Life after Divorce

Rawshni M’aabed 

There’s been hundreds of millions of words written about life after death, and slightly less about life after life.  

How much has been written about life after divorce? And how much of that makes sense? 

I am an Iranian born Pakistani Parsee [Zoroastrian] woman, almost 30 now. I have been divorced for almost eight years. Divorce is something very rare in Parsees.

My family came to Pakistan in 1980. I don’t recall myself being religious, and since my early teens I have been irreligious.  Materially, I have had a pretty sufficient life, I have not known want. These few facts just about sum up my background. 

One fact sets me apart from other people though. I cannot speak, I am mute; my larynx has been permanently damaged. 

As with other women in my situation, I’m often asked the question, how did I get divorced? How did it happen?

I, on the other hand, have often asked myself, with hind sight, how could I get into it in the first place? How did I get married? Why did I get married?  

Because if I had not, there wouldn’t have been this divorce business, right? 

I finished school at a few months past sixteen. It was in my final year in school that I took up a job after school, to pursue further studies with my own resources. 

I was extremely lucky. On the basis of my academic record and my ambitions – I had written a fairly long, detailed application to make up for the lack of a worthwhile resume – I landed a job as trainee assistant manager with a multinational company providing consultancy services to big business, government and multilateral organization active in Pakistan. 

That was around thirteen years ago. I am still with the same organization. I now oversee the organization’s total operations in Pakistan, as well as have a say in the matters of our offices abroad. We have three offices in Pakistan, and two abroad. That was my career. It needed mentioning as it has had a great bearing on my evolution as a businessperson and it has had a great bearing on my personal life. 

I’d like to mention a few words about my company. It is a family owned business and the notional head of the business is a very devout Ithna ‘Ashari lady. Though the company does not discriminate in hiring, most of the employees are Shia. Even in those early days, when I joined, this place offered a very congenial environment to work, especially for those who prefer to mind their own business; and generally keep to themselves. Those were rented premises, and when a few years later, when the company bought its own premises, the layout was totally segregated, even to the extent of modifying workflow where need be, to absolutely minimize contact between men and women in the office. 

My first few months in the company were spent in the traffic section, basically a one-man department manned by a very senior executive, who reviews all the incoming and outgoing communications before they are sent out or handed over to the department concerned. It is still like this here. All new inductees are placed in the traffic section before being assigned to any specific position. This gives a person a very clear orientation and insight into what the company is about, who and what we are doing at any given time, who we talk to and why. 

After these first seven or eight months, I was sent to research. It was here that I met my future husband.  Like me, he was also a trainee assistant manager and like me he was also a Parsee. A couple of years older than me, self-sustaining, and very well-read. He was also hardworking and dedicated to his work, regular and punctual. He was also articulate, even erudite. Physically, he was suave and handsome, the type of man for whom girls could wear their hearts on their sleeves.   

With me he was considerate and caring. While apart from the Managing Director of the company, everybody else in the office kept aloof from me in the office due to my disability, he would come across to my table whenever he had any free time, with a pad and pencil, and engage me in two-dimensional dialogue, where he would speak and I’d write down my responses. Often these conversations were not looked at kindly by others around us, but somehow things never got out of hand, probably because such conversations weren’t very frequent. 

I don’t recall any time in my life earlier when I had had such long, and such interesting conversations with anybody. Throughout my life, people had tended to stay clear of me, due to my speech impediment. Even in my own home, there was almost minimal interaction between me and my parents and brothers. People addressed me only when they had an absolute need to. The same holds true for my extended family, cousins, and classmates etc. 

Now here was a person who took pains to talk to me, to let me have my say, and to listen to whatever I had to say [write]. The only such person I had ever known. As it turned out he was irreligious too, socially conscious, aware of issues, having points of view worth discussing and debating. Those times, not very frequent, were very interesting and illuminating. 

I cannot really pinpoint exactly when this camaraderie grew into a vibrant friendship and then even more. All I can tell you is that it took us more than four years to start leaving the office together, to wait back for the other if one was free at the regulation time and the other was not; and to share a cup of tea or coffee or an ice cream before wending our ways to our homes - or to start arriving a few minutes earlier in the morning. 

The only serious face-off I had with the office occurred around this time, when I was asked by a senior to “go slow, and go careful” with whatever I had with him. I simply told her that if we were coming earlier to our place of work to have some time with each other, or waiting for each other after sign-off time, that was our own time, and none of her business to advise us how to spend it. She just said to me, not unkindly, “Rawshni you’re too gullible . . .” and let it go at that. 

A few weeks later, however, I was called in by the MD. She praised my diligence at work, and offered me something I just couldn’t refuse. A leave from work with 70 per cent pay, to take a two year course either in Business Administration or Management Sciences. If this was designed to distance me from him, it did, physically. I immersed myself in the studies with gusto, but somewhere in the back of my mind he was always there. I missed those moments we used to spend together. 

When I rejoined the office after completing the degree, I was given a very good raise, and made the MD’s executive assistant. This changed my routine in many ways. The office starts at nine, and when she is in Karachi, she is always in the office a few minutes before that. Similarly she often works late. She also has certain social commitments to meet, and she somehow developed a habit of taking me along wherever she went. Ever since those days, I don’t think she’s ever gone anyplace without me, except in the days when I suffered a nasty auto accident and was hospitalized, and stayed away from work for sometime. 

It was some months after I had rejoined that he proposed. I accepted. It was against the advice of everybody in the office, and against the advice of my parents too. One word that almost everybody who knew him or had met him, used was “smooth-talker.” Right from my MD down to my own family; who met him after he proposed. 

