AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A woman of substance
ZIYA US SALAM
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Salma Ahmed’s book exposes the hypocrisy of life in the subcontinent.
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MAYBE it is just a coincidence, maybe it is a sense of destiny but in many ways Salma Ahmed’s life has a startling similarity to Tehmina Durrani’s, the defiant lady who penned My Feudal Lord many summers ago to relate a
tale of brutal male hegemony in Pakistan’s elitist society.
Their lives seem to run parallel, similar tales of deprivation and humiliation, parallel tracks of being at the receiving end of a patriarchal society, where material riches cannot camouflage the complete absence of respect for the female gender. But their destination is different, as Salma shows later in the book.
Violence at home
If Durrani talked of Ghulam Mustafa Khar, the Governor of Punjab (Pakistan), who inflicted the worst form of violence on her; Salma does the same when it comes to Saeed, her third husband, and before that Fazil Janjua, her first husband, a little below her station in society, and a man not averse to using his spouse for professional gains.
If Saeed did not stop short of using physical violence, and did not think twice before throwing her out of his house in London, barefoot with not a penny in her hand, Fazil invited his ‘friend’ home, a ‘friend’ she was supposed to ‘entertain’.That Salma survived all her husbands — she married thrice — is a tribute to her resilience. And her unfettered spirit which refused to be shackled by anybody, neither her wily mumani (aunt) nor m
en, for many of whom she was either an occasion for ego massage, or a threat to their manhood. She was a “good catch” for some, a challenge to others.
Clarity and honesty
However, similarities with Durrani go only thus far. While showing the same courage to talk of her most intensely private moments with clarity and honesty, Salma also talks of her early days, a pampered childhood in a manner of someone born with riches. And indeed she was, as she relates early in this autobiography.
The greatest deprivation she experienced in childhood was to share her tiny flat in Karachi, following the Partition, with her four uncles, grandmother and two of her mom’s relatives. Karachi’s humidity was the greatest brush with adversity for this eldest child of Syed Akhtar Hussain, Pakistan’s top diplomat and a member of the delegation that persuaded the UN to pass a resolution to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir. Reared as she was in the cool climes of Nainital and Murree, on either side of the border, Salma does not have those agonising memories of the tragedy where people on both sides of the border suffered. She was too small, too secluded.
Creditable zeal
Where Salma’s story differs from that of other long suffering women in the subcontinent is the zeal and enterprise she showed in setting up her own business and carving her own identity.
Starting her business career as a relatively young woman, she set up her first industry in 1967, though she had already been through three marriages, having been married and divorced the first time when still in her teens. Winner of the prestigious Priyadarshani award for being Pakistan’s most successful woman entrepreneur since Independence, she is a member of the Pakistan Muslim League. And thereby deserves greater credit than has come her way.
It is not as difficult to step out of the shadows of anonymity and take off the mask of those in the public eye, but it is a far gutsier thing to take off your own mask in the public, and talk of your own inadequacies, and those who claimed to have loved you at some point of time. That she often loved the undeserving and did not care as much for those deserving is clear from Salma’s account. She comes across as a repentant mother, a wronged wife and, in the end, as a woman of substance.
Through her account, she exposes the hypocrisy of life in the subcontinent. Unfortunately, she is holding a mirror to the blind.
Cutting Free: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Pakistani Woman; Salma Ahmed, Roli Books, Rs.295.
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