Right to life?

“… What happened?”

“I couldn’t live with being no more than somebody’s possession anymore!”

I’m in shock! Hearing about the breakup of the 12 year marriage of a friend who got married to her Prince Charming at the age of 16 has knocked me for six. I can still see the way they looked on that day… She was so young, so beautiful and so sure of her destiny in him despite the age difference and him looking proud and so handsome. And 3 days ago, hearing her say that she had divorced and returned to Pakistan stunned me.

Sitting across from her in the living room of her aunt’s house here, I listened to the story of how a fairy tale wedding was a prelude to a living, breathing personal hell. It seemed like a tale one reads in the newspaper of a how a child bride of 16 was so carefully molded into a woman beyond reproach in her appearance, her outlook and her personality until she was no more than a vase sitting in the hallway of the house that was her prison for more than a decade.

“I was a showpiece! His ultimate accomplishment! I was going to be the ugly duckling from Pakistan that would turn into a beautiful British swan in the hands of a master.”

Manipulation, emotional blackmail, and a regular stream of verbal and physical abuse served to ensure that she was the perfect Pakistani turned Brit hostess in London where no English stiff-neck would find anything to fault in her dress, in her mannerism or her speech. She was to be perfect. And when she faltered it was a simple matter of instilling some discipline.

But at what price did her freedom come? The only reminder that she has children is the one photograph that is now on the coffee table where we sat.

I may be biased. I don’t know any truth about their relationship except what M has told me. Hard as it is to believe our contact over the past 10 to 12 years has been erratic although being family friends meant that we kept getting news of each other and occasionally did talk, apparently that too when ‘he’ allowed it. All the rumors suggested a match made in heaven and a living embodiment of a fairy tale. But the woman sitting in front of me on that floor had traces of fear and nightmares in her eyes. And she was frightfully calm.

She wasn’t regretting her decision because she believes it her right to live her life for herself before she lives it for someone else including her two boys. As she puts it, they are as much his as hers but she couldn’t continue to live in a house where nobody could even see her cry. As she puts it, once her duty of giving birth to the children was done, they were taken away to be brought up my hired help and were being schooled by the grandparents.

“I didn’t even feed them! They’ve never slept in my bed and beyond the very formal good mornings and good nights and occasional meals they don’t speak to me. When I finally cracked, he said the children wouldn’t go and when I looked at them all I could see was him. They were his as they always had been. I was simply the means of bringing them into the world and beyond that nothing. The identify more with their grandmother than with me. They had nothing of me in them and when I realized that I walked out.”

And now, after coming here, her parents refused to let her back into the house. They say she disgraced them and their values by walking out on her children. It is the wife’s duty and obligation to keep house for her husband and obey his every say. And as for the abuse, Islam justifies that it can be used to discipline the wife. Somehow I don’t think forgetting to place a fork on the left side or the right side of the plate is one of those conditions. And I don’t think whipping with a belt hard enough to leave marks on the back comes under Islamic code of conduct between husband and wife. From my limited knowledge, a husband is allowed to discipline his wife only under extreme duress and that too if it’s causing some detriment to religious belief and even then to take care not to mark the woman and explicitly not to hit her on the face.

Is this what marriage is? The only way it works is if the woman is completely subjugated. No personality and no wishes of her own, she conditions herself to work endlessly to satisfy a man’s emotional, physical and other needs? What about her right to life?

I’m not advocating equality of sexes. I am open eyed enough to admit that Islam does not propagate equality of sexes. It thrives on the differences and builds on them in light of obligations and rights on both parts. It’s the both parts that so many men in our society regardless of their economic or social stature don’t understand. They know to a man that they can beat their wives, they can have up to four wives at a time, and that the wife is supposed to cater to their every whim. What about the fact that they are supposed to be kind and gentle to their wives, treat them well, keep them happy and ensure that their emotional and physical needs are met as well?

And I’m staggered by her parents’ response. Since when did having children become something for which she would continue to suffer abuse when technically she wasn’t even bringing them up. Would the Islam that allows a woman to refuse a person if she doesn’t like the look of him, condone her staying with a person who counted her every breath as an allowance and a boon from him? Why have they chosen to believe the man they know routinely hit their only daughter on the basis of one phone call where the gent in question was crying about M’s cruelty and callousness in walking out of a marriage despite his protests over their own daughter’s declaration of what she went through when she has the bruises and scars to prove it?

There is so much in my head right now. Is this marriage? Is this religion? Are these things a failing of our society or of an individual? Was it right or wrong? How do I judge? Should she have compromised? Would she have lived if she had?