Page one of A Woman on a Suitcase, with its very first lines, goes straight to the point all too quickly that it at once looks comical as it does grave. There is a young woman freshly thrown out of her house by her husband, perched on, of all things, a suitcase, bursting with thoughts. It has the promise of a satire — the author does not lash out at the patriarchy, but paints a naked picture of how things stand and lets the reader see how very ridiculous it all is. 

The novel, the third by Pakistani author Shazaf Fatima Haider, has a woman on the cusp of a divorce, torn between wanting to fit in and wanting to walk out. While the author does not harp on allowing doses of humour into the grave area of abusive and unhappy marriages, Shazaf says that fiction for her is a way to settle the demons of her own mind. She wrote the novel a decade or so after her own divorce. The protagonist of her book, Seema Hyderi, is like her, a girl raised in Pakistan with a certain set of beliefs and ideas about marriage, and finds it hard to shake them off, especially when she is confronted with an affectionate mother-in-law, far removed from the impassive mother she grew up with. 

“As many who have left marriages will confirm, one often comes out with a lot of shame and unanswered questions, un-had conversations, and also a lack of closure. While I am happily remarried and have four children of my own, I sometimes find myself wondering why certain people behaved the way they did; or whether my own actions in the past had been wise. The desire for the 'revenge narrative' had long gone — I was past all the recriminations and bitterness, but I needed to put a firm lid on a tumultuous part of my life,” Shazaf tells TNM.

Seema’s marriage is not given the shades of a physically abusive one, but she is periodically humiliated, thrown out of the house for hours in “punishment” for her disobedience, made to do housework so much that she has little time for her art. Her husband Momin had, in the sweet rendezvous preluding their wedding, promised a space for her art, but it was a different man she encountered at the Hyderi house. Seema knows, as a girl growing up in a place where submissive wives are the norm, that women who get out of marriages, no matter how bad they are, are outcasts. Conditioning is a hard habit to kick.

She does not walk away from her marriage with the sure steps of a woman who knows what to do, not after years of being told it is exactly what she is not supposed to do. She is for the longest time, irritably though understandably, confused, indecisive, and neither here nor there. But to Shazaf, Seema is a hero. “Literature and movies like to show heroic women who fight back physically — they are bloodied, limping, devastated avengers. But that's not the story I was writing. Women are heroes when they're able to pursue their pleasure despite the world telling them they have no right to do so. They are fallible, confused, and sometimes even wrong. But they subscribe to a belief I hold in my core — all of us are sent into this world with one beautiful life and our goal is to become the best version of ourselves.”

It is touching to see Seema take time to allow herself some sympathy, become free of the guilt she’s been forced to carry without an ounce of understanding from anyone around her. That is until she meets a divorced relative she too had cut ties from and a loving uncle who takes her to London for a respite. The uncle – Fauzi – is the picture perfect man, who not only sees the injustice of Seema’s situation, including the hidden toxicity of her ‘loving’ mother-in-law, but also lets Seema see it all for herself, opening the doors for her to a strange new world where she could get lost and find her way back. 

“I included Fauzi's story (that includes a heartbreak) to show that patriarchy hurts men too. Momin (Seema’s husband), by the way, as ridiculous as he is, is also a victim — thoroughly castrated by his father and overwhelmed with the duty of being 'alpha male' when it doesn't come naturally to him. I also wanted to show that sometimes, people's lives are left hanging, and they still survive despite heartbreak — and that's more true to life than a neatly folded-in story where everything is resolved,” Shazaf says.

You cannot find the happy endings of a fairytale, for the book is not only about Seema. You get parallels to compare the relatively better off deal she had, like the outright abusive marriage of Muneera – Momin’s sister – who thinks she has to bear with the beatings and tortures of an easily-pricked man for the honour of her family. You get Seema’s parents, one of whom hates the other for a brief extramarital affair, but holds up the facade of marriage for the sake of the world outside. 

But Shazaf does not want the book to be seen as representative of a whole country or society. “Seema is in the minority in that she is from a life of privilege, can travel to London, and never really has to worry about money. This is not the case with a lot of women who have had to fight the stigma of divorce and battle financial difficulties, in addition to child custody. By eliminating the practical difficulties in Seema's life, I was able to focus on the normalisation of abuse as a means for controlling women and their bodies.”

Shazaf does not believe it is getting any better for women. Rather, she says, we are regressing and feminism is misunderstood. The change, she says, is slow. “The governments of the world are doubling down on our rights over our bodies and everywhere you look, the damaging old-school tropes of the angel in the house, most evident by the viral trad-wife movement on social media, are coming back and under the illusion of 'choice', are taking us several steps backward by removing choice. I know that in my family, divorce is no longer the death-knell it was when I left my marriage 10 odd years ago. Several young women, cousins and friends, have left abusive husbands, men who were gay and married only to please their families, serial cheaters, etc. There is the awareness that a woman can be happy and thrive after divorce. There is a change, but it's slow and it seems to be stalling.”