And the World Changed (27 page)

Dadi behaved abysmally at my mother's funeral, they told me, and made them all annoyed. She set up loud and unnecessary lamentations in the dining room, somewhat like an heir apparent, as though this death had reinstated her as mother of the house. While Ifat and Nuzzi and Tillat wandered frozen-eyed, dealing with the roses and the ice, Dadi demanded an irritating amount of attention, stretching out supine and crying out, “Your mother has betrayed your father; she left him; she has gone.” Food from respectful mourners poured in, cauldron after cauldron, and Dadi relocated a voracious appetite.

Years later, I was somewhat sorry that I had heard this tale, because it made me take affront. When I returned to Pakistan, I was too peeved with Dadi to find out how she was. Instead I listened to Ifat tell me about standing there in the hospital, watching the doctors suddenly pump upon my mother's heart—“I'd seen it on television,” she gravely said, “I knew it was the end.” Mamma's students from the university had tracked down the rickshaw driver who had knocked her down: They'd pummeled him nearly to death and then camped out in our garden, sobbing wildly, all in hordes.

By this time Bhutto was in prison and awaiting trial, and General Zulu was presiding over the Islamization of Pakistan. But we had no time to notice. My mother was buried at the nerve center of Lahore, an unruly and dusty place, and my father immediately made arrangements to buy the plot of land next to her grave: “We're ready when you are,” Shahid sang. Her tombstone bore some pretty Urdu poetry and a completely fictitious
place of birth, because some details my father tended to forget.

“Honestly,” it would have moved his wife to say.

So I was angry with Dadi at that time and didn't stop to see her. I saw my mother's grave and then came back to the United States, hardly noticing when, six months later, my father called from London and mentioned Dadi was now dead. It happened in the same week that Bhutto finally was hanged, and our imaginations were consumed by that public and historical dying. Pakistan made rapid provisions not to talk about the thing that had been done, and somewhow, accidently, Dadi must have been mislaid into that larger decision, because she too ceased being a mentioned thing. My father tried to get back in time for the funeral, but he was so busy talking Bhutto-talk in England that he missed his flight and thus did not return. Luckily, Irfani was at home, and he saw Dadi to her grave.

Bhutto's hanging had the effect of making Pakistan feel unreliable, particularly to itself. Its landscape learned a new secretiveness, unusual for a formerly loquacious people. This may account for the fact that I have never seen my grandmother's grave and neither have my sisters. I think we would have tried, had we been together, despite the free-floating anarchy in the air that—like the heroin trade—made the world suspicious and afraid. There was no longer any need to wait for change, because change was all there was, and we had quite forgotten the flavor of an era that stayed in place long enough to gain a name. One morning I awoke to find that, during the course of the night, my mind had completely ejected the names of all the streets in Pakistan, as though to assure that I could not return, or that if I did, it would be returning to a loss. Overnight the country had grown absentminded, and patches of amnesia hung over the hollows of the land like fog.

I think we could have mourned Dadi in our belated way, but the coming year saw Ifat killed in the consuming rush of change and disbanded the company of women for all time. It
was a curious day in March, two years after my mother died, when the weight of that anniversary made us all disconsolate for her quietude. “I'll speak to Ifat, though,” I thought to myself in the United States. But in Pakistan someone had different ideas for that sister of mine and thwarted all my plans. When she went walking out that warm March night, a car came by and trampled her into the ground, and then it vanished strangely. By the time I reached Lahore, a tall and slender mound had usurped the grave-space where my father had hoped to lie, next to the more moderate shape that was his wife. Children take over everything.

So, worn by repetition, we stood by Ifat's grave, and took note of the narcissi, still alive, that she must have placed upon my mother on the day that she was killed. It made us impatient, in a way, as though we had to decide that there was nothing so farcical as grief and that it had to be eliminated from our diets for good. It cut away, of course, our intimacy with Pakistan, where history is synonymous with grief and always most at home in the attitudes of grieving. Our congregation in Lahore was brief, and then we swiftly returned to a more geographic reality. “We are lost, Sara,” Shahid said to me on the phone from England. “Yes, Shahid,” I firmly said, “We're lost.”

Today, I'd be less emphatic. Ifat and Mamma must have honeycombed and crumbled now, in the comfortable way that overtakes bedfellows. And somehow it seems apt and heartening that Dadi, being what she was, never suffered the pomposities that enter the most well-meaning of farewells and seeped instead into the nooks and crannies of our forgetfulness. She fell between two stools of grief, which is appropriate, since she was greatest when her life was at its most unreal. Anyway she was always outside our ken, an anecdotal thing, neither more nor less. So some sweet reassurance of reality accompanies my discourse when I claim that when Dadi died, we all forgot to grieve.

