‘Before I realised it, I had consented…’

My personal life had taken a dramatic turn on July 29, 1987, when I agreed to an arranged marriage on the prompting of my family. An arranged marriage was the price in personal choice I had to pay for the political path my life had taken. My high profile in Pakistan precluded the possibility of my meeting a man in the normal course of events, getting to know him, and then getting married. Even the most discreet relationship would have fuelled gossip and rumour that already circulated around my every move…
As an undergraduate in America during the flowering of the women’s movement, I was convinced that marriage and a career were compatible, that one didn’t preclude the other. I believed then, and still do, that a woman can aim for and attain all: a satisfying professional life, a satisfying marriage, and the satisfaction of children. I looked forward to marriage with a man who would pursue his goals just as I pursued mine. The military coup d’etat had changed all that…
So many of my father’s childhood stories to us had revolved around our future weddings. “I don’t want you to get married, but of course you will,” my father used to say to Sanam and me. “I’ll be waiting for the day when you come back and if there’s one tear in your eye or one crack in your voice, I’ll go to your husband and beat him up and bring you home to me.” He was teasing, of course, but even the subject of marriage would remind me of my childhood and fill me with sadness. I hadn’t reconciled my grief.
~*~
Soon before the family was to gather in Cannes in July 1985, my mother and Auntie Manna approached me with a proposal from the landowning Zardari family on behalf of their son, Asif. Auntie Manna, I learned later, had carefully researched the prospective groom before passing on the request to my mother asking the Zardaris to answer such questions as Asif’s academic qualifications (Petaro Cadet College, the London Centre of Economic and Political Studies), his profession (real estate, agriculture, and the family construction business), his hobbies (swimming, squash, and his own polo team, the Zardari Four), and even whether he liked to read!
“Well, he can’t compare with Benazir, but he does like reading,” said his father, Hakim Ali, a former member of the National Assembly and now vice-president of the Awami National Party, a member of the MRD. Auntie Manna, an old friend of Asif’s family, wanted a personal inspection of the prospective groom as well. Asif was brought to her house, where he evidently passed muster, appearing slim and smart in his polo outfit. Satisfied on all counts, Auntie Manna then contacted my mother in England.
But tragedy intervened again. Within a month, my brother Shah Nawaz was murdered. I was shattered, as were we all. I told my mother and my aunt that I didn’t want to even think of marriage for at least a year if not two. I didn’t even ask the name of the intended groom from the Zardari clan.
~*~
I wondered what future husband would be able to tolerate a life as demanding as mine. When I was home, my political meetings often ran well into the night. And I was rarely even at home, constantly travelling the length and breadth of Pakistan. What husband would accept that my time was not my own, so it could not be his? Was there a man in existence who could break with tradition enough to adjust to the fact that my first commitment would always be to the people of Pakistan and not to him? I was concerned as well about the feelings of the people were I to marry… If I married, would they think I no longer needed them?
On the other hand, I argued with myself, remaining single could work against me politically both inside and outside Pakistan. In the male chauvinist society we live in, little thought is given to a man who remains a bachelor. But a single woman is suspect. “Why aren’t you married?” journalists often asked me. I wanted to ask them irritably if they asked the same question of a single man, but restrained myself. The journalists were not used to covering single women in traditional Muslim societies, and the unusual circumstances dictated the unusual question.
Still, inherent in the question, and representative of a whole school of male thought, was the bias that there must be something wrong with a woman who wasn’t married. Who knew if she would make a reliable leader? What would she do under pressure? Instead of considering my qualifications and the party platform, the unspoken reservations were that a single woman might be too neurotic to lead the country, or too aggressive, or too timid. This was especially true in a Muslim society, where marriage was regarded as the fruition of a man and a woman’s life and children as its natural consequence.
~*~
“How do you marry a perfect stranger?” I asked a friend in Lahore when I returned to Pakistan. “Once you’re married, you look at the person with different eyes,” she said. I asked another friend the same question. “Even if you’ve never met him, you start to love him because he’s your husband,” she said. “You know the saying: First comes marriage, then comes love.”
I did some investigating on my own. Someone told me Asif had taken a bad fall from his polo pony and would limp for the rest of his life. That turned out not to be true, but even so it didn’t bother me. A limp was not a character flaw. I spoke with someone close to Asif who told me he was generous to a fault, always giving money to his friends when they were in financial trouble. I liked generosity. Another mutual friend used an Urdu saying to describe Asif’s strong will and loyalty: “He’s a friend’s friend, and an enemy’s enemy,” he told me. The description reminded me of my brothers and was appealing.
For all that I was inhumanly busy, I was lonely at times. 70 Clifton is a big house, built to contain generations of Bhuttos at a time. Al-Murtaza, too, is large. Yet often at night, the only room with lights on was mine. I felt a degree of insecurity about the houses as well. Neither property belonged to me. Mir would undoubtedly remarry and return to Pakistan as soon as it was possible. What would my position be in the home of my brother and his new wife? I needed my own home, I decided. I needed my own family as well. My sister was married and had a child. Mir had Fathi, and Shah had Sassi. We, who had been the nuclear family, had given way to other nuclear families. Where did that leave me in the swirl of all these new families? Death, too, was weighing on my mind. Before Shah’s murder, I felt we were a big family, but when there were just three of us, the family seemed small. With only one brother, the balance was upset. The idea of having my own children seemed more and more appealing to me.
~*~
When I returned from Islamabad to Karachi, I found a handwritten request to call on me from Asif’s stepmother. “Fakhri, Fakhri, what do I do?” I phoned my cousin. “Meet with her,” she urged. “If you like, I’ll stay with you. Besides, you can ask her about all those doubts you keep expressing to us.”
