Objects of Affection

Pages: 407

Despite the stereotyping of women in Muslim homes,several women writers from the subcontinent,who happened to be Muslim,have been widely read from Ismat Chughtai to Qurratulain Hyder and Communist-doctor-writer Rashid Jahan,who was one of the many angry young women of Urdu literature of the 20th century. They explored their status as women,and their worlds with tremendous empathy,sensitivity and detail. Nighat M Gandhi carries on this tradition of trying to understand the lives of Muslim women in Bangladesh,Pakistan and India,not through anger,but love and its umpteen interpretations.

As someone who has lived in Bangladesh,India and Pakistan,who made the difficult choice of defying her Muslim Pakistani family to marry a Hindu Indian she met while studying in the US,she is uniquely positioned to embark on a project like this.

The strength of Alternative Realities is not that it is alternative,but that it attempts to understand complex realities by finding the centre of gravity of diverse lives and histories. More than six decades after Partition,the author travels to meet women from the region and understand their definition of love. You meet compromise dressed as love in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,a lesbian couple in Karachi,where the author finds a cluttered sink and a refreshing sense of priorities in a world where women are driven by chores they feel compelled to finish before anything else. The book combines the style of a travelogue with detailed documentation of personal histories. The gaze and the lens is feminine,whether it is walking in the bazaar streets in a chador,or assessing how urbanisation has choked all footpaths in Karachi,but the success of the book is that it also conveys what else is happening in the region.

The first story is of Nighats own love for a Hindu boy. An anecdote about her fathers anger when the family orders a pork pizza in the US makes you fear another NRI story,but her voice soon finds authenticity as she journeys to Abbotabad,Oghi,Allahabad and Sind.

The stories enthrall and surprise both author and reader. You meet several shades of the subcontinent,the Taliban- and drone-induced terror near the Afghan border,Hindu women from Pakistani Thar coming to the Bightai shrine to celebrate Diwali,women in Bangladesh urging the author to think of herself as a citizen of the cosmos,and,finally,a Gujarati Muslim poet-writer,who sacrifices her love for a Gujarati Brahmin after the 2002 riots. Nighat Gandhi finds these diverse stories and effortlessly weaves them into a whole,through poetry and politics and the universal quest for love.