Talaaq 3 Times She Said

Marriage is a strange habit - an obsessive compulsive union of two for the sake of children, for the security of money, for the fear of stigma, for the
nostalgia of a sexual drive, which rises from coma occasionally by force of habit - for lack of options - for economic stability - social security - moral
duty - religious obligation - familial unity - what is it really for?

For she hates him. She is a vegetarian and he an avid meat eater who must have freshly cooked meat for lunch and dinner. She stays with him because
she feels she has no choice, and as she pulls out goat hairs from his evening meat, the revulsion in her heart mushrooms like a narcotic cloud in the sky.
Yet she stayed for another 15 years, until their Ayesha grows up and leaves her family in disgust. Then she feels betrayed and cheated that the very
child who united the two by blood is unreal like a figment of her nightmare.

She is despised by him. He pulled her out of an obscure small town and brought her to America, wide-eyed and hiding behind curtains. Now 10 years
later, she is sickened by his possessiveness, sickened by the fact that he holds her back in her every effort at self-improvement, mocks her need to learn
English, inflicts abuse at her friends, doesn't want her to have friends. This isn't because he is protective of her but because he is jealous she will be
smarter then him, earn more money than him, be more popular and connected with the community and the world than his narrow, demented, one-dimensional arrogance ever allowed him to be. She is communal; he only knows how to aim his paan ki peek at community and side-walks.

She tried last year to be a match-maker for the sake of voyeuring her mind in the romances of others. He systematically destroyed her hobby - said she
had relations with every boy she tried to set up; every girl she tried to set up was a morally vacuous. He tries to defame her. He tried to plunder the one
thing a woman holds dear to heart - her reputation. He stands in a court of law for stabbing her with a kitchen fork and manages to sneak threats with his
glare that only she has learnt to understand.

She is sickened by his desire to smoke a pipe and envision himself enveloped by sea dragons while she earns the money for those drugs. She isn't
allowed to earn, yet she puts bread on the table. He calls it soiled bread.

He tells her she is too tall, too short, she is unpure from lesbian experience in her Abottabad hostel days. She had no experience before marriage and is
hence frigid, unpleasing, unseductive. He complains she can't cook like his mother.

He says she should wear more makeup, he claims she looks carnival-esque with more makeup. He calls her mother an impoverished mohajir from India -
a poor panaghir with no living quarters. He whispered to her last night, "when I saw you in the street last night, you looked so disgusting with your nose stud and your smudged lipstick, your hips swaying like a naachne wali, I wished a crate would fall on your head."

He thinks she reads too much literature, too little Shakespeare, too much Quran. He regrets she can't communicate in front of his friends like other
women can, she can't hold her own in a conversation. He shakes his head and says, had he not married her, she would have died a spinster like her
other sisters.

He eats his goat. Marriage, they tell her, keeps society from disintegrating, from every little thread if its fabric falling in disarray. Yet the fabric of her mind
and sanity is shredding piece by piece, the threads of her body lie in disarray, screaming for help. Screaming this midnight: please auntie do it, she says
talaaq, talaaq, talaaq!

And little did she know, her husband would stop mid-bite and crumble, shrink and disappear into the twilight zone, into the midst of a group of divorced
middle aged men with their bellies hanging out and their heads apologetic of imminent baldness, hoping to capture the dreams of a young nymph but
sadly sinking deeper every night with the realization they lost the only true maiden they could ever have. They wrestle in futility with their self created
sea dragons, their every breath gets shorter and joins a finite set of ever decreasing breaths.

Talaaq, talaaq, talaaq, and the tortured memories of every single moment with him began to loosen their throttled hold on her wajood - her existence. Talaaq,
talaaq, talaaq, in the voice of a young and rebellious Khalida Riasat, turning history into destiny, breathing the infinite possibilities of fresh air.

And little did she know that society, morality, religious sensibility, the compulsion of habit would fall at her feet like submissive, stray pups, stripped of
their rabid sting. Now begging her for fodder, for definition. And the smell of fresh currency would make her dizzy. It is true a few doors closed on her.

Okay, maybe many more than a few doors. It is true, she was stigmatized for a while and initially things were difficult and there were debts instead of
currency, there was fear instead of the joy of freedom. Life outside bars was vast and scary and some even suggested she consider staying within. So
what if your daal has stones, at least you get a meal every day.

And after she uttered talaaq, she said khula a hundred more times - irretrievable breakdown of marriage - she explained to a hundred more lawyers and
magistrates, and more than a hundred years later, she got a piece of paper.

You get no money or dowry or meher, the paper said. Who cares she said, take away this as well. She took off the ring which he insisted she keep,
because he was suddenly ashamed of the inane vengeance of his material demands. It is soiled she said and walked away proudly to the sound of
metal against wood. Divorce they say is evil and prevalent in the West - but if marriage remains an obsessive compulsive habit, our only way to maintain
union, then sometimes divorce is a necessary evil - the only way to retain union.