But by the time 1970 was exiting the monsoon season, with civil war beginning to loom and the absurdity of panels and ribbons and pictures asserting itself in my mother’s mind, she walked out of the Poet’s life and went in search of an identity that wasn’t caught up in his shadow. At the outset of her search she found my father, plucked him up by the collar and, weeks later, married him.
The Poet responded by writing Laila. My mother remained unmoved, and proved this by becoming pregnant just a couple of months after her marriage. When the Poet heard of her pregnancy, he came to see her. (‘He was wearing that grey shawl I loved — it was a hot, hot day, he must have been incredibly uncomfortable. But that didn’t stop him from wearing the grey shawl,’ she told me once when I asked her for details of their reunion. That was as much as I ever got out of her about it.)
They didn’t move in together, of course — not then, not ever, at least not in Karachi. But her father had already died and left her the two adjoining houses in Bath Island, so she and the Poet became neighbours. Everyone expected a wedding to take place after her divorce with my father came through, but the Poet didn’t believe in marriage — the illegitimate child of a rich landowner and a woman who worked on the lands, he grew up with a fierce dislike for the very institution which would have saved his mother from her outcast status, with only a widowed aunt willing to take her in and help raise her son. And in any case, my mother said, she and the Poet weren’t temperamentally suited to co-habitation and much preferred adjoining houses so there was no need for a formal contract which couched the terms of marriage in monetary terms and demanded a declaration of religious beliefs. She came to see the idiocy of this view when he died, but by then it was too late.
For a good part of the first twelve years of my life the Poet was either in prison or self-imposed exile; and wherever he was, she wasn’t far behind. I think the government moved him to jails in remote parts of the country just to make life difficult for my mother who would shuttle back and forth from Karachi to visit him whenever prison rules or bribery allowed. On the occasions he was allowed daily visitors she would find somewhere to live near the jail — he had admirers in every part of the country who offered her places to stay — which sometimes meant being away from home, and me, for weeks at a stretch. The times when he was jailed in Karachi rather than anywhere else owed themselves entirely to Beema, who had relatives in the military and bureaucracy, and who was the only person who seemed to see how much I needed my mother around.
Most of Karachi society disapproved of her, of course. Running around the country after some man she wasn’t even married to, leaving her daughter behind. But they also said that letting Beema raise me was the best thing she could do for me, not that that excused her behaviour in any way. From 1972 on, however, the whispers about the ‘coffee-party feminist’ began to subside. This was the second phase of ‘Samina Akram, Activist’, and she inaugurated it by speaking out vocally against the false imprisonment of the Poet, who was in jail again, allegedly for the indecency of poems he’d written five years earlier, though everyone knew that the real reason for his imprisonment was his poem ‘Ufuq’ which condemned the generals and politicians he held responsible for the tragedy of the 1971 civil war. My mother’s attempts to have him freed brought her into contact with other women who were engaged in similar fights for husbands or brothers or sons. Even after the Poet was released she continued to seek out, and later to be sought out by, women in search of justice. She offered them whatever help she could by pointing them in the direction of sympathetic lawyers and journalists or explaining their legal rights to them — the research she had done for the unwritten book about women and jurisprudence in Pakistan served her well over the years. But the fame she acquired was greater than the sum of everything she did — it had something to do with that grazia that Shehnaz Saeed spoke of.
And what of me in all this? I was just a few months old when the Poet was imprisoned in 1972, and my mother knew the ability of a smiling infant to cut through bureaucracy. I could instantly reduce both uniformed and inky-fingered men into cooing creatures — and though they tried to snap back into positions of authority, the damage had been done as soon as they started addressing me in baby-talk. The landscape of my first few months in this world was one of courtrooms, prisons, lawyer’s offices. ‘I would not allow them to tell me there was a choice to be made between motherhood and standing up for justice,’ my mother used to say, and I never asked, ‘But what about the choice to be made between motherhood and romantic love?’
I looked down at the paper in my hand again.
HE WAS IMPRISONED SEVERAL TIMES DURING THE 70s BY THE BHUTTO GOVERNMENT FOR HIS POLITICAL VERSE INCLUDING ‘UJALA’ (DAWN) AND ‘AIK AADH LAMHA’ (A LITTLE DISTANCE).
He was one of Bhutto’s strongest critics, but even so he was filled with apprehension when the anti-Bhutto movement pulled religion out from behind its veil of privacy and into the realm of politics as both secular-minded and hard-line religious politicians banded together to campaign against the government. Bhutto tried appeasing the hardliners by introducing Islamic laws, but the General in the wings took over and decided to show everyone how Islamization was really done. My memories of those days are all about fear. The Poet and my mother were in Karachi at this point but I used to feel claustrophobic in their presence, all that pessimism sitting so heavily on them, evident even to a six-year-old, that part of me was actually relieved when
IN 1977, FOLLOWING THE MILITARY COUP WHICH BROUGHT GENERAL ZIA TO POWER, HE WENT INTO EXILE IN COLOMBIA to stay with his great friend Rafael Gonzales — my mother went with him.
HE RETURNED TO PAKISTAN OVER A YEAR LATER.
He was unable to write a word in his time away, and my mother claimed that following Pakistan’s news from a distance had almost given her a nervous breakdown. They saw in the New Year—1979—with a promise to their friends that they weren’t going to leave again, and I moved half my toys and books back into the blue bedroom in my mother’s house with every confidence that I would have no reason ever to move them out again.
IN 1979 GENERAL ZIA INTRODUCED THE HUDOOD ORDINANCE WHICH NAZIM, WHO KNEW SOME WOMEN ACTIVISTS, WAS VERY CRITICAL ABOUT.
‘How can words be used for such indignity?’ the Poet said, when he heard the details of the laws being passed in the name of Islam. (And my father’s father, the most gentle and pious of men, wept himself to death over it.) The Poet wanted to get back on a plane and leave the country, leave for anywhere. But my mother told him he’d have to go without her. Something in her broke free the day she sat at her dining table in dressing-gown and slippers, smoking a cigarette, and reading out loud every detail of the Hudood Ordinance. When she got to the part about ‘Zina’, which said an accusation of rape could only be proved in a court of law if there were four pious, male Muslim adults willing to give eye-witness testimony, she looked up at me and said, ‘For the first time, I wish I’d given birth to a son.’
LATER THAT YEAR, ZIA HANGED BHUTTO AND THE POET WROTE ‘ZEHER’ (POISON).
When he heard of Bhutto’s death the Poet locked himself in his cramped, dark store-room, and when my mother finally found a spare key and opened the door she found him whimpering and shaking. Within days of the execution he produced ‘Zeher’ and no one dared publish it. Undeterred, he made twelve copies of the poem, called twelve of his friends over for dinner and handed a copy of the poem to each one. ‘It was all very Last Supper,’ my mother later said, recalling the dinner. It was hardly the most accomplished of his poems (‘“Eyes expelling barbed wire in place of tears?” my mother said, holding the page away from her, between thumb and forefinger. ‘That’s what you get with instant poetry.’) but within forty-eight hours there were thousands of copies circulating throughout the country, being set to music, and through song entering the nation’s consciousness. That’s when he and my mother devised the code — they knew imprisonment was inevitable, and given previous instances in which letters smuggled into the prison ground had been intercepted, they decided a secret code would be a sensible safety measure.