For to be lost is just a minute's respite, after all, like a train
that cannot help but stop between the stations of its proper destination in order to stage a pretend version of the end. Dying, we saw, was simply change taken to points of mocking extremity, and wasn't a thing to lose us but to find us out, to catch us where we least wanted to be caught. In Pakistan, Bhutto rapidly became obsolete after a succession of bumper harvests, and none of us can fight the ways that the names Mamma and Ifat have been archaisms, quaintnesses on our lips.

Now I live in New Haven and feel quite happy with my life. I miss, of course, the absence of women and grow increasingly nostalgic for a world where the modulations of age are as recognized and welcomed as the shift from season into season. But that's a hazard that has to come along, since I have made myself inhabitant of a population which democratically insists that everyone from twenty-nine to fifty-six occupies roughly the same space of age. When I teach topics in third-world literature, much time is lost in trying to explain that the third world is locatable only as a discourse of convenience. Trying to find it is like pretending that history or home is real and not located precisely where you're sitting, I hear my voice quite idiotically say. And then it happens. A face, puzzled and attentive and belonging to my gender, raises its intelligence to question why, since I am teaching third-world writing, I haven't given equal space to women writers on my syllabus. I look up, the horse's mouth, a foolish thing to be. Unequal images battle in my mind for precedence—there's imperial Ifat, there's Mamma in the garden, and Halima the cleaning woman is there too, there's uncanny Dadi with her goat. Against all my own odds I know what I must say. Because, I'll answer slowly, there are no women in the third world.

A PAIR OF JEANS

Qaisra Shahraz

Qaisra Shahraz (1958– ) is a novelist, script writer, and educator. She was born in Pakistan and moved to Britain at age nine and has lived there with her family ever since. She studied English and European literature and scriptwriting at the Universities of Manchester and Salford, earning two masters degrees. She is an education consultant, an international teacher trainer, a college inspector, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts,
and a member of the Royal Society of Literature.

Shahraz's publications include two novels:
The Holy Woman
(Black Amber, 2001), winner of the Golden Jubilee Award; and
Typhoon
(Black Amber, 2003). Both have been translated into several languages. Her fourteen-episode television drama,
The Heart Is It
, won two TV Awards in Pakistan. Her award-winning short stories are taught in schools and colleges; “A Pair of Jeans,” her very first work of fiction, was first published in the British text book
Holding Out: Short Stories by British Women Writers
(Crocus, 1988). Since 1990 it has been taught in Germany from literary texts aimed for schools and in 2006 was among the stories chosen by the German Education Ministry of the Federal State of Baden Wurttemberg as compulsory required reading from 2007 to 2012 for the Abitur (higher level) English Literature exam for all the gymnasium schools for seventeen- to eighteen-year-old students.

“A Pair of Jeans” puts the symbolism of clothing at the center of the culture conflict in the lives of Asians in Britain. The jeans that Mariam wears for a normal, innocuous hiking trip put undue stress on her engagement. They become a symbol of all that her fiance's parents fear: the loss of identity and cultural moorings in an alien land, and their loss of power over their son.

• • •

Miriam slid off the bus seat and glanced quickly at her watch. They were coming! And she was very late. Murmuring her goodbye to her two university friends, she made her way to the door and waited for her bus stop. Once there she got off and hurriedly waved goodbye to her friends again. She pulled her jacket close, suddenly conscious of her jean-clad legs and the short vest underneath her jacket. The vest had shrunk in the wash. All day she had kept pulling it down to cover her midriff. Strange, she felt odd in her clothing now, though they were just the type of clothes she needed to wear today, for hill walking in the Peak District in the north west of England. Somehow here, in the vicinity of her home, she felt different. As she crossed the road and headed for her own street she was acutely aware of her
appearance and hoped she would not meet anyone she knew. She tugged at the hemline of her vest; it had ridden up yet again. With the other hand she held onto the jacket front as it had no buttons.

Her mind turned to the outing. It had been a wonderful day, and though her legs ached after climbing all those green hills, still it was worth it. Her eye on her watch, she hastened her pace. It was much later than she had anticipated. She remembered the phone call of yesterday evening. They said they were coming today. What if they had already arrived? She glanced down at her tight jeans. As soon as she reached home, she must discreetly make her way to her room and change quickly.

Just as Miriam reached the gate of her semidetached house she heard a car pull up behind her. Nervously she turned around to see who it was. On spotting the color of the car and the person behind the wheel, her step faltered; color ebbed from her face. On the pretence of opening the gate, she tried to collect her wits. Too late! They were already here. Her heart was now rocking madly against her chest. The clothes burned her. She wanted to rush inside and peel them off. She clutched at her jacket front, covering her waist.