Polygamy: I do, I do, I do and then I do again

From politicians to your neighbourhood cleric, stories of men who have a second wife are the talk of the town.

KARACHI: From politicians like Mustafa Khar to your neighbourhood cleric, stories of men who have a second wife are the talk of the town.

“My advice to anyone who wants to get remarried,” says JC, a Karachi-based lawyer, “is never marry a woman because you like her beauty or if she likes your wallet.”

After eight years of marriage, JC decided to remarry. His new bride had been married for 15 years to a man who JC says had impotency problems. JC’s second wife is his first wife’s relative, and he enlisted the help of his parents to arrange the marriage. “When a man realises that a woman is not his wife, but just a woman, he remarries,” he declares.

A number of reasons are cited by those remarrying, including reuniting with a lost love, sheer boredom at having been married to the same woman for up to 20 years, finding a new soul mate or siring a male child if the first wife only bore daughters or no children at all. In the 1980s and 1990s, anecdotes about men who had married women in the UK or US to obtain a foreign passport were commonplace.

According to a Gallup Pakistan survey conducted in July 2010, 67 per cent of respondents said being married was better than being single.

JC says his first wife was unaware of the courtship or the marriage. “She is a careless woman. She did not realise what was going on.”

There are economic challenges to remarrying. Religion dictates that all wives must be treated equally and fairly, and this plays heavily on the minds of the men who make a second choice. “I cannot afford to have a second wife,” said a taxi driver who works on II Chundrigar Road. While he complains that his wife went back to their home in Buner because she could not adjust to the weather here. “It is too expensive to live in Karachi.”

Begum Mumtaz Qureshi, who has run a marriage bureau in Karachi since 1982, says she does not deal with cases of men who want a second wife. “In cases when men say they want to remarry because the first wife didn’t have a child, you cannot prove that it was the man’s fault or the woman’s. It is not as if the man is carrying some sort of certificate around with him. This happened once - a man decided to remarry and then he could not have children with the second wife either.”

“To remarry, a man must be a rogue,” candidly remarks JC, who has advised several colleagues on the challenges of having two wives. “To me, every woman now seems like my mother or sister. If you are not financially well-off and physically fit, the idea of a second marriage is flawed. If you have both, the second marriage is for ‘status’.”

For ‘commoners’, the gossip circuit in Karachi is also often abuzz with rumours about men who marry their lovers because they are being pressured to “give her a respectable existence” or they get pregnant. Many men keep their second wife secreted away in a separate house until details of their marriage can be made public. For others, a childhood commitment made at the family level often means that they honour their first wife but then they marry out of love later. Some men shuttle between their village where one wife lives and Karachi where their second one lives.

The practicalities of how families then interact may be complicated. Many live together and develop an amicable relationship, but a majority of women refuse to have any contact with the ‘other wife’. In her memoir My Feudal Lord, Tehmina Durrani wrote that after she married Mustafa Khar, she would go out in public with his other wife, who he later divorced. JC says that while his first wife left when she heard from her family that her own relative was her husband’s new wife, he persuaded her to return. His wives lived together for five years, but they now live on separate floors of the same house.

“A man who marries twice never ages,” JC says. “His children keep him young. If she is not rude, a wife never gets old. In every house, only two things should be old - parents and an old wife. Everything else should be new.”

Published in The Express Tribune, February 14^th, 2011.