Book Discussion: My Feudal Lord
My Feudal Lord by Tehmina Durrani unusually combines the home and the deck, the kitchen and the parliament, and the bedroom fight and the lynching mob. It finely shreds details on how the ‘domestic stuff’ is a microcosm of the power-play on the political ground. Both operations pathologically deal with the manipulation of human psyche. I have selected four themes that I would specify within the textual realm of this autobiography.
Childhood complexes: Childhood trauma is real. This is one very important aspect of this biography. It unravels with frankness the minute details that keep us traumatized consciously or unconsciously even as adults.
Durrani explicates this by weaving her complex childhood. Coming from an elite family, her Pathan father, Ahmed Shah Durrani, who is “six-foot tall and had the presence of a film star”, had held several notable positions, most importantly, Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan during General Yahya’s martial law. Her mother, Samina Hayat, belongs to the elite Hayat family settled at the northern edge of Punjab that had been bestowed by vast tracts of land by the British crown in compensation of their loyal service to the British colonial masters. The family ancestors has had fought alongside Spanish moors and thus traced back their renowned good looks to intermarriages with Spanish women. Hayats, forming an exotic family circle were considered “advanced” and “fast” for their epoch because of the slavish aping of anglicized lifestyle. Tehmina Durrani, a dark skinned child arriving in this family in 1953, is Ahmed Shah Durrani’s first daughter and Samina’s second daughter because she already had a daughter from her first marriage.
To an outsider, Durrani’s childhood would occur extremely comfortable who had privileges and traveled the world. The father is as much handsome as the mother is beautiful. The family appears an epitome of decorum, “always waiting to be photographed”. But this child is an outcast among her parents and other lighter-skinned siblings who are very conscious of their Pathan lineage. Samina, already being careful that the father must not love Tehmina above Rubina, her daughter from her first marriage, is embarrassed to introduce Tehmina to friends and relatives for her dark skin. Tehmina’s childhood appropriates the tale of an ugly duckling in a new setting; an advanced family holding racist beauty constructs. She states: “Even as a baby I felt my inadequacy. My surroundings seemed hostile to the way I looked, and very early, I withdrew into an isolated, ‘condemned-by-nature’ cell. I never remember my mother hugging or kissing me when I was little.”
The father on the other hand is too distant, always holding his affection and never interfering with family decisions. It is a matriarchal family where the father comes back to narrate his whole day in crisp English to a dominating wife. “The immaculately groomed” mother keeps formality alive at home leaving no place for love and laughter. The worst of all, little Tehmina is given charge to maintain her mother’s elaborate wardrobe. She remembers the muscle pain even years after that she felt while maintaining her mother’s wardrobe and fearing if anything gets misplaced in the armoire or jewelery box. This is where the subjugated Tehmina breathes, always seeking approval of her dominating mother. Tehmina’s grandmother dotes on her but in a way that makes herself hate even more. She would provide her with cucumber pastes, lemons, fresh creams and bleaching agents to transform her into something she is not.
Durrani is essentially a feminist and not a man-hater. Had it been the latter case, she would not have detested the undue dominance of her mother. She is an advocate of a balanced relationship where understanding prevails and both are allowed to maintain their individuality.
Amidst all this, she develops meningitis. She miraculously recovers but gets tagged as mentally unstable for her whole life, accredited to this incident. This is the incident Mustafa Khar would later use to gaslight her that since she is mentally weak, she is always imagining things.
While she is growing into a better shape, she is constantly compared to her mother leaving her to a second place. Even if she grows beautiful, she cannot be ‘as’ beautiful.
Thirsty for love, Durrani gives in to the twenty-seven-year old Anees who smuggles her fashioned pastries and love letters while she is still in uniform at the Catholic boarding school, believing that someone might not err again to love her. Later, Mustafa will also discover the wounded child inside her and hurt her at cuts old yet fresh.
Gaslighting: The physical beating, although inviting much sympathy from readers, is too typical and repetitive for the plot. The real painful thing occurring to me as a reader is the psychological abuse inflicted on her. Mustafa Khar, the ‘Lion of Punjab’ who has held the seat of Chief Minister of Province, is a magnetic attraction for Durrani in the beginning. She is not able to resist adultery. Such was his charm. Right after the marriage, she is reduced to a child. Her thinking faculty is cancelled. She is not allowed to read a newspaper. She is invited to discussions where she has to agree with what the husband says. She becomes “a wall on which he could bounce off ideas”. She starts playing an obedient child where she has to manage the unpredictable mood of her husband in the same way she dealt with her mother as a child and because the abuse is not new to her, apart from the additional physical abuse, she resigns and grows reticent because Khar always gaslights her into a situation where people would mock her for risking her former conjugal life with Anees to remarry Mustafa Khar, a man already been married for four times. Durrani highlights instances where she wants to interpret Koran differently. When he says that “woman is like a man’s land”, he wants her to interpret it in the sense that a feud only keeps his land while it remains functional to him but deep inside she thinks otherwise. For her, land is something that needs to be cultivated and tended and that is the kind of responsibility a man should assume towards a woman.
