Heathen Coup

Fatima Shabbir, Pakistan

You looked down upon them, 

they rose higher than you could ever reach, 

Or see, 

Or even imagine. 

(1) 

MY EYE 

‘The doula massaged the shoulders of the female as she panted for breaths, her face eerily  pale and her cheeks glistening with uncharacteristically shimmery sweat mixed with pearl like tears. Gliding her hands down her back, she touched her hands to the contracting  abdominal walls, trying to transfer as much strength as she could to her.  

‘Shhh...he is going to be out in a matter of minutes now, Khatoon e Mukhtaram, merely  minutes,' she whispered soothingly in the female’s ear, smoothing the jet-black strands out  of her face.  

The female forced in a long breath and nodded, her lips pursed but her eyes having a glint of  triumph and something indescribable, something that shined contrastingly against the  darkness of the spacious room. A marvel of nature would be witnessed in a few moments  and all because of her. 

Her hawk-like nose flared and her cheeks puffed up as she readied to control the scream that  tore out of her throat anyway as the last contraction hit and sounds of crying filled the grand  infirmary. Drawing in another long breath, throwing her shoulders back and tipping her chin  

up, the female, with an air of pride, primed to receive Mubarak from all the maids and the  doctor after a long wait of very painful last twelve hours and equally hard past eight months,  thirteen days, five hours and precisely seventeen minutes.  

She was greeted with a haunting silence that quietened the crying of the new born into a  faraway fainting noise. 

The child was born. It just wasn’t a human. 

My mother had screamed when I was born. Not so much due to physical pain. More so due  to emotional pain and utter horror. I was rejected at the time of my birth without a second  glance. The first glance was accidental while my mother’s doula tried to bring me in the line  of my mother’s vision but she refused to look at me at all, however, reflexes are hard to  control when you have waited for something as long as she had. Unfortunately, in her case,  her wait and struggles were all in vain. She didn’t get what she wanted. Instead, she got me.  So, I was blessed with a first glance. The second glance never came. 

My father never even heard about me. Because you don’t talk to the Elder Extraordinaire of  the tribe unless it is important. I wasn’t important.  

Guru Jee, whom I preferred referring to as Maa Jee now (not back then, she liked being a Guru  to all of us and it was tradition), had named me Dolly when she’d found me with a rag doll in  the package in the ‘Use-Me’ near her khaveli but I changed it when I realized that the poor  choice was not even Islamic and learnt that Dolly the sheep was a cloning experiment but her  parents did exist to her and she did get acknowledged internationally. I wasn’t even  acknowledged by a birth certificate in NADRA. So, I and her weren’t remotely on relatable 

grounds. I had named myself Peerzadi Abdullah the moment I rose in ranks in our household and was allowed such privileges as trying to make my own decisions. One name each for both  my genders (as some of you call the likes of me, She-male, a horrible case of name-calling if  you ask me but then again it isn’t as bad as stooping to Khusra or Hijra or Chhakka). Only I  called myself by those names, my people still called me Dolly because they didn’t think that  we should have names like that and certainly not two names. 

I tsked as I took a sip of the excuse for a cup of tea offered quite hesitantly to me by the police  constable a few minutes ago (It was an odd offering, really. Maybe she didn’t know what I  was) after which I was left unaccompanied in that room to venture down the memory lane as  I did fairly often when left alone and ponder over the above stated musings. 

The room was lit by a lone light bulb hanging on for dear life by a feeble wire, the walls stood  smudged with colonies of Cladosporium, a desk sat in front of the unnecessarily grand chair  lining the west wall, a wide assortment of stationery, papers, files and stamps adorned the  desk-top and then there was my bench, the sole, battered, wooden bench that rubbed against  the bruises on my sitter even if I shifted a millimetre to any side. It was pushed up against the  east wall, very well away from the desk and with me sitting on it, if I leaned into the wall, my  hair would be plastered to the particularly thick mess of the green goo made by the fungus. 

After a few more minutes had passed, a man in police uniform came in, scrutinized me for  about fifty seconds from the tip of my head to the elongated nail of my big toe poking out of  my destroyed sandals, yanked the cup of tea out of my hands in a least gentlemanly way,  spilling it all over my torn dress and told me to get out of there. He tagged his command at  the end with ‘Khusra’ (oh yeah, he did stoop to it) in a nauseated tone as if the mere idea of  me, the sheer sight of me sickened him and not in the sympathising way. I got up, clapped in  his face once and spoke my parting line, 

‘Allah gharak kre.’ 