Anyway. We got married a few months later. In the traditional Parsee style, dasturs, and rice and Asirvad and all.  

Things started souring up during the honeymoon. We had gone up north, Kalaam. Actually what happened was that he lost his wallet somewhere. The office had paid for the honeymoon as a wedding gift, but he had some cash which he lost.  I told him he need not worry, that I had some cash and that these things happen. 

He asked me where I got the money from. I told him that it was my money. After all I‘d been earning all these years, I had savings and so on. He came back with “Yes, you’re the Bibi’s blue eyed baby”, using the word Bibi sarcastically.  Bibi was our boss. 

When we rejoined duties after our return from the honeymoon, I was given an office car.  This was actually an entitlement and a necessity of my job description, and had, in fact, been ordered much earlier. The demand for this car was greater than the manufacturer’s capacity and there was always a queue of buyers. It’s just a coincidence that the car booked for me arrived when it did. I once again had to hear that “blue-eyed baby” bit. 

I have been able to understand what it was that made things go wrong so fast. Back in Karachi barely a month or so, we had another tiff. We were looking for a place to live. He wanted to rent a rather small place in a Parsee colony. I wanted to get one closer to the office, and in a better locality. He expressed reservations about the higher rents and all. I told him why worry. We both were earning, we had good packets. Again the “Bibi’s blue eyed baby” came up, with a jibe at me getting a better packet than him.  

We did eventually get the better place, but life seemed to fall into a pattern. One of the most striking things that happened after we were married was that all those intelligent conversations ceased altogether. In the office there was hardly any interaction with him. On the way to the office and back home it was usually a morose silence. At home it was more like, khaana lagaalo (serve the food), chai day dou (give me tea), paper pakrra dou (give me the newspaper), bed peh aa jaao (come to sleep), etc.  If I brought this up, this lack of communication, now I’d get to hear “It’s you who can’t talk. Not me.” 

Apart from the physical intimacy allowed or afforded by marriage, to me it seemed we had either drifted poles apart, or had always been. The guy simply couldn’t realize that here was a person trying to make genuine contact with him, trying her absolute best to be unselfish with herself with him. 

Then one day he asked me to resign my job.  

This was a bombshell.  

I had taken up this job when my parents could easily have financed further studies, I had decided to work after my “A” levels because I had felt, that a person with a problem as I have, still has the ability and potential to fend for herself, to contribute something worthwhile to society. While still in school, I had invested my spare time and my allowance in some short duration certificate courses in various computer skills – skills which proved an edge right in my first interview [and the only one I’ve ever given] and have served me well ever since. 

 It had been my ambition to prove to myself, to my family that I could face challenges, acquit myself with appropriate responses. To prove to all who avoided me due to my disability, and to the world at large that I was as at least as good as the rest of them, if not the best of them. My job, and the hard work I put in, had helped me realize this ambition, and stand tall. My job was my identity, the assertion of my being. 

I wasn’t about to resign that. Not for him. Not for anybody. Not for anything. 

Things continued in this vein. Sundays, the day off, was the most painful of all. He wouldn’t want to visit my parents or his, wouldn’t want to go out. I feel I should mention here that his parents and siblings are fabulous people, his mother is simply adorable and has been a second mother to me in her love for me. His family and I are still on the best of terms. 

All this was taking its toll on my nerves. I’d become irritable, prone to losing my cool. It also began to affect my work.  

I started thinking of a separation. About six months into the marriage, I talked to him about being separated for awhile. Once again he flew into a rage. Once again the tirade about me being a non-marriageable commodity he had deigned to marry, once again the jibes about me being the “Bibi’s blue eyed baby” and this time topped with an accusation about me and her that is too vile to put into words. 

So I sued for a divorce. 

Two months later we were divorced. 

Though the idea for separation and eventually the demand for divorce had been mine, I was devastated. It seemed that somewhere within me there was some insufficiency that had caused the demise of my marriage, that I couldn’t hold on to the man I had loved.  

Yes. It had become “had loved” the day we had that last face-off. His stooping to the depth that he did had killed something in me. Finished all the respect and regard I had for him. Just those few words.  

I became an automaton. Working as if programmed. Living as if programmed. Mirthless smiles. Hollow laughter. Tearless sobs in the dead of night. Alone, sympathizing with myself, pitying myself.

Life seemed to have shrunk, became an inexorable gray that encroached upon what little I did and could still see. For almost an entire year, I did not leave home, except for work, did not shop, did not see my parents, relatives or friends [except if they came down to my place] did not attend any social function, not even with “Bibi” who used to take me everywhere with her, wherever her social obligations took her. 

The nights - they were absolute hell. Sleep seemed to have boycotted me permanently. The ceiling seemed to descend down upon me, the walls close in around me. Tired of twisting and turning, I would get up, boot up my computer, and get on to the net. 

How did I reclaim myself, my sanity? 

Work. 

Seeing what was happening to me, “Bibi” overloaded me with problems, till it seems I didn’t have a single brain cell left idle to dwell upon myself. 

This and the unadorned care that she embodies for all. For a few months I was transferred to Lahore, and to Islamabad. It helped, because in either city she made arrangements for me to live with her relatives to whom I also owe a debt of love. 

It’s been almost seven years now. There was ebb in my life, now it is in high tide again. Since my divorce I have added further to my academic qualifications and have advanced professionally beyond the most fantastic dream. My company respects me to no end, my competitors consider me a fair and honourable adversary, my subordinates look up to me . . . 

Will I remarry?  

The right person?  Yes.