Women like her scared me.

Sasha said that she came to the dargah not out of piety or to seek peace, but because it was convenient for the man she was having an affair with to drop her off here. At times, if the mood took her, she ventured inside. My burka and designer-bag combination had somehow given her the impression that I wasn’t what I seemed and was therefore meeting a man. Illicit sex was on everyone’s mind here. apparently mine too, because I understood all of this without her having to say it.

She didn’t seem too concerned about what I might think of her, and that was perplexing. After all, who didn’t want other people’s good opinion?

“Are you one of those judgemental, easily shocked types?” Sasha queried.

“Um...” I said.

“Because if you are, I might as well leave now, I’m not a ‘good’ woman.”

Sasha waited for me to speak, head tilted and eyes glittering.

“We hope to drown the murmurs of our paralysed conscience by screaming about other people’s sins,” I reassured her.

Zen and Sufism. Hallelujah.


Sasha laughed. The way she looked around at the people thronging the dargah, her sunglasses in place, her mouth just a little grim, I felt that maybe Sasha needed an excuse to be at a place like this.

She fingered the beads in her hands, her mind far away, her lips pursed. Turning, she handed the string of beads to me and said, “You keep these. I’ll keep the shawl.” at my reluctance she shrugged and added, “They were just giving them away. I didn’t pay for them or anything.”

My mother used to say that any “gift” at dargahs was a good omen. I extended my hand towards her. The beads, warm and smooth, made a soft hollow sound as I gripped them.

Throwing off the reflective mood that had taken a hold on her earlier, she asked, smiling, “Drop me home, please?”

As soon as we’d settled in my car and given my driver her address, Sasha lit a cigarette with her silver lighter, monogrammed with her initials, and said, “You don’t mind, do you?”

I shook my head, opening my window by a sliver. A fist of hot, humid air rammed into the air-conditioned interior.

Defeated, I raised the glass partition between the outside world and my cocoon of luxury back into place.

“So tell me your story,” Sasha said, blowing away the woodsy nicotine-laden smoke through her vermillion pout.

Her disclosures and her curiosity were like a dark hole sucking me in. I contemplated telling her about how I’d practically brought myself up on books, because, though my mother was always there, she was never really present. I had tried. Truly. In some ways I was still trying to bring myself up right.

Or maybe I should draw her attention away from me. Find sanctuary in what I considered my only strength – my posh education. The human mind, I could tell her, needed myths to understand its own complexities and contradictions. We made myths to sustain ourselves. Familiar rituals became landmarks to assumed sanity, and the myth of normalcy was established daily. After all, tomorrow is another day. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

We had reached the Mall Road. Punctuated by traffic lights and architecture—ranging from the Mughal to the colonial to the contemporary era—the Mall Road is a testament to loose traffic laws and history. Motorbikes pressed around us, packed like honeybees in a comb, dazed and slow, buzzing around. I tried not to make eye contact with the rider only a couple of inches away from my window.

As I actively tried to avoid the numerous pairs of eyes clocking us, I thought I should tell Sasha why I went so often to seek comfort from the dead.

Every day I told myself I wouldn’t go back. Yet, I returned home daily, only to escape from it yet again the following day. The Sufi path I was so desperately seeking promised me limitless peace, if I could only annihilate the Self, pray and live an abstemious life of piety.

I wasn’t quite sure what piety meant. Was it praying five times a day? Was it fasting during Ramadan? Was it “obedience” to a husband whom one knew to be wrong? – just one more product of the social construct, if Marx was to be believed, and therefore weak, fallible and untrustworthy? Or was it some unknown, undefined quality within the hidden self? To annihilate the Self, mustn’t one first determine the Self?

I didn’t have a Self to speak of.

I was an utterance in absentia. I was a forgotten word, uttered and mislaid long ago. I was the word that existed because there was another word that was my opposite, and without it I was nothing. I gained meaning only by acknowledging that possible other.

Sasha was still looking at me – waiting I’m sure, for a more sensible answer than I was planning on giving.

“Parents?” she asked.

In Lahori-speak that question meant: Which family are you from? Important or non-entity? My family believed they were the stalwarts of society. I wasn’t sure they were right. I fielded the question.

“They’ve both passed on.”


She nodded, almost in sympathy. “Mine too. Siblings?”

“Brothers. Older. We’re not very close.”


As I said this, I realised I’d finally accepted it. How had that come about? How and when had I become this estranged sister from once being a loving and loved one? The scythe of my marriage was stained with so much blood.

“I was an only child, thank god.”

Sasha sounded like a talk-show host – so confident in her prying, as if I owed her information about myself, as if the story of my life was nothing more than entertainment for her. Maybe that was how we all perceived each other: walking stories to read and discard. My nervousness was getting the better of me by then. I was beginning to feel inadequate.

“Which school?” she asked.

“Convent . . .”

“Which one?” Sasha asked.
What was she, crazy? There was only one.

“Jesus and Mary,” I responded, now much surer of myself.

“Oh, I thought maybe Sacred Heart, where I’m from, or god forbid, Presentation.”


Presentation Convent? What was that? Other status symbols like cars and houses, one could scoff at and move on; schools however, symbolized more than one’s background. Money came and went, class didn’t.

Sasha laughed at my reaction and went on talking about very personal stuff.

She discounted the presence of my driver while he pretended to be deaf. I was mortified – albeit that seemed to be my natural state of being.

We passed the Lahore Fort built by the Mughals; the Post Office and the High Court – both colonial – past the National College of Arts, whose first principal had been Rudyard Kipling’s father, and the neighbouring Lahore Museum built by Sir Ganga Ram. But Sasha chatted on, not looking outside at the sights. We lived there. architectural wonders in the backyard weren’t as meaningful as those abroad.

“Luqman is so...average, you know?” said Sasha. “I’m the kind of woman who wants a hero. Someone I can look up to. He’s so...blah!”

Most women portrayed their husbands as insatiable studs or marshmallow-hearted slaves they’d trained to perfection – preferably both. If a woman was unhappy in her marriage, it was her fault. If her husband didn’t think she was worth the effort, why should anyone else? If a woman couldn’t even manage her husband, she was a dullard and a failure.

Exhibit a: Me.

I said what I’d conditioned myself into thinking and saying for the last six years.

“I love my husband. He’s my best friend.”

Sasha tried to hide her smirk. She even tried to cover her snort with a cough. I had to smile too. I’d sounded foolish even to my own ears. My eyes revealed my story even as my tongue swore fealty to a long-forgotten time. I no longer had the desire or the will that had sustained my marriage for years and made me turn metaphorical cartwheels for Saqib. Been there, failed that.

I shrugged.

Excerpted with permission from This House of Clay and Water, Faiqa Mansab, Penguin Random House India.