I heard a string of panicked curses directed at my back because they and we, we all believe  that Allah listens to us, especially when a baddua passes our lips.' 

(2) 

THE NORMAL EYE 

When I had arrived at the university campus early in the morning to start my habitual  morning run on the track, I’d seen her sitting on the side-walk outside the gate and smoking  a cigarette. Seeing her in that condition had shaken me to my core and mistaking her for a  normal girl, I had rushed to her side, forgetting my bicycle and instantaneously decided to  forgo the track to help her. I had offered her my hoodie; she’d dismissed that with a gesture  of her hand. I had offered to call the police for her; she’d turned her face to me fully and  scoffed. I had come to the conclusion that she was uncomfortable with me and guessing by  her state, it wouldn’t have been a surprise if she were. So, dropping my satchel to the  ground, I had just made myself comfortable when I noticed the slight stubble on her jaw, a  strange detail to notice really since it is common for girls to sometimes grow facial hair too. I  had internally shaken my head at myself and offered her my hand by saying,

‘My name is Fatima. I go to this university,’ Gesturing over my shoulder at the gate, I had  attempted on a smile but it refused to tip my lips up seeing her condition, ‘What’s your  name?’  

It had been that moment when she, once again, had turned to me but this time with wary  surprise splattered across her face. She took my hand cautiously, her eyes trained on my  face in a suspicious way. Her hand was big and calloused like my father’s, it engulfed mine  completely. I recall successfully grinning at that, hoping she would open up to me. Then she  had started recounting it all to me, her random claps giving away that she belonged to the  damned community and with each of those claps, my stomach had sunken a tad bit more.  

Her kameez was torn on one side, her bra visible to any eye that even fleetingly passed over  her, her trousers tethered at the crotch and the backside showing her underwear, once  again, to even a blasé eye. All of her was splotched with fresh tea-stains here and coppery  blood stains there. Nobody had offered her any shawl or blanket to cover herself up at the  police station. These weren’t a humiliating state of affairs for her any longer. It was in fact the fourth time that she had found herself in a position of the mentioned sort and she was becoming immune to the derogation that usually came in tow of it. I could be naked in the  middle of the street, I could dance in short clothes in front of a mufti sahib, I could be an  attention holder of a tamasha in Peshawar but would the gherat of any of our men and the  haya of any of our women roar in outrage? Would a fatwah be passed? Would I be  protected or killed due to honour? The simple and direct answer is no. Those interactions are  between men and men, men and women, and women and women of the society. I fall in  none of the categories nor am I allowed to be a part of both. I could be a Hafiz e Quran in the  Islamic Republic of Pakistan and unfortunately, I would still not become respect-worthy and  would still not rise to the level of being considered a human, she’d said. 

Now I understood her casual dismissal of my very initial offers. She was raped four times, in  all four major provinces, and despite the existence of law, she wasn’t even given an  opportunity to voice her suffering. The law enforcement would take one look at her,  categorize her as a Khusra, send her on her way. All the four times. 

I shivered, tried to move a little away from her and attempted to mask the disgust that must  be visible in my face. She noticed it. She shook her head, muttering to herself in an  undertone and it sounded awfully like ‘Oh what the hell had you expected, Abdullah?  Acceptance?’. Honestly? She repulsed me in a most weird way, to put it simply. The reason  was quite unclear to me, coming to think of it. I just recall thinking that ‘oh I’m sitting with a  Khusra. It’s not a girl.’ I didn’t even know if it was a she (since I had been subconsciously  referring to her as ‘she’). I did not care anymore about how I had found her_it, about it obviously being raped. I just cared about getting as far away from it as possible because I  had been terrified of Khwaja Sira when I was a little kid. I was twenty-one now and still had  not gotten over that irrational fear which wasn’t so much of a fear now, just a general  discomfort at being around one (and I must confess, an apathetic disregard of their  existence). The phobia, as I recall it, wasn’t due to any trauma I might have suffered but due  to the way my mother, my cousins and literally everybody took this certain tone when they 

said ‘Khusra’. I never wanted to be near one. I suppose that fear resides in a large  population of Pakistani youth. The elders just ignore their very existence. 

It took me some summons of courage that I didn’t just get up and walk away from it. I didn’t  know what made me but I kept sitting beside it (in my mind, I was still referring to Peerzadi  Abdullah as ‘it’). 

I found myself instantly pulled into a childhood memory as if I had dipped my head in a  pensieve.  

