ABSTRACT
Like most women of that time Fatima learned to read the Koran at home and was literate in her native language, Urdu. Along with four brothers and two sisters, she lived a middle-class life in the small town of Sialkot in what was then undivided India. At the age of 14 she went through an arranged marriage and moved to Kashmir. Her husband was the only son of middle-class parents and aspired to emulate the ruling class, which was, at that time, the British Colonial presence. Fatima found herself caught between two sets of demands: on the one hand, an archetypally powerful mother-in-law who regarded Fatima as little better than a slave and expected her to do all her chores, dutifully and silently; and on the other hand, a husband who was keen that she become ‘modern’, give up the veil and generally participate in a more glamorous lifestyle. But he was unable to stand up to his mother, and his job (as a forest officer) meant that he was away for long periods, leaving his wife at the mercy of his mother. Within a year they had a daughter, Qamar. By the time Fatima gave birth to her second child, a boy, about three years after the marriage, events were overtaking her. Her husband fell in love with a ‘modern woman’ who had come for a vacation to Kashmir. She smoked, danced, rode horses and they quickly decided to marry. Fatima was given a divorce and returned with the two children to her family in Sialkot. Shortly afterwards, the boy died of pneumonia. Fatima spent the next thirty-five years with her parents, serving the household in such central ways as cooking, cleaning and sewing. When her own parents passed away, she came to live with me, her daughter Qamar; she stayed until her death, in her early sixties, from complications caused by diabetes.
