Sleeping with the enemy

This week, I am going to lay off the people who have made the citizens of this country unrelentingly miserable and review a book on divorce, which happened to come my way. In her first delightful commentary, Down Bureaucracy Lane, the author Talat Rahim had a dig at members of the administrative service that played an exceptional role in hampering economic progress in our country. Now, the irrepressible writer has done it again. This time the focus has been on conjugal rupture. In Down Matrimonial Lane, she has, in a series of interviews, exhumed the private lives of 30 divorced Pakistani women who belong to the world’s most misogynistic and testerone fuelled society and some of whom live abroad. The way she has welded together personal experiences in the hope that a bit of gravitas might rub off on the reader is marvellously involving.

Though the narrative makes interesting reading, this is in many ways a sad, sad book. While some women have eventually triumphed over tragedy and reconstructed their lives in what for many has been a truly traumatic experience, the reader cannot help feeling compassion for the divorcees, especially in those cases where children are involved. However, when I got to the end of the book, I came to the inescapable conclusion that Pakistani men and women are in essence no different from the men and women of any other country, and the reasons for divorce are often the same. Thailand is a glorious exception. In the land of smiles, one hell of a lot of females divorce their husbands and end up as single parents because their spouses are lazy, just refuse to work and support the family.

If a reader expects to find in this book the odd salacious passage, which might titillate the senses, he will be sorely disappointed. The account has an almost clinical simplicity. It tells the story of the women in an easy-to-read style, without the psychological gobbledygook that often accompanies accounts of family ruptures in the West. And fortunately, the author doesn’t adopt a moralising tone. The names of the women who feature in the book have, of course, been changed for obvious reasons. But there will be readers who, after soaking in personal details and specific episodes in their lives, will recognise the identity of some of the women who have been interviewed. Incidents in a person’s life are often a complete giveaway.

An astonishing number of women get divorced in Pakistan — and not just in the upper middle class, and it is not always the men who make the first move. Most of the jilted females can be found in the lower economic stratum of society. Some are treated with cavalier ruthlessness, battered and abused and, at times, killed. Many have nowhere to turn as they cannot return to their families. I remember reading a number of years ago, a messy and unappetising compendium of women who were divorced for the most capricious of reasons. In Rahim’s book, an assortment of reasons have been given for the split — incompatibility, lack of communication, mental illness, inconsistency, boredom, mother-in-law interference, old-fashioned jilting, the appeal of a much younger partner, loss of the sex drive and even attempted murder. There is also the desire of an educated and talented wife to develop a career and be financially independent. One case was a little odd where a man takes 40 years to discover that he and his wife have nothing in common. The book will certainly have an appeal to divorced women and to couples who have a stormy relationship.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 13^th, 2013.