My dear editor, 

You have no idea of the trial you have set up for me by asking me to write a piece on what I would be, or what I could have done, if I were a woman.

I should have been quite happy if you had asked me to borrow the robes of the prime minister of Pakistan. It might have been easy for me to update Machiavelli and produce a modern guide for civil princes on the art of walking through a minefield. I could have filled your columns with suggestions for mitigating the disadvantaged citizens’ misery or the joys of looking for talent beyond the favoured few.

Although the shoes worn by the Punjab chief minister are too large for any ordinary mortal to step into them I might have accepted the challenge, like Josh Malihabadi, of tendering advice to naujawanan az kism-e-majaz. I could have described ways of wringing the arms of the engineers responsible for drawing up the Orange Line train scheme, who have trapped him in a project Lahore will neither forget nor forgive.

Or I could have told you of the languages each bulbul-i-haft zaban needs to learn -- the language of love that can spring only from a loving heart, the language of modesty only the wise can speak and the language of tolerance the strong alone can command.

I would have gladly accepted your proposition -- if I were a leader of the Pakistan People’s Party. It should have been possible to tell you about half a dozen less painful ways of killing a party.

I would not have hesitated to accept the crown of thorns the head of the Pakistan Cricket Board is sporting these days and would have summarily disposed of the pack of immature, loud-mouthed (fond of barak) showboys and the tribe of ravenous parasites that are destroying cricket in this country.

But I do not think it is possible for anyone belonging to Pakistan’s male flock to genuinely and fully feel what it means to be a woman in this country. Even the most liberal and progressive Pakistani men cannot draw up an authentic woman’s wish list. A mild scratching of their skin would reveal not only deep-rooted biases against women but also a dread of their becoming equal to men.

When you ask me to slip into a woman’s role, as was done by male actors in the early days of theatre/natak in our part of the world, and nobody was fooled, you are not asking me to apply my mind/skills to a new job, you are ordering me to adopt the psyche of a long suppressed species that is not like a bathing suit everybody can slip into.

Further, unlike relatively advanced societies, where all women enjoy certain basic norms of freedom and dignity, we find women in Pakistan offering a bewildering array of variations not only in terms of freedom and dignity allowed to them but also in terms of their sorrows and their longings.

Which of the many models of Pakistani womanhood you wish me to fit into?

Should I become the young woman from Thar who wonders why her newborn has no right to live, nor can she understand that her child’s death is due to the denial of her right to nutritious food and to choose a proper time for getting married and bearing children?

Or would you like me to become the young girl from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who paid for her life for committing the sin of dancing in a family marriage ceremony?

Or do you want me to write as one of the women in the northern parts of the country who tills the land, tends the cattle, cooks for the family, delivers a child every 18 months or so and looks after a leisure-loving husband who breaks his drug-induced sleep only to grab food or to hurl profanities at his slave?

Perhaps you would like me to acquire the persona of a member of the business and professional women’s club or one of the women civil servants. (I do not mention the honourable women in armed forces for want of knowledge about them.) True, gone are the days when the late Gulzar Bano, the first woman to cross the CSS bar, was denied entry into foreign service for being a woman and was refused a desk in a hall full of men at the accountant-general’s office.

Today, we see many women in positions of authority but, like the women members of legislatures, they are barely tolerated by their male superiors, even by their male colleagues or men subordinate to them. By and large, they are tolerated by men in spite of being women and are often punished for being that.

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In any case, I cannot describe the travails of women in state service better than Kishwar Naheed who has been telling of lecherous dandies in the corridors of authority in installments and I will never have the courage to sing hum gunahgar aurtein. Nor can I compete with Fouzia Saeed who decided to take on all the sharks around in one go.

I have heard enough about the way women lawyers are treated by their male colleagues or how male lawyers behave before women judicial officers that I would like to withhold for the time being.

Similarly, I cannot represent the women workers who are paid less than men for doing equal work, nor the women working in agriculture for whom doing unpaid labour is part of the marriage deed, and certainly not about the bonded woman working on a farm or a brick-kiln whose dignity can be protected neither by her equally disadvantaged husband nor by a state that does not care.

At the moment, I will be obliged to show a galaxy of scars on an emaciated frame, if I were a woman. I am not afraid of doing that but perhaps that will not be the right message to the women on the move.

The Pakistani woman that we would like to see is still in the making. In spite of all the tyranny and chicanery that the defenders of patriarchy are capable of, the women of Pakistan are doggedly struggling to come into their own. And any woman or anyone who speaks for them can do no better than joining them.

But let me take another route for answering your proposition -- the route of the theory of transmigration of souls. If one has any choice, I might not join the herd of men and women who would not like to be born as women in Pakistan or a similar priestly state, and would prefer for my soul the body of a woman to that of a wolf or a serial killer. My mission will be to organise a trade union of the wives of the pious men of faith, the leading scholars, savants and sages among them. The members of the union will have a small contract with their husbands to the effect that the latter will join them in doing household chores, such as washing dishes and pressing the linen. The union will promise that no husband will be called zan mureed or joru ka ghulam. Women will not enslave anyone. They will not behave like men, George Orwell notwithstanding.

I hope, dear editor, you will understand my inability to offer a fair account of Pakistani woman’s suffering or her aspirations. The big gentlemen who will take the podium day after tomorrow do not know that they will fare no better.

Yours truly,
I. A. Rehman