July 8, 1967

Mohammad Ali Jinnah had come to Karachi in 1947 with a woman who would be acceptable to the new nation. His sister, Fatima Jinnah, had at that point kept house for her brother for years; after he was gone, she would become the first to contest elections for the country’s highest office. A trained dentist and an educated woman at a time when few Indian Muslim were, Fatima Jinnah had reveled in the role of “Mother of the Republic”, never balking at the contradiction that she had not ever married or borne any children of her own. Perhaps it had not mattered as much then, or perhaps people accepted that her child was really Pakistan, the country her brother had wrought from the British. Her demure presence at the elbow of her brother was acceptable to all, even in the contentious moments that preceded Pakistan’s birth: her clothes were modest enough to please the mullahs yet sophisticated enough to reassure those who swore by secularism. It was Fatima Jinnah, in pastel tunics and flared floor-length skirts, who presided over state functions at which her brother and the new country required a hostess. It was Fatima Jinnah who tended to the dying Jinnah when he took to his bed one year after Pakistan was born. It was her face, wan and worn, that flashed on news clips across the world at the founder’s death.

Two decades later, in 1967, Fatima Jinnah had been pushed to the margins of the city she had presided over in its first days as Pakistan’s capital. No longer the sister of the governor general, she lived all alone at the edge of Karachi in a red stone palace near the sea. From here she would make her last heroic effort, contesting elections against the military general Ayub Khan. This woman who was running for office against men could not, however, command the support of other powerful women. When Hamida Bogra’s women had begun their campaign against polygamous husbands, they had deliberately chosen to ignore Fatima Jinnah. The virginal spinster sister of the dead founder was of no use to them. How could she, never having been married, understand the fury of a betrayed wife? …

…So the backs of the women who championed women’s rights remained turned to the woman who was Pakistan’s first female candidate for governor general. They remained averted after she lost to the general and after he signed into law legislation that required men to receive permission from their existing wives before marrying another. So Fatima Jinnah, alive but forgotten, receded further and further from the political consciousness of the country her brother had founded. No one seemed to know or care when or why she moved to Mohatta Palace and shut herself up alone in its twenty-four rooms.

The palace had its own story. Its eerie pink domes and elaborately carved terraces were a remembrance of Shivrattan Mohatta, the Hindu businessman who had lived there before Partition took it from him. The palace had been his summer home at a time when the Arabian Sea, not yet pushed back by land reclamations, crashed its turbulent waves before the palace’s front lawn.

In 1947, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs requisitioned Mohatta Palace. When Shivrattan Mohatta had wept, no one had listened. When at a state function for Karachi businessmen, the homeless magnate managed to get a minute next to Jinnah, he used it to intercede for his house. He received no sympathy; the founder had himself given up too much. “It is a matter of state,” he simply said before walking off.

Nearly twenty years from the day Jinnah uttered those words, his sister found herself in a similar position of wanting. The Pakistan she had heralded at the side of her brother as an independent, democratic, and progressive republic for the subcontinent’s Muslims was ruled by a military dictator and rife with ethnic enmities. The spats with India, in 1948 and again in 1965, fomented an attitude of permanent siege that justified routine suspensions of the law and an unquestioning worship of the military. The generals hated her because she touted democracy, and the mullahs now denounced her because she, once merely the sister of a leader, had had the audacity to try to be one herself.

Made incongruous by the country’s new reality that had erupted around her, Fatima Jinnah became a relic and a recluse. By the summer of 1967, the woman who had for decades led the most public of lives, instrumental in the ideological contest against the British and fervent in her political maneuvering and visions of Pakistan’s future, shut herself up in the quaint palace hoping perhaps to disappear among its looping porches and porticoes. If anyone in Karachi noted her absence, they said nothing at all about it. Every night she locked herself in the second-story bedroom she had chosen in Mohatta Palace. Every morning when she awoke, she dropped the key from the balcony upstairs so that her attendant below could retrieve it and bring her morning tea.

