By S Zahra Fatima Shah
The Amma I remember is small yet stout, old and grey, how grandmothers are described in books. I remember her as the distant mother to my father. The slightly acerbic mother-in-law to my mother. The doting grandmother to my siblings and me. The woman who brought up seven children and helped bring up 17 of their children.
When I was little, she woke up at the crack of dawn to churn milk into lassi for my grandfather, cook up thirty rotis and fry eggs and okra — the traditional Sindhi breakfast — all on her own. She would let me run around without my shoes on, tossing sofa cushions and kitchen utensils to wreak havoc around the house in the early hours of the day, till the noise woke everyone up. She would laughingly let me hide behind her to escape my mother’s wrath. Amma was my favorite grandmother.
Her life story was revealed to me in snippets. I was six years old when I realised that my paternal grandparents were distant cousins. I was eight when I was told that Amma had been an orphan. I was 12 when I understood that at nearly the same age, many years earlier she had married my grandfather. I was 19 when I saw her meet her sister, who had always lived three blocks from my father’s childhood home in Larkana, Sindh—for the first time in sixty years.
Her forever-misty, charcoal-black eyes twinkled as she called me over enthusiastically from where she sat in her wheelchair.
“Sonoo, this is my sister. Yes, my actual sister. We are sisters by blood,” she said, smiling for the first time in months. “I thought she would be gone by now but she’s here.”
A taller, wrinkled, stooped woman stood next to her. As I tried to piece together what was happening, the woman threw her arms around me with incredible gusto.
“Oh my god, you look just like me when I was young,” this stranger said to me. “You didn’t know your grandmother had an older sister?”
I looked at the frail, diminished frame of Amma and then at the surprisingly springy “older” woman next to her.
“Look how she has fallen into old age so fast,” said the woman. It became clear to me; this was Amma’s sister. “The last time I saw her, she was small too, but then she was a child, now she’s emaciated. Look what being wrenched away from her family did to her.”
I looked quizzically at Amma, but the sisters were now crying into each other’s arms inconsolably. Not knowing what else to do, I tried to comfort them.
It was my aunt’s wedding day and guests I had never seen before filled my grandparents’ front yard. I assumed that they were from the groom’s family, but I saw my mother and other aunts emotionally greeting other women. All of them dabbing at their eyes to keep the tears from ruining their make-up.
I later found out that the unknown guests were members of Amma’s family. Her sister’s children and their families, and those of Amma’s other, now-deceased siblings.
“Why have we never met them before?” my siblings and I asked our mother when we got home after the ceremony. “We didn’t even know they existed.”
My mother answered in a voice filled with sorrow. “Amma was never allowed to meet them, she was not even allowed to mention them. Only after her stroke, Amma said her last wish was to see her family. So all her children fought very hard to make this happen.”
That is when I found out how “honor” had ripped my grandmother apart from her family, sixty-odd years ago.
As my mother told the story, Amma was little when her parents passed away. She and her four siblings moved to their maternal grandmother’s village in Sindh in pre-partition British India. Amma’s mother had not been a member of the revered “Syed” bloodline, and her father had married her against his family’s wishes.
A few years later in 1947, Sindh became a part of the Muslim-majority Pakistan. But even as the land was geographically divided in the name of religion, old customs that had seeped into the fabric of the province’s culture remained. Casteism, the legacy of ancient Hindu practices, had been warped into placing the Prophet’s descendants, or “Syeds” as they were known, at the apex of Muslim lineage. The Syeds were revered throughout Sindh as spiritual leaders, and known for intermarrying to ensure that the bloodlines remained pure. Amma’s mother’s family, the “Chandios,” were their “mureed,” or disciples — far beneath the Syeds in the social order.
When Amma’s parents passed, her grandfather’s family continued to ostracise her and her siblings. They were taunted for being “Chandios,” not “Syeds,” like their father.
When one of Amma’s older brothers fell in love with his second cousin, a “Syed,” chaos ensued. After all attempts to reason with the elders to agree to their marriage failed, the lovers decided to elope. This was the last straw. A second generation of Syeds had now been corrupted and polluted by the Chandios. It was time to involve the “jirga,” or tribal council/community tribunal.
To preserve the Syeds’ “honor,” the jirga proposed that my grandmother be taken from her family in exchange for the girl that her brother dared to marry. The couple was disowned by both families and exiled from the district, and my grandmother was taken under the condition that she would never meet her family again. She was 11 when she was forcibly married off to my grandfather.
But only in name. Because her brother had brought shame to my grandfather’s family, she became their property rather than their daughter-in-law.
For years and years, till my father and his siblings grew up and rebelled against the family’s cruelty, Amma was treated like a house-servant. She would wake up at the crack of dawn every day and start her chores—cook food, clean the large “haveli,” the grand familial home, feed the cattle and then wake everyone else. Once she had children, they began to help her with her duties as well. My father and his brothers would be errand boys for the family, and my aunts would do housework. All of them were usually kept so busy that they would hardly spend any time with each other.
Honor-based violence is still pervasive and used as a tool against innocent women to restore a family’s or community’s “honor” in Pakistan. Approximately 1,000 Pakistani women are brutally murdered in the name of “honor” each year to this day. Besides endorsing honor killing, jirgas in certain areas also sentence victims to other forms of violence or “punitive verdicts” such as forced marriage (often to their rapists), acid attacks, financial settlements, and even forcible sexual vengeance or rape of female members of the accused party/tribe.
My grandmother’s ancestors wanted to kill her brother and his wife in the name of honor to restore their family name. But to save their lives, Amma paid the price.
Amma’s punishment was a life of servitude. A punishment that would have carried on for generations out of inhumane spite, if my father, aunts and uncles had not risen up against this archaic life sentence. They wanted to break the cycle. So they studied by torchlights in dark corners of the haveli and worked part time outside the home, while their mother slaved away for their father’s family, till they could make something of themselves and free her.
And they did. When my father, the eldest son, graduated with an engineering degree from one of the leading government universities in Sindh, he demanded that my grandfather leave his family home or they would take their mother and never associate with him again. My grandfather begrudgingly agreed. A highly educated man himself, he had always been critical of his family’s rigid and oppressive traditions, yet he did not defy the jirga’s verdict. So even as he left his family behind and Amma was no longer a bonded laborer, she still was not free to meet her family because of the jirga’s verdict.
Years passed by and her children forgot her sentence. She kept waking up in the mornings to churn milk into lassi for everyone, cook us delicious meals, and take care of the house.
In 2015, she suffered a major stroke and became bedridden. We would sit with her for hours and try to cheer her up but she would not stop crying. It seemed like the stroke had broken her spirit. Her life’s goal had been to take care of other people ever since the jirga sentenced her. Without working limbs, she had lost her purpose and her light.
Her family became increasingly concerned when even after months, she kept getting worse. She believed that her time was up and refused to get out of bed. Her doctors and physical therapists were unable to heal her. Her grandchildren and children tried to cheer her, without success. One day, close to my aunt’s wedding, she said she had a last wish. And that is how she finally reunited with her family.
After sixty years.
“I can die in peace now,” she said to me on my aunt’s wedding day.
And she did. She passed away a few months later. Toward the end, she had stopped recognising me. Still, every time I went to see her she would light up, mistaking me for her beloved sister. She would talk to me for hours of a distant past, reliving old and cherished memories.
Now I remember Amma as the little girl who loved playing with her sister in the meadows in her village. Running free. Happy.