Book Reviews The World
of Pakistani Women
by Aditi Bhaduri
Book: 'Neither Night Nor
Day', edited by Rakhshanda Jalil;
Harper Collins India; Rs 250; Pp 191
When 'Neither
Night Nor Day' landed in my hands, I wondered what I could expect from
the slim volume of 13 stories by women writers from Pakistan. As one
with friends across the divide, I know there is a vibrant women's
movement there and that a defiant civil society, no matter how
beleaguered, does exist. So, what would women be now saying through this
new compilation?
Would the stories be based on the done-to-death theme
of women caught in the crossfire between the West's
'war on terror' and the defiant 'mullahs' (clerics)?
Or would they be those familiar rants against the
Hudood laws (penalties for commission of acts of
immorality, transgression against other's honor,
property, and other common rights, the punishment for
which is specified in the Quran and in the authentic
traditions) and the General's foot-in-the-mouth
comments on women and rape? Or the by-now-clichéd
'hijab (a woman's head and body covering) is
liberating' statements?
As I discovered, 'Neither Night Nor Day' is none of
the above. They are simple tales or rather glimpses
into the lives of the millions of ordinary women going
about their daily lives. These women happen to be in
Pakistan, but they could just as well have been from
any village or town in the subcontinent.
In her forward, the editor, Rakhshanda Jalil, who
works as the Media and Cultural Coordinator at Jamia
Millia Islamia University, writes that her concern has
been 'to present as complete a picture of the
everydayness of life as it is lived and experienced by
Pakistani women... The criteria for selection rests
not so much on name or fame or technical virtuosity in
the craft of the short story but on telling as many
stories as possible in as many styles and voices as
possible.'
And the stories do that brilliantly, without any
pretensions, without any pompous claims to making
feminist statements. Yet, they are about women who
defy and resist, whether in an urban setting in Lahore
or in a dusty village in Sindh.
In 'The Job Application', Nayyara Rahman sketches a
young single mother's heart-rending search for a job
and the final verdict she delivers when she fails to
secure it. The plight of another young mother, who is
heartbroken at parting with her baby boy and prefers
death to dishonor and servitude, is the subject of
Zahida Hina's 'She Who Went Looking for Butterflies'.
In Khaleda Hussein's 'Leaves' we hear echoes of youth
from those in the autumn of their lives; while in 'The
Breast', a young mother, whose baby is taken away from
her simply because it's a girl, defies all norms to
suckle another infant - which is also a girl.
Bina Shah's 'The Wedding of Sundri', that describes a
mother's anguish at the wedding of her 12-year-old
daughter Sundri, could well have been the story of any
mother in any village of India. Just as Qaisra
Shahraz's 'The Goonga' could have lived and died in
anonymity in any small town here. However, despite
conveying the emotions of sorrow, despair, fear, love
and longing with amazing finesse, these two stories
seem a bit stretched. Sundri's farewell is
heart-wrenching enough without the added drama of a
'kari' (honor killing) murder. And the rage and shame
that Goonga's son feels on discovering that his father
is the village 'idiot' is poignant enough, without
going into detailed epilogues.
An attempt at presenting 'as complete a picture' of
the lives of Pakistani women, Kiran Bashir Ahmed's
'Plans in Pink' gives us a glimpse into the life of a
Pakistani Christian. Nikhat Hasan's Kafkaesque 'The
Tongue' is about the resilience of the human spirit,
which always rebels against enslavement.
Then, there is a story that presents a slice of life
of a non-resident Pakistani. The conflict in identity,
the cultural confusion arising from straddling two
worlds is well brought out in 'Neither Night Nor Day'
by Sabyn Javeri. The protagonist is neither able to
fully give up her 'Pakistaniness' nor is she embraced
by the culture of her adopted country, whose dictates
she has to bow down to.
Yet, another 'global Pakistani' speaks to us from a
café in Sarajevo - albeit through a long-winded,
shoddily crafted tale by Maniza Naqvi. There are
echoes of Partition in 'Five Queen's Street'. It
reflects a 15-year-old's guilt and compunction at her
inability to prevent the abduction of her Hindu maid
by Muslim thugs, during 'the long summer of
Partition', when almost 'everything else died in
Lahore'.
'A Sandstone Past' by Sehba Sarwar, my personal favorite, is another comment on the Partition, an
event that continues to exert a great deal of
influence on the lives of millions in the
subcontinent. We get glimpses of post-Partition
Karachi - of the emptiness left behind in the old city
by the flight of its Hindu residents to India -
through a story narrated by a 14-year-old protagonist.
We meet the ghost of Sarita, a young Hindu woman
engaged to a rich Muslim man. The families of the
couple are against the match and Sarita is done away
with in an honor killing. Her ghost, dressed in
bridal finery for a wedding that was never to be,
roams the corridors of the stately house of her
beloved at night. After Sarita's death, which takes
place soon after Partition, her family, which had till
then wanted to remain in Karachi, migrates to India.
When the protagonist, who had accompanied her sister
to a friend's slumber party, returns home, shaken
after an encountering Sarita's ghost, one of her last
tired thoughts before she falls asleep is 'wishing
that one day Sarita's... family could come home again
to Karachi, to the city on the edge of the Arabian
Sea, where her ancestors had lived and died.'
So, while there is nothing mind-blowing intellectual
about the narratives, somewhere they do strike a cord
with the reader through their everydayness and
simplicity.
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When 'Neither
Night Nor Day' landed in my hands, I wondered what I could expect from
the slim volume of 13 stories by women writers from Pakistan. As one
with friends across the divide, I know there is a vibrant women's
movement there and that a defiant civil society, no matter how
beleaguered, does exist. So, what would women be now saying through this
new compilation?