On the morning of July 9, 1967, no key dropped from the bedroom balcony. No one minded and no one cared. The gardener let himself in and watered the lawns, not giving the old woman a second thought when he didn’t see her. Noon passed and then also the afternoon. It was evening when the washerwoman who did Fatima Jinnah’s laundry finally called on a neighbour with her worries about the mistress. It was near dusk by the time a locksmith was called and the door opened. Inside her bedroom, Fatima Jinnah lay cold, having passed away hours before she was found.

She left behind a small poodle, a goat, and a duck. A funeral was held in the grounds of Mohatta Palace the next morning. Hundreds of mourners – dignitaries and bureaucrats and politicians and their wives – came and sighed and waited to be photographed. Karachi in July was brutally hot, so fiery that even the electric fans and the nearby ocean could not alleviate the heat under the tents. By early evening, everyone was gone. At dusk on July 9, 1967, Mohatta Palace was shuttered up and left to the stray gulls and thorny bushes. It would remain that way for decades, with all who wanted it unsure of the strength of their claim, or of its wisdom, and whether it must be bought from the distant descendants of the Jinnahs, the government of Pakistan, or even the descendants of the Mohattas, now scattered somewhere across the border in India. It could have been given to Dina, the daughter of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. But she had stayed in India after the birth of Pakistan, stayed an Indian and then married a non-Muslim against her father’s wishes. Under the inheritance calculations of the laws of the Islamic Republic, she was not entitled to what either her father or her aunt left behind.”

December 1986

It is the most ordinary of days that enclose tragedy within their sealed lips: after years of neat, regular morsels, dutifully swallowed, that singular, bitter bite. And so that December morning had been forgettable until Aunt Amina appeared unexpectedly at our breakfast table, her tear-sodden face hung like an incongruous portrait between the toast and the tea.

The day had begun, as always, with crows and cars and clattering cooking pans from the neighbor’s kitchen sounding together in the morning chorus. There had been the same hurried washing of face and hands, eyes screwed against the sting of soap; the same squabbles with my brother over this or that; the frantic search for the homework book.

It must have been around seven thirty when we descended into the kitchen, the humming, brimming heart of our house, and there we found the silence. My aunt Amina—puller of cheeks, maker of treats—had been thrust into the middle of our morning like a cold, sharp jab. She sat at the far end of the teak table, her wilted head drooping into a teacup. It was the pale yellow one, ornate and delicate, and a present from my father to my mother, cupped in his hands all the way back to Karachi from a business trip to Thailand. I had never seen anyone else drink from it.

Aunt Amina had been absent from the breakfast table of her father’s home, which was also her brother Abdullah’s and our father’s home for nearly eleven years. A dangler on the edges of adult conversations, I knew, even at ten years old, that married women did not come back to spend the night at their parents’ home. A bride’s departure from her father’s house was the beating heart of every marriage ceremony: the severing of one life and the start of another was commemorated in every wedding song I had ever sung and every nuptial ritual I had ever seen. At the rukhsati (leave taking), the bride, laden with gold and garlands, said her final good-bye to each one of her family members. It was a weeping finale to weeks of wedding celebrations, drawing into its cathartic fold all the married women in attendance. At every wedding, they cried with the bride and for the bride and for themselves and the homes and lives they had left behind.

I had seen Aunt Amina’s wedding only in pictures, its details shut within the photo album that my grandmother Surrayya kept in the deep shelves of her metal wardrobe. In it sat Aunt Amina and her husband, Uncle Sohail, as bride and bridegroom, arranged next to relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins, all in their wedding finery. The bride had worn a gold and red sari, its fabric so stiff that it angled at every fold, making a tent-like point in the middle of her head. The elderly women who supervised the dressing of brides in those days had taken away the glasses she always wore. In the few pictures in which she did look up at the camera, Aunt Amina looked as she probably felt: a bit blind.

On our way to school that morning, stuck in the back of the little brown hatchback in which my mother ferried us, I squirmed with questions. Our daily journey was a long one, threading from the suburban streets of our neighborhood in the southeast of the city to the deeper, denser heart of Karachi’s smog-smeared downtown. Well-tended villas standing guard over manicured lawns slowly gave way to grimy apartment buildings teetering over shuttered shops.

