That love can be destructive, delusional and often irrational is historically well chronicled—from Anna Karenina to The Crown, to name only two from a massive selection. What Heart Tantrums does is to deconstruct this process as a memoir of a marriage; it is a discursive, partisan, unembarrassed look at the lies, manipulations and occasional redemptive unfolding of a long relationship. Aisha Sarwari’s account of her marriage shocks not only because of the violence her husband inflicted on her, but also because of her choice to stay with him despite their two little daughters and her dislocated jaw, broken teeth, and frequent black eyes.
Heart Tantrums: A Feminist’s Memoir of Misogyny and Marriage
Vintage Books
Pages: 320
Price:Rs.699
The memoir begins some years into the marriage when the violence was at its worst and when no one suspected that her husband had a brain tumour and was not in control of his increasingly erratic behaviour. In the beginning, the central question of the book seems to be: how could any wife, especially if she is well educated, financially independent and a successful career woman—and Sarwari is all three—accept being hit by her husband? But quite soon it becomes apparent that the realities are more complicated. Sarwari writes with exemplary honesty, “ [My] marriage… gave me not just status, but oxygen. How does a Muslim girl like me, now a woman, go back into the world without that status?”
In his Foreword to the book her husband acknowledges—somewhat disingenuously—“I was thoroughly undeserving of a partner like Aisha. I plucked a beautiful flower and then trod on it.” And Sarwari admits she decided that her intelligent, charming, interesting, and often devoted husband was worth the blows, the anger and the agonies. In one of the most disconcerting sentences in the book, she writes, “ [He] hurt me. Big deal. He stopped soon enough, didn’t he?” But she does not, intentionally or otherwise, minimise the shock quotient, even describing how, after a blow, a tooth fell out of her mouth and bounced down the stairs. It feels as if she is forcing you to ask how she could risk her daughters’ safety, her self-respect and her sanity for this man.
Not only did she stay, but after his operation and recovery, even financed a course he took at Harvard—and was understandably enraged when she discovered he had an affair with an Indian coursemate. But again, Sarwari’s commitment survived: She explains, “…I hadn’t known until now but I was very afraid of being abandoned…,” and adds, illuminating just how convoluted, how transactional, how irradicable certain social expectations are, particularly within marriages: “I wanted out. But I also wanted to be honoured for staying put.”
Cover of Heart Tantrums. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Aisha Sarwari grew up in East Africa. Her mother is from a Konkani Muslim family which had settled there; her father’s family had left India for Pakistan at Independence and they met when he went to Uganda to take up a job as a schoolteacher. They married in Kampala and had many children, of whom Aisha was the youngest and her father’s favourite. His early death left her feeling unanchored; a feeling exacerbated by the identity issues of being a brown person in Idi Amin’s Uganda. However, she had supportive elder brothers and eventually went to college in the U.S. where, in an online forum discussing Pakistan’s history and politics, she met her husband, a Pakistani from a well-connected Lahore family.
They married soon after she left college and headed to Lahore, where they lived with her in-laws and had two children in very quick succession. The narrative begins with the violence in the marriage and the recurrent crises as her husband’s ’s increasingly irrational behaviour—and the relationship–spirals out of control. Then the scene shifts to her childhood in Africa, and then back to Lahore, chronicling the early years of the marriage. Finally, it covers her professional life—the workplace intrigues, the incompatibility between public and private sectors, the not infrequent hostility from male colleagues threatened by independent, intelligent, qualified women—all of which shed light on the professional and personal journeys of upper middle-class women in this part of the world.
“There is such a distinct shift in storytelling gears from the drama and shock of the opening chapters to a very different tenor in the subsequent ones that the two parts almost feel like two separate books.”
The narrative’s back and forth, however, is confusing. There is such a distinct shift in storytelling gears from the drama and shock of the opening chapters to a very different tenor in the subsequent ones that the two parts almost feel like two separate books.
The Africa part, particularly, seems separate from the rest, being much slower and dealing not just with her struggles with her conservative family, but also with her growing awareness of being set apart for being an Indian girl in Africa. Sandwiched between the more dramatic Pakistan sections, this part is distinctly heavier. It is a relief when the narrative returns to Lahore and to the young couple still in love but each fighting for survival.
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Since this is a memoir and not fiction, it would have helped to keep the narrative chronological to give a better understanding of the reasons behind Sarwari’s actions—starting with her childhood, then America (of which there is surprisingly little), followed by Lahore, Islamabad, etc. The back and forth gives it the feeling of a novel which detracts from the verisimilitude of the memoir, which paradoxically, often shocks with its painful candour.
Heart Tantrums is an uneven book which could have been much shorter. But its effort to look unflinchingly at issues which many women in the subcontinent face, makes it worth reading.
Ranjana Sengupta is an editor and author of Delhi Metropolitan: The Making of an Unlikely City.
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