive, with habit as respirator and heart machine. We stayed in America for another two years and people thought we were happy. We were invited everywhere. And we entertained lavishly. But we never could find a babysitter Ozi approved of. Every month or two he made me get a new one.
Sometimes I would explode at Ozi, and then he would take me seriously, almost become the Ozi I’d fallen in love with. But only for an hour or two. After a while I found that I was getting angry at him just for attention, which made me feel like such an infant that I stopped doing it. Ozi still came to me when he needed to be held and comforted, and I was so lonely that I was grateful for the opportunity. But my resentment grew. I had two selfish children on my hands, and they were making me miserable.
I started drinking Scotch, neat, during the day.
I didn’t tell anyone how I really felt. Not my best friends. Not my mother. And certainly not my husband. It was a new experience for me. I’d never been ashamed of anything I’d done in my life. But this wasn’t something I’d done. This was me. Not an act but an identity. I disappointed me, shamed me. So I hid my secret as well as I could. And to do that, I had to hide it from myself.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all was what I was writing. After trying my hand at a few edgy pieces and finding it a nightmare to get them published, I wrote an article on lullabies for a women’s magazine. Really. I put an international spin on it, interviewing friends who came from all over the planet. Enough to put anyone to sleep, I thought. But I was wrong: it was a hit. The magazine was flooded with letters. And I was asked for more. So I did one on herbal remedies for diaper rash and vegetable balms for baby skin. Another winner.
I kept writing, glad for the distraction from the constant demands of my son. The income was important to me, as well. Between Ozi and his parents, we had everything we needed, but the idea of taking pocket money from my husband had begun to grate on me. So I managed to earn some financial independence writing about parenting, little hypocrite that I am. It was satisfying in a strange way, and in a not so strange way, too. The strange satisfaction came from at least being able to write about motherhood well. It helped me hide from myself. And the not so strange satisfaction came from learning that I was a good writer, feeling new muscles growing in my back, wing muscles, the kind that mean you’re learning to fly.
But it wasn’t the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn’t feel any passion to write about the place. I didn’t give a damn about local politics, I wasn’t moved by the issues. I missed home. And I was frustrated by people who actually thought the world had a center, and that center was here. ‘The world’s a sphere, everyone,’ I wanted to say. ‘The center of a sphere doesn’t lie on its surface. Look up the word “superficial,” when you have a chance.’
Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World Club’s bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that didn’t have a moment to waste, and falling in love as soon as we shot onto the bridge and I saw Manhattan rise up through the looks of parental terror reflected in the window. I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one had wanted to believe he was the first so badly). I had my mind blown open by the combination of a liberal arts education and a drug-popping international crowd. I became tough. I had fun. I learned so much.
But now New York was starting to feel empty, a great party that had gone on too long and was showing no sign of ending soon. I had a headache, and I was tired. I’d danced enough. I wanted a quiet conversation with someone who knew what load-shedding was.
Then Ozi decided he’d had enough of being a well-paid small fish in Manhattan. His father needed him, and he wanted to go home. I agreed. I was desperate for a new start, too. So we took a deep breath and jumped and landed with a loud splash one summer in beautiful Lahore.
But Lahore wasn’t the answer. I didn’t know anyone, I had nothing to do, and I hated living with Ozi’s parents.
At least Muazzam’s new nanny was a blessing. For the first time since before he was born, he wasn’t completely dependent on me, and that was liberating. I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my time, and then about what I wanted to do with my life. My twenty-sixth birthday reminded me that I was still young.
I tried to restart my marriage, to rediscover everything that had made me love Ozi in the first place. Honestly I did. But it didn’t work, because I lost my respect for him. And once that happened, there was nothing more I could do.
How do you lose your respect for the person you love? It isn’t easy. It takes – it took – a lot. It took his mother, for one thing. She’d spent half her life making her son into the man she’d wished she’d married, and now that he’d returned, she was back in business. She corrected his posture, critiqued his suits, made him self-conscious about his receding hairline by telling him again and again how a good haircut would hide it. And the effect she had on him was incredible. One look from her would transform the relaxed, charming, sexy man I’d married into an uncomfortable little schoolboy.
But it took more than his mother to utterly destroy my respect for Ozi. It took his father, too. No matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise, I quickly realized that the rumors about Ozi’s father being corrupt were true. And when I finally, delicately, confronted Ozi, he seemed almost surprised that it bothered me. In fact, he said one of the main reasons he’d come back to Lahore was to help his father protect his assets, kickbacks from the good old days when Dad was a senior civil servant with the country at his feet.