There are numerous instances positing the narcissistic traits of her husband. He wants her to feed on an extra-fat diet that keeps her bloated all day so that she becomes unattractive for other men. She is not allowed to shop on her own. She doesn’t go to the hairdresser for so many years because he loves her knee-length brown tresses like anything. Her first marriage is continuously used as a stick against her leaving her in utmost sexual confusion. She has to play a subject of carnal hunger. If she shows advances, she is shamed for that. If she sits numb, she is rebuked for not showing any interest. This way she has to react as much as he wants, not feeling anything on her own.
Of course the most horrible scene is the one when she is stripped off and asked to call her mother to apologize that whatever she had revealed about Khar and Adila’s (her youngest sister) affair is her imagination. Durrani puts it that after that night, no matter how many layers of clothes she put on, she always felt “naked”. After inflicting such humiliation, he has the audacity to hug her and cradle her in his arms while saying that “these things happen to people in love…they auto-suggest and go mad. You are, in any case, not mentally strong because of the meningitis. It is not really your fault and I should have controlled my temper.” Durrani clutches him and cries like a helpless infant.
Valium also becomes a symbol of mental numbness. She commits suicide by gulping down ten tablets of Valium from her father’s washroom and even then, as she recovers, she has to face the smoldering wrath of her husband who invalidates her emotions and thinks she has overreacted. In fact he is humiliated by the fact that she had been examined by male doctors. In the end, when he abducts her to stop her from applying for a separation, he forcefully pushes valium in her mouth, a method he was used to employ on his dogs. In fact this vicious cycle is seen oscillating several times. He humiliates her and takes her back with a bigger facade. When she leaves him for the first time, he turns into a vagabond lover and after that, showers so much affection on her during their trip to Florida. No night is without a candle-lit dinner and no day without extensive shopping but the honeymooning ends soon. It is only when Khar is in jail, she starts to socialize and attempts to make decisions on her own. Towards the end, when she is able to evacuate her husband through her intelligence and courage, after few days of appreciation and rejuvenation she gets to hear that she is a “hysterical woman” and her complaints are “nonsensical.”
This may be reality. But this is one of the most horrendous kinds of abuses that do take place in our society especially in intimate relationships. The saddest part is that it goes without being validated and penalized.
Home-wrecker: This is one theme I don’t want to talk much about although it appears recurrently in this book; also, because this is one theme where I can appreciate the author’s frankness but not her decisions. So many times, she has tried to prove her baby-sister Adila, a cunt, irrespective of the realization that Khar would have run an affair with someone else if it wasn’t with a fifteen-year-old girl. She herself had been in an adulterous relationship with Khar when he was married to Sherry with children and Durrani expresses her guilt on that too but she fails to stand for the truth that her husband was never interested in being loyal to any woman. He had done it earlier and he was doing it then too. The man of the home was never interested in keeping the home.
Politics and the humanitarian cause: One important question that Durrani posits to her audience is the objective of political power. For a good span of time, she falls for the public image of Khar, the image of a savior. When Mustafa explains his growing agitation with Bhutto in public and reasons that it is because Bhutto has isolated himself from common man and was surrounded by cronies and quislings, Durrani looks up to him as a man of honor. When Khar allies with India, an act of treason, punishable by death, Durrani accompanies him because he justifies it as “Bhuttoism”, a kind of diplomacy important to gain power over military. This, Durrani says, was another reason to stand with Khar because it ‘appeared’ noble. But gradually she realizes that this ‘humanitarian cause’ is more of a facade. He had taken his fists with superintendent at jail not for the sake of evacuating other prisoners but to establish himself as the most powerful man. He was only comfortable with Benazir, taking leadership of the exile community, at the promise of his position as a senior statesman. He rants long speeches on how the party has digressed from its manifesto but then rejoins the party when he realizes that Bhutto’s legacy is the only strand that can gain him public popularity. After some time, he somersaults back to Jatoi and IJI when Benazir Bhutto’s government is dissolved. When Durrani visits Khar for the last time, she feels uncomfortable at the opulence of his living and recollects his vows of living in a smug flat after his exile ends. What I understand, Durrani is not against a lavish living. She had done that rather happily as a feud’s wife. But she is trying to achieve some comprehension that if political power is not essentially for humanitarian cause then why does humanity invest so much resource in this pretense? Can political power ever raise itself to humanitarian cause? Can civil society be an alternative? These are some questions that she might not have verbalized in her autobiography but there are ample directions relevant to this theme, this autobiography can map in the readers’ mind.
As a reader I can’t decide the genuineness of the events narrated. I am neither saying that it is a magnificent book. But I say that it is an important book. It posits important questions that are quintessential to social development and women empowerment especially in a country like Pakistan.