“It would be such an honour if you would consider Asif,” the impeccably dressed Cambridge graduate said to me in the living room at 70 Clifton. “Marriage would give you a new dimension.” I restrained myself from saying that a woman doesn’t need marriage to give herself a new dimension and instead proceeded to tell Asif’s stepmother every reason why marriage to me would not, in fact, be an honour for a man, but a nightmare.
“My life in politics is not an ordinary one,” I told her. “I don’t have the luxury of calmly waiting for elections every five years. My politics are a commitment to freedom and the meaning of my life. How would a man feel, knowing that his wife’s life does not revolve around him?”
“My dear, Asif is a very confident young man. He understands what he’s in for,” Asif’s stepmother assured me. I rushed on.
“I have to travel a lot, and I can’t always take a husband with me.”
“Asif has his own work, my dear, and won’t always be able to travel with you,” she countered.
“I hear he loves going out to parties and socializing,” I said. “In the little private time I have, I prefer to stay home with a few friends.”
“That’s not a problem,” she said simply. “When a man settles down he likes to stay at home with his wife and family.”
Feeling encouraged, I took a deep breath and broached the most difficult subject of all. “In spite of custom, I cannot live with my in-laws,” I said. “There are political workers and meetings in the house day and night, taking up the living room and dining room. I will need my own house.”
“I agree, as does Asif,” she said, unbelievably. “Asif’s mother and sisters will need privacy too.”
Who is this extraordinary man, I thought. And I rescheduled my trip to London, far away from the intelligence vans and the watchful eyes of the Zia regime.
Thank God for the political appointments which occupied my mind in London during the day of July 22, 1987. Not until evening did my stomach start to churn with anxiety as I realized that there was no escape from meeting Asif.
Auntie Manna sipped her coffee nervously as Asif and his stepmother rang the doorbell of my cousin Tariq’s flat. I tried to look casual from the security of an armchair in the drawing room, my heart pounding harder and harder as each step of Asif’s brought him nearer. They must have been excruciating steps for him, too, though he looked confident in the one glance I gave him. Everyone present talked politely of impersonal matters. No one mentioned marriage at all.
Asif and I didn’t have a conversation by ourselves during the entire evening. He was wearing glasses, and I couldn’t even see the expression in his eyes. I didn’t have a single feeling about him at all after the evening ended, even when he sent me a dozen roses the next day. The crate of mangoes he sent me from Fortnum and Mason, however, along with a box of marrons glaces, my favourite sweet, were delicious. So was the crate of cherries he sent to Sunny.
“What’s the answer, Pinkie?” asked my mother, Auntie Behjat, and Auntie Manna that morning, and the next and the next. “I don’t know yet,” I said.
I felt torn. I knew my friends in the West would find it difficult to understand the peculiar cultural and political circumstances that were leading me toward an arranged marriage. And there was also the personal side of the question. In my position as the leader of the largest opposition party in Pakistan, I could not risk the scandal of breaking any engagement or ever getting divorced, except under the most extreme circumstances. I was being asked to make up my mind about living the rest of my life with a man whom I had met only three days before and, at that, always in the company of our respective families.
I introduced him to a few of my friends from Oxford. They liked him. I introduced him to a Pakistani school friend. She found him charming and told me to marry him. Asif took my family out to dinner and I had to sit next to him. I kept my niece Fathi, who talks non-stop, on my other side for protection. The next day my cousin Tariq and Asif had a Man-to-Man talk. “If you marry Benazir, you’ll be in the spotlight,” Tariq told him. “The tiniest thing you do, even staying out late with friends, will reflect on her.” Asif won Tariq over too.
“He understands the situation,” my cousin assured me later. “He has wanted to marry you for years. He knows exactly what it means.”
“What’s the answer, Pinkie?” Yasmin pressed. Every morning Sunny and Mummy rushed to my bedside and stared at me meaningfully. “What’s the problem? What’s taking you so long to decide?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Fate presented itself in the form of a bee. On the fourth day of the Zardari visit, I took Fathi to Windsor Park while Asif went to a polo match. A bee stung me in the hand. By dinnertime my hand was very swollen. “I’m taking you to the hospital,” Asif told me when he arrived at the flat. He ignored my protests, calling for a car, arranging for the doctor, buying the prescribed medicine. For once I am not the one in charge, I thought. I am the one being cared for. It was a very nice and unaccustomed feeling.
Fate intervened again the following night during our search for an elusive Pakistani restaurant. Mummy, Sanam, Asif, and I piled into a car with some other Pakistani friends to go to dinner. We got lost. But instead of getting irritable or impatient, Asif kept everybody laughing in the car. He was flexible and had a sense of humour, I noted to myself, as well as being caring.
“What’s the answer, Pinkie?” my mother asked the next morning. I took a deep breath. “All right, Mummy,” I said. Seven days after I met Asif, we were engaged.
~*~
“Don’t walk so fast. You’re not late for a public meeting,” Sunny whispered to me through the pink veil covering my face as she and Mummy led me to the wedding stage in the garden.
“Brides walk sedately,” echoed Auntie Behjat as she held the Holy Quran over my head and tried to keep up.
I tried to look demurely down at the ground as I took my place on the wedding dais. My cousin Shad came up, smiling.
“What’s taking the men so long?” I asked, wondering what was happening on Asif’s side, where the maulvi from our family mosque was reading the marriage vows.
“Manzoor ah-hay? Do you accept?” Shad asked me in Sindhi. I thought he was jokingly asking me if I was ready.
“Ah-hay,” I replied. “Yes. But where are they?” He only smiled and asked me the question twice more. “Ah-hay. Ah-hay,” I repeated. Before I realised it, I had consented to the three questions of the male witness, and was a married woman.