Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building

4. Anger

4 Anger Throughout my days in the Shipyard, from my first awkward meetings with neighbors to our final, warm good-byes, women would spontaneously—and, it often seemed to me, inexplicably— tell me stories. The question “ek qissa sunaun?” (Shall I tell you a story?) punctuated many a hallway and drawing room conversation. Informants’ tales are of great interest to anthropologists because of the way they point to local genres, discourses, and cultural preoccupations less caught up in, or elicited by, the ethnographer’s questioning. In the Shipyard, there was one such “genre” of stories that women never seemed to tire of telling: stories of angry men and victimized women. Zubaida’s is a more or less representative example: “In a village near ours, there lived a beautiful woman. She was so pretty and so simple (sidhi) and innocent. Her parents married her to her first cousin, and he took her away to his own house, where they lived apart from his family. She was so good. She spent her time reading the Quran and taking care of the house and the food. She never went outside unless it was in full burqa. “But her husband was very jealous, and whenever he would come home, he would be angry, and ask her, ‘Did you see anyone today?’ She would always answer, ‘No, no one,’ and it was the truth. “If he took his wife out with him, even in burqa, her beauty would shine through—her hands, her feet, her eyes—and men would look her way. But she kept her eyes down, never flirted. Still her husband would get so angry. And 104 / Zenana finally one day he killed her. He left her body lying in the courtyard and ran away. It was many days later that her family came to ask after her, and they had to find her there like that.” This was the first of what I initially labeled the “honor killing stories” that I was to hear. Zubaida told it to me at my doorstep one afternoon when she had come looking for her children, Meher and Zain. In the months that followed, I heard many more like it—most so similar as to warrant little more than a scribble in my field notes: “Another honor killing story today.” Ruhi told me one at our second meeting, as we sat drinking tea in her drawing room. Hers was about a woman in a gaon near Ruhi’s natal town of Nawabshah. The woman’s husband was gone for several weeks looking for work, and while he was away, his wife was ordered to deliver some fruit to the landlord’s haveli (mansion). When the husband returned and came to hear of her errand, he was overcome with anger. Convinced that she had been unfaithful (us ne ghalat kam kiya),1 he bombarded her with questions and accusations. This story, too, ended in violence, with the man killing his wife, chopping her up in pieces, and depositing them in front of the haveli. Variations in the stories of this kind were remarkably minor, having to do with details about the woman (she was rich or poor, beautiful or plain, veiled, childless, etc.) or the degree of violence visited upon her (beating, burning, maiming, but usually murder). Some were drawn out, detailed, and well told, like Zubaida’s. Many were mere headlines, terse and epigrammatic, like Hina’s mother’s comment: “A woman was killed by her husband in my village last week for no reason, no reason at all.” All the stories took place in villages, and all of them were represented as “true” (sach)—a story, but not a fairy tale (kahani). The more “honor killing” stories I heard, the more I struggled to ascertain their meaning. Set, as they invariably were, in the gaon, could they have something to do with “the city” and migration? Were these tales simply cenotaphs for the backward, ignorant village—experiments with crafting an “indigenous urbane”? In fact, I believe these stories do have something to do with “the city” and “the village,” but not in the way I initially imagined. What about the relational character of the tellings ? Were these grim tales of victimized women specifically directed at Anger / 105 me? Did they say something about my “structural” relationship with my neighbors? Were their narrators asserting a kind of “parity of modernity” or, conversely, claiming...