We had been living in a rented house in Rawalpindi back when I was probably eight. On one  particularly pleasant winter morning with the sun shining softly against the heavy set of  clouds and cool, light breeze, there was a knock at the door. Since the door had an extended  handle that could directly unlock it from the first floor where our tenet, a lady of an other worldly temper, Fayyaz Begum lived, I waited for her to unlock it but she didn’t. She was  probably sleeping, I thought, just like Mum and Baba were. So, I decided to go and see for  myself who was at the door when the knocking got persistent. Bouncing in a squeaky,  lighted up pair of boots, I ran to the door, and rising up on my tiptoes, I, with some  difficulty, pulled at the bolt. The door swung open, knocking me down on my keister. I didn’t  register the pain. I just registered some heavily made-up women with tight dresses and  visible cleavages. I saw one of them smile down at me. A scream of utter terror tore out of  my throat, waking my parents, Fayyaz Begum, and probably the dead too in the cemetery  behind our home. I ran to my mother as soon as I could regain footing and wrapped myself  around her leg. ‘Khusray, Maa,' I had said. As it turned out, they were some old properly  female friends of my mother. Even at that young age, my mind had associated make-up and  tight dresses with Khwaja Sira.  

Shaking my head to snap out of that memory, I drew in a long breath. Yesterday, I had been  at that protest held at Liberty Chowk for the motorway incident, ringing my throat dry for a  rape victim. A female rape victim. Today I was sitting beside another victim of the same  abuse for the fourth time but I lacked the emotions, the sympathy, the empathy and the  pain that I felt for any other victim. In fact, like I had stated earlier, my stomach turned at  the prospect of having anything to do with a Khusra. My impulsive abandonment of my run,  my bike and bag to help a victimised girl had evaporated out of existence with the  revelation of Peerzadi’s actual ‘gender’. 

Why? 

(3) 

MY SHATTERED EYE 

The girl was beautiful. The concern that had taken up her whole face when her eyes landed  on me, the way she had dropped everything and rushed to my side and then the  transformation of that worry for me to the most apparent revulsion against my very  presence made my heart ache but we were all used to it. Most of my people were numb to  it. The expression of repugnance on the faces of men and women and the fear or jeering  remarks from children who are supposed to be too innocent for this, was what I had seen 

everywhere I went from the moment I had started understanding the world. So, it wasn’t  anything out of blue to see it here too. However, it had felt good to be on the receiving end  of compassion from a stranger for once. I didn’t know initially that she’d taken me for a girl  or I would never have shaken her hand.  

For the first time in my life, a normal person had sat down so casually beside me and  offered me their hand. I reckon I’d gotten carried away with the mere idea of acceptance. In  that moment, the world had seemed better than it did on other days. 

On other days, men uninvitedly and forcefully rubbed up against me, women turned their  noses up and looked at me as a creature lesser than all wights that walked the earth, made  me dance in front of their men and, children? Those allegedly innocent beings threw stones  at me, pulled at my dupatta, slapped my behind and whatnot.  

Today, a girl had willingly sat with me. Those few moments of misinterpretation had been  outlandishly heart-warming. I could reminiscence them now and knew I would chase them  all my life if I could.  

Snapping out of my reverie with that last stupid thought, I involuntarily sighed wistfully.  Closing my eyes tightly for a moment to make myself go back to my aukaat, I called, ‘Allah’  in a silent prayer and I called Islam, the mere shadow of which sometimes passed over this  land despite it being an Islamic Republic.  

I was suddenly tired. I could no longer sit there. Dusting my shredded shalwar off with my  swollen palms, I got up without making any move to cover myself. It didn’t matter here. The  girl looked up at me and I caught the transitory relieved look on her face which she quickly  masked with something fake that I didn’t have the strength to decipher. She stood up too  and took a step away. Her foot was up halfway through another backward step, when she  stopped herself and opened her mouth. I turned away from her before she invited my  baddua to her too. Enough negativity for a day.  

‘You can take my hoodie.’  

I stopped in my tracks, turned towards her, assessed her and decided to put her out of her  misery for once and for all. 

‘Too short for me, girl.’ 

I had never seen someone as grateful towards me as she did in that instant. The impulse to  curse her was strong, the urge to clap in her face and yell at her was stronger but the rare  will to just turn away from her was the strongest. I walked away.  

I just wish I had never shaken that hand.

Fatima Shabbir, 21, is a nature-obsessed soul that likes wandering around aimlessly sometimes. She is currently studying at Army Medical College, Rawalpindi in her third year of Bachelor in Medicine and Surgery. She loves reading, writing, football, cricket and yes, she loves Computers too. She loves Harry Potter separately. She likes to keep her writings to herself but sometimes she shares.