The point of demarcation between the familiar Karachi, of home and friends and nearly clean streets, and the darker, grumpier heart of the city was the mazar of the Quaid-e-Azam, Pakistan’s founder, who died on September 11, 1948, when the country was just a year old. The mausoleum’s white dome rose up pristine and commanding from its park of scrubby trees and bushes just as we turned from Shaheed-e-Millat Road onto M. A. Jinnah Road, named after the founder himself. I had been inside just once, for a school trip in the second grade. Under the cavernous atrium of the dome, we stood on the side of the pink marble tomb, thirty girls in a dutiful line. Solemn and serious, I had imagined the man whose staring face was on the rupee lying just under the carved stone: a stern, male Snow White.

After the Mazar, the traffic broke from the hesitant outings of suburban housewives gathering up tomatoes and potatoes and the right cuts of meat to the frenzy of men in pursuit, fueled by the fever of an urban hunt that began every dawn. There were buses with working men hanging from their sides, chauffeurs toting executives, and rickshaws and donkey carts ferrying all the rest. Those who lived here in the old parts of the city lived in tenements, crawling out every morning into the crowded streets, cramped from nights spent squeezed in small, airless rooms. Beyond the Mazar lay the Karachi of crude realities; of heroin addicts who sat crouched under blankets on the medians, of newly arrived farmers who tried to sell live chickens to harried clerks on their way to work, of street urchins that pressed their dirty, snot-crusted faces against car windows, looking into other lives.

As we entered this Karachi the easy, smiling contours of my mother’s face pulled tight and then even tighter. She had fought for this, learning to drive just so she could take us to school, to the best schools, insisting that it could be done and that she could do it. For this she had sat awkwardly between my father and my grandfather, arguing her case against their objections. For this she had tolerated our crying chorus, every Monday and Wednesday, when the instructor from the driving school showed up at the door at 9:00 a.m. sharp. For this, she had tolerated the weeks and months of my grandfather Said, insisting that he, who could not himself drive, must nevertheless accompany her on every trip, because a woman, even one with a driver’s license, could not be trusted to drive alone. Her battle to be permitted to drive had not been an easy one.

Five years had passed and now she was allowed to drive alone and without my father or grandfather correcting the timing of her turns, the certainty of her navigation. But despite her victory, the descent into this other Karachi, the sweaty, angry, male Karachi, was still my mother’s daily test.

Because children never pick the right moment to burst in, I blurted out a question that appeared on the periphery of my mind: “Is Uncle Sohail dead?” My twin brother, Zaid, turned around to glare. I wanted an answer, and so I asked again: “Is Uncle Sohail dead?”

My mother did not respond when the light turned green, or at the next light, or as we descended even deeper into the city, onto roads flagged by beggars and hawkers and aimless men hanging around corners. She was quiet as we drove past the row of cinemas, the Capri, the Nishat, the Regal, the Star, past the bloody face of Sylvester Stallone, the jutting hips of a Punjabi actress stilled in midgyration. We passed the electronics market with its unlit neon signs (Hitachi, Sanyo, Toshiba) exposing their wiry entrails.

It was only as our car pulled up before my brother’s school that my mother spoke. “No, Uncle Sohail is not dead,” she said in the tiny moment before the gates would shut and leave my brother punished for being tardy. “He is not dead, but it would have been better if he were.”

These words, my mild-mannered mother’s wishes for a man’s death, tumbled out behind us, stumbling into our lunch boxes and schoolbooks. I carried them into my classroom, where I took in a lesson on the Indus River valley, where I completed a test on fractions. I said them to myself in recess as I tried to swap my jam sandwich for a carton of fruit juice: “He is not dead, but it would have been better if he were.”

Aunt Amina was there when we returned home from school that day and the one after. She stayed as one December day flowed into another and everyone dragged out their shawls and sweaters to bundle up against the barest bit of cold. She was there and not there, a diminished Aunt Amina, an approximation of the witty woman whose jokes and inflected barbs spiked up casual afternoon chats and whose cuddles had infused me with warmth for as long as I could remember. The woman I saw had been wrung out like the washing that hung outside the kitchen window: twisted, drained, and turned to squeeze out every drop of spirit.