ALTERNATIVE REALITIES
Love in the Lives of Muslim Women
Nighat M Gandhi
Tranquebar; 407 pages; Rs 350
Khadija, the first person to convert to Islam, is believed to have been 40 and twice widowed when she married the Prophet Muhammad, who is said to have been 15 years younger than her. The community approved of the match. Compare this to the lives of many Muslim women today, and the absence of the essential freedom to make choices becomes starkly visibly.
Yet, in this essentially male world, where women and their stories, dreams and desires are missing even from literature and poetry, there are those who are risking it all for the sake of love. It is the stories of such women that Nighat M Gandhi brings out in her book, Alternative Realities: Love in the Lives of Muslim Women. It's a labour of love that takes Ms Gandhi through the three countries she calls home: Bangladesh (where she was born), Pakistan (where she was raised) and India (where she married). Yet, in what is both a poetic and painful contradiction, there's the realisation that although she belongs to all three countries, she belongs to none. "Is there a patch of the planet I can call my own?" she asks herself, sitting in a bus that is taking her to Lahore.
As a Muslim woman for whom falling in love with an Indian man - worse, a Hindu man - turned her progressive and loving father against her, Ms Gandhi's book is by no means a dispassionate account. Every story is hers. She is every story. And that is a good thing. Because a book such as this one has to be lived to be written.
Her agony comes through in one sentence as she describes the devastating months in her parents' house, which she says sapped her of her self-confidence, faith and love for her family: "It isn't easy to live as a shunned being in one's own home, especially when you have grown up thinking you were loved."
The book recounts the travails of women who have dared to launch a jihad against oppressive conventions to follow their heart. Ms Gandhi, the Sufi wanderer, adds depth to the narrative with the help of companions like Bulleh Shah, Nizamuddin Auliya, Amir Khusro, Rumi and Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai (the 18th-century poet saint of Sindh), who accompany her through the journey. The poetry of these Sufi saints, who celebrated the "unseen dimensions of love" and embraced its contradictions, is sprinkled across the pages. It is a way of thought that "tasteless, one-dimensional modernity", of which the fundamentalists are a product, can neither fathom nor tolerate.
While visiting the tombs of Nizamuddin and his disciple, Khusro, whose love for his spiritual guide continues to be worshipped, she remarks how things have to be black and white. "It becomes sacrilegious to ask questions like, were Khusro and Nizamuddin lovers?" she writes. "If they were both men seeking God, one a seeker, the other a guide, how could they also be seeking each other?"
Women are not allowed inside the chambers where the graves of Khusro and Nizamuddin are located. Yet, "it's in its overwhelming femininity that the humanist ethos of the shrine lives". In contrast to this is the dargah of Bhitshah in Sindh, where Ms Gandhi goes with Nisho, a transgender who is in love with a man from "a very prominent, respectable family" and who knows this love can never culminate in marriage. Here in the night, she finds Hindu women from Thar going right inside the mausoleum to offer the chadar they have brought for the saint, and singing and dancing with gay abandon. Moving gracefully from the sublime to the satirical, Ms Gandhi handles the subject of sex, which is by no means taboo as long as it revolves around men, through a book she lays her hands on outside Nizamuddin's dargah. Titled Islamic Etiquettes of Sex: Sexual Relationship between Husband and Wife, the book is peppered with priceless nuggets: "Do not drink water right after copulation. Doing so can give you asthma." And, "Do not converse with her while having sex. Doing so can make your child speech-impaired". And, recite a prayer "before you consummate the marriage", and so on.
Cocking a snook at such stories are the accounts of women like Firdaus, who walked out of a loveless marriage and, despite "two bitter divorces", says she "never grew bitter towards men" and never gave up on love. There are some stories that are not solely tales of "love in the lives of Muslim women". These could be any couple's story - Hindu, Muslim or Christian. Like the story of Nisho, the "Rakhi Sawant of Sindh". It could be the story of any transgender in love, regardless of the religion to which the person belongs. Or, for that matter, the story of a lesbian couple, Nusrat and her companion QT, who feature in the chapter "Siraat-e-Mustaqeem - The Straight Path".
Alternative Realities, a feminist, part-autobiographical account, often comes across as a personal quest. Ms Gandhi sometimes appears to be seeking closure for the decision she took as a 24-year-old, when she left her parents' house in Pakistan with no physical baggage but plenty that would weigh down her soul to join the man she loved in England. Decades later, the journey she ventures on for this book takes her through another ocean of intolerance. But the islands of love that she succeeds in finding make it well worth the effort.
