Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building

5. Intimacy

5 Intimacy In addition to the wealth of “angry men” stories with which I was regaled, stories drawing explicitly on hadith and other religious themes were legion. One topic in particular stood out as a perpetual favorite. I will shorthand it, roughly, as “the moral deed justly rewarded.” Typically, tales with this theme featured a good and modest woman who, due to extreme poverty, is forced to commit immoral and illegal acts, like consuming haram (forbidden) food, stealing, or engaging in prostitution. Through a self-sacrificing act—like feeding a faqir or tending a wounded animal—the woman’s sins are erased. A messenger of God comes to inform her that this “good deed” is “her Hajj.” So ubiquitous was this type of story that my husband and I laughingly referred to them as “‘This is your Hajj’ story #306,” “#307,” and so on. But as I was to discover, the intriguing tensions that these stories engage, between performative morality or duty and an inner goodness, between signs of piety and the pious soul, serve to dramatize a powerful, ongoing theme in women’s local relationships: the coherence, or lack thereof, between one’s “insides” and one’s “outsides.” The leitmotif of these stories is that external circumstances (generally poverty) prevent the protagonist’s “outsides” from matching her “insides .” The appearance of the messenger enables or secures a longed-for 138 / Zenana transparency, where the truth of the woman’s insides, her inner goodness, is readable—by the woman herself and the world at large. Significantly, resolution does not lie in a transformation of material conditions, such that the protagonist’s outward comportment may, at last, reflect her inner state. On the contrary, the reward for her good deed is a kind of divine intimacy, a “being known” by God. To know and be known is an end in itself. But there is another truth that unfolds in these tales—a warning of sorts. For just as exigent circumstance may obscure the truth of a noble heart, the reverse is also true: outward signs of piety, solicitude, or friendship can mask evil or malevolent hearts. There is a saying I heard repeated many times in the Shipyard: dost hota nahin, har hath milanewala: Not everyone who shakes your hand is your friend.1 As the stories foretell, women’s everyday reflections on intimacy are fraught with paradox. There are expressions of deep longing—for transparency , access to the insides, the inner life of self and others; on the other hand, there are clear and oft repeated interdictions on being open, violable, exposed. In this chapter, I consider women’s understanding of intimacy as it emerges through a kind of labor of attachment—both licit and covert—performed in the civic, homosocial space of the apartment building. This is an intimacy that refers neither to the modern figure of the romantic couple (which, though increasingly ideologically available for my informants, remains markedly suspect) nor to the idiom of kinship . The possibility of intimacy in this new space may go far in explaining women’s commitment to the intense daily labor of individual and collective emotional regulation on which everyday peace rests. But as I will demonstrate, the specific terms of this intimate female sociality— this knowing and being known—may be rather more complexly related to the emergence of the peacemaking subject. Before I proceed, I wish to remind the reader of the specificity of this site, a form of dwelling that, to an unprecedented degree (both historically and biographically for my informants) brings together strangers— people from a diversity of ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian backgrounds— under one roof. Furthermore, as a result of both financial constraints and concerns about modesty and gender segregation, women in the Shipyard (and I’m talking specifically about married women) were not mobile. Without cars or money for cabs (or, for that matter, permission from Intimacy / 139 husbands or in-laws), they were unable to visit, with any regularity, their affinal or consanguinal kin (or old schoolmates) who lived in other parts of the city or beyond. The point of this is that this local space is both unprecedentedly foreign for most of these women, meaning they are surrounded by ghair log (outsiders) and at the same time it defines, more than ever, women’s theater of action. Except for special occasion visits to...