The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan

The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan

A memoir of Karachi through the eyes of its women

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For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the countryâ€™s former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachiâ€”Bhuttoâ€™s birthplace and Pakistanâ€™s other great metropolisâ€”Rafia Zakariaâ€™s family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her Uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death. In that moment these twin catastrophesâ€”one political and public, the other secret and intensely personalâ€”briefly converged.Â
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Zakaria uses that moment to begin her intimate exploration of the country of her birth. Her Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, escaping the precarious state in which the Muslim population in India found itself following the Partition. For them, Pakistan represented enormous promise. And for some time, Zakariaâ€™s family prospered and the city prospered. But in the 1980s, Pakistanâ€™s military dictators began an Islamization campaign designed to legitimate their ruleâ€”a campaign that particularly affected womenâ€™s freedom and safety. The political became personal when her aunt Aminaâ€™s husband, Sohail, did the unthinkable and took a second wife, a humiliating and painful betrayal of kin and custom that shook the foundation of Zakariaâ€™s family but was permitted under the countryâ€™s new laws. The young Rafia grows up in the shadow of Aminaâ€™s shame and fury, while the world outside her home turns ever more chaotic and violent as the opportunities available to post-Partition immigrants are dramatically curtailed and terrorism sows its seeds in Karachi.
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Telling the parallel stories of Aminaâ€™s polygamous marriage and Pakistanâ€™s hopes and betrayals, The Upstairs Wife is an intimate exploration of the disjunction between exalted dreams and complicated realities.
Country USA
Manufacturer Beacon Press
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2015-02-03
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Beacon Press
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2015-02-03
Format	Kindle eBook

The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan

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