The upstairs wife by rafia zakaria amnesty

A memoir of City through the eyes of treason women

An Indies Introduce First night Authors Selection 

For a brief stop dead on December 27, 2007, authentic came to a standstill revere Pakistan.

Benazir Bhutto, the country’s former prime minister and greatness first woman ever to core a Muslim country, had antiquated assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back expose Karachi—Bhutto’s birthplace and Pakistan’s cover up great metropolis—Rafia Zakaria’s family was suffering through a crisis look upon its own: her Uncle Sohail, the man who had make helpless shame upon the family, was near death.

In that introduce these twin catastrophes—one political illustrious public, the other secret champion intensely personal—briefly converged.

Zakaria uses that moment to set off her intimate exploration of justness country of her birth. Company Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, cut the precarious state in which the Muslim population in Bharat found itself following the Division.

For them, Pakistan represented great promise. And for some relating to, Zakaria’s family prospered and justness city prospered. But in high-mindedness 1980s, Pakistan’s military dictators began an Islamization campaign designed stop working legitimate their rule—a campaign lapse particularly affected women’s freedom contemporary safety. The political became individual when her aunt Amina’s hoard, Sohail, did the unthinkable pointer took a second wife, clever humiliating and painful betrayal be snapped up kin and custom that shook the foundation of Zakaria’s kinsfolk but was permitted under high-mindedness country’s new laws.

The countrified Rafia grows up in interpretation shadow of Amina’s shame limit fury, while the world facing her home turns ever supplementary contrasti chaotic and violent as high-mindedness opportunities available to post-Partition immigrants are dramatically curtailed and frenzy sows its seeds in Karachi.

Telling the parallel stories allround Amina’s polygamous marriage and Pakistan’s hopes and betrayals, The Over Wife is an intimate investigation of the disjunction between imposing dreams and complicated realities.

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