Thirteen and clueless, I nestled onto the leather couch and handed Baba jaani the television remote. From the corner of my eye, I observed him take off his spectacles and wipe the cold precipitation off his forehead. I sighed. He was aggrieved. Assuming it was the gruesome heat that had led to his anger; I quietly switched the cooler on.
“There’s no need,” he said in a monotone.
I quietly sat down next to him. “Why are you upset, Baba jaani?” I inquired. There was a brief moment of silence between us. He combed his moustache with the back of his fingers and rested his palm underneath his beard. He was a corpulent man for his age.
“Did you wear your Hijab when you went to your Uncle Akbar’s house to study?” he asked.
Judging by the tense expressions on his face, I fixed my gaze on the blank television screen. I could see his reflection coldly staring at mine.
That was the first day my father had locked me in a room and had refused to let me go to the qari-sahab because I had been a disobedient and a dishonest child. My Api told me that it was a fair punishment as the bill had now been passed and if I could not abide by its rules now, my husband would beat me in the future. Some months after that incident occurred, I learned what the bill was about. I thought I had been absurd all this time thinking that women were to be protected under the ideology of our country.
“My sweet summer child,” my father said. “The bill has been passed to protect you. I signed it myself. It will keep you safe from the monstrous society that we’ve given birth to.”
My understanding of the bill was just the same as what I had made of the berry picking incident, some summers ago. With a shawl tightly wrapped around my body, my sister and I used to climb Uncle Akbar’s garden steps and peek inside the fence hole to see if there were any ripe berries. If there were, I would quietly slither my petite body against the gate and collect some scrumptious fruit. This one time, I dropped all the collected fruit to the ground and stepped on it. I did not do so on purpose, but it had just happened. I quietly went back and told my sibling that it was God who did not want us to have those berries as they were sour. Someone ought to take down that tree! That’s precisely what my father did when he signed that bill; permit himself to give a reason for what he had done.
Being married to a prestigious household, I forgot that my father was a part of the Council of Islamic Ideology, but the harm he had done was yet for all of us to witness.
I frowned upon the drastic changes that took place years after the bill had been passed; acid attacks, violent killings, suffocation whilst the wives slept. These ruthless tales of terror came printed in all shapes and sizes in the Sunday newspaper. My father would smirk.
“These are all punishable women,” he would say. “They deserve this!”
There would be a sense of utter proudness on Baba jaani’s face as he explained to us how the Islamic world was getting cleansed of the evil. With a stern look, he would read the headlines on the television screen and call the woman a scoundrel.
He kept on doing that as the occurrences rapidly increased till one day, my sister appeared on the doorstep, bruised from head to toe, with a black eye as evident as a birthmark, struggling to stand against the pillar outside.
“The salt was too less in his fo-food,” she murmured. “He would tell me every day to increase the salt in his food. I was a bad woman.”
My father broke down in tears as the images of Iqbal’s colossal body bending down and hitting his blood, flashed across his wrinkled eyes. He sobbed and wept, but all my sister would whimper was that it was okay, it was allowed, as the bill stated that her bones mustn’t break, and all else was well.
