Our Loved Ones Left Behind

The other day I received an e-mail from a very dear friend, someone I have known for a very long time. My friend’s dispatch was suffused with dejection. His marriage is on the rocks and he is totally exhausted by life, he wrote.

This friend of mine currently lives in a house he inherited from his father. He lives with his wife and two children on the upper level, while the lower level is occupied by his widowed mother and an unmarried elder sister.

He wrote that his wife was asking for a divorce. [A note for Non-Pakistanis: in Pakistan only men have the authority to nullify the marriage.] The reasons for demanding a divorce, in the view of the husband, were trivial: his wife accuses him of giving more attention to his mother and sister than to her and the children. My friend, in a word, believes his wife has gone non compos mentis. He has reasons to doubt his wife’s sanity: for a long time she has suffered from severe depression. In fact, she is still on medication—my friend believes the medicines are not working.

Reading his message I wondered how my friend would come out of this trying situation. Why has life exhausted him so early in life? Is the pessimistic tone of his message amplified by the stressful environment he lives in? Isn’t it hard enough in Pakistan to go out and fight your way through the day? Domestic problems on top of your daily fight with the system can be devastating. I pictured my friend coming home at night, totally worn out, hoping to find a peaceful retreat, but then having to face yet another warfront. He’s being shot at from all directions.

How is life more stressful in Pakistan than in the West, you may well ask. Well, most countries that have come out of the colonial experience have crumbling infrastructures, and Pakistan is no exception. It is an exhausting experience to work in a system that is falling apart.

My friend is one of the handful of my engineering classmates who still live and work in Karachi. The rest of us escaped. Most came to North America. Some went to the Middle East—and majority of those who went to the Middle East ultimately applied for immigration to Canada and are now planning to move.

I wonder if my friend considers us, the escapees, to be the root cause of Pakistan’s and therefore his problems? It is logical for him to blame us. What if all these brilliant, hard-working people had stayed? Couldn’t they have turned around the country through their collective strength? But we were weak, and each one of us felt alone. I wonder if my friend would believe in our justifications: that we were idealists who wanted to see drastic changes in our country but felt powerless to change the system. We had to escape to retain our sanity. We escaped to places where people have already created systems that work; where, through trial and error, the system of governance has been made flawless. Initially, we came here not to stay permanently, but to gain strength and ultimately go back. But as time passed by, we became more and more comfortable here. We have been good Pakistanis though. We call our parents once a month and regularly read the online version of the Daily Dawn to keep in touch with the latest developments in our country. The intellectual among us even take time to write about Pakistan’s problems and how things can and should be changed for the better. And that’s the best we can do. Don’t ask us to come back. We are too weak to go and live in that country.

I wonder if my friend would understand all this. I don’t know how his problems will work out. I’ve asked him to try to cool things down; send his wife and children to her parents’--for her to see that getting some attention from her husband is better than not getting any attention. Giving honest, sincere advice is all I can do for him.