We do talk a lot about patriarchy and male dominance. It stands on a shelf somewhere deep, reminding me that there are countless shoulders that slump and ache with the burden of womanhood, while I have the luxury of flaunting it as a coral brooch pinned to my dress.
I don’t own this book because I don’t need to.
The spirit is crushed,” surrenders a pregnant Durrani after being brutally bashed by her husband because she visited a male doctor. “ A prisoner ultimately settles into a monotonous routine. This book spoke to me about the extent to which feminism can be exploited which is boundless it seems, the extent to which conventional upbringing turn women – both the victim and her mother, in this case – as enablers, accepting such inhumanity as “fate”, reconciling with destiny and the implausible extent to which she endures it in silence, careful lest she harms the “honour” of her man, secretly pushing her pride under the carpet till it’s stained with her own blood. Register Nowīeing the citizen of a patriarchal society where the cultural norm for women is to remain silent against oppression, I sensed the stifling darkness of the corner she was pushed into, which led her to offer “spicy” details of her life for public consumption. Never miss real stories from India's women. For those who haven’t heard of the book, it’s the autobiography of a Pakistani author, Tehmina Durrani, who takes us on a journey from being born and raised in a repressive society, to enduring a traumatic marriage as the wife of Ghulam Mustafa Khar, a visible politician during Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government and inveterate woman abuser to being emancipated and contesting for the rights of women. My Feudal Lord finally burst that bubble. You are needed to protect it with an intensity that goes deeper than your mother’s wisdom talk – do not answer eve teasers or look at them in the eye, just walk away – and sharper than the safety pin you must carry on a crowded bus. I was put in charge of my womanhood, but still too naïve to realize that you can’t just wear it like a batch pinned to your school dress. When I moved away, the bubble got flimsy. Growing up in a small town, I never realized that I lived in an opaque sanitized bubble – where my womanhood was sheltered, protected and cared for by parents. So, what I write here is from memory, and in a way that’s good because a decade has erased the sundry and filtered only the parts that matter. A friend loaned it to me over a decade ago and I returned it after reading.