“Never trust a man, Hina. They’re all scum.”
I was nine years old when my mother first said this to me. She had failed yet again to secure a divorce from my father in Pakistan—her second attempt at doing so. The first time she tried, I was five and remember the day we came back home after my parents’ separation—one of my earliest memories in life. My brother and I ran up the driveway of our house in Lahore and hugged our dad, seeing him months after my mother took us to our grandmother’s place where we stayed during their split.
Between showering us with gifts and taking us on vacations around the world, my father often gave into his demons. He engaged in extramarital affairs and expected my mother to be cool with it. He would drive stone cold drunk with my brother and I in the back of the car, our mother yelling at him from the passenger seat to avoid hitting an oncoming truck. She wasn’t allowed to work, lest she suffer my father’s wrath which could take on a number of forms: financially cutting her off, or not paying the kids’ school tuitions, or verbally threatening her, sometimes escalating to physical abuse. In the pits of his destructive spells, my mother was often collateral damage.
Her three brothers, who all lived comfortable lives in Lahore, weren’t much help when she tried to get out of her toxic marriage. They robbed my mother and her three sisters of their rightful inheritance as part of my grandfather’s estate when he passed away. Under the pretense of needing the money to look after my grandmother, the four sisters were left at the mercy of their husbands to support them, and each of them suffered in their marriages.
To survive in this world, I was taught to always guard my real self from men. “Don’t let a man know how smart you are,” mom said as I neared the end of my teens. “Men don’t like women who are smarter than them.” I was cautioned to never share too much of my story with a man. The heartaches, sadness, disappointments and trauma. That’s all fodder for men to emotionally manipulate women; a leverage to keep them chained in unhappy and lopsided relationships to benefit the man. I was to remain stoic and composed, and never let a man see me without make-up. That’d be too real.
Mom introduced me to the works of Jane Austen and the Brontӫ Sisters when I developed an intense love of reading. She guided me to discover the strength each of the female protagonists showed in the face of 19th century Victorian life—the same challenges women in Pakistan were contending with during the 1990s: fighting for autonomy and pushing back against norms tying a woman’s self-worth to what a man thought of her. These heroines presented a conundrum to me; they found their “happy endings” with men who valued and respected them for their fiery and unfettered natures. But how? Weren’t all men supposed to be scum?
This dilemma worsened when I started living independently in my early-20s. We immigrated to Canada and I moved away to attend university, while my parents went through their whole song-and-dance routine of getting a divorce, this time in a new country. I had issues of my own starting to manifest.
How was I supposed to trust a man if they’re all scum? Is love even real, or possible with a man? Were all men different versions of my father? Should I live my whole life as an act to save myself from inevitable heartbreak? Who am I if I’m not me?
There were a lot of pretenses in my first serious relationship. I decided to go with the demure, good-girl personality which saw all my rough edges sandpapered down. I dressed modestly, didn’t hold controversial opinions, and never let my boyfriend in on the naughty thoughts often circulating in my mind. And I never, ever spoke about the trauma of growing up with an abusive father. I was a sleeping volcano of repressed emotions and muted desires.
That relationship lasted two years, and as a snake molts its skin, I too shed my nice girl act and leaned into the strong, independent woman trope. For Hina 2.0, I pretended I never had any trauma to begin with. At parties, I laughed about how I watched my father revive my mother after she tried to overdose on sleeping pills when I came home from school one day in Lahore. It was no big deal; I was over it.
By the time I met Sai, I had perfected my act. My longing for a man to understand the psychological damage wrought upon me from living in close quarters with my volatile parents—that was compartmentalized away. My need to be seen and accepted as a broken woman who never got over her daddy issues—that didn’t exist. My insecurities around intimacy masked as a laissez-faire, anything goes style of pair-bonding was the ultimate play.
A year into dating Sai, cracks started to appear in my perfect facade. In a moment of weakness, I’d share something with him I wasn’t supposed to, like what it felt like when my father hugged me and cried like a baby during one of his drunken episodes, telling me again and again how much he loved me. Or how helpless I felt seeing my mother lie listless in the corner of her bedroom after having balled her eyes out because my father had once again committed adultery. Such moments of honesty were rare, and I knew Sai could see more than I cared to admit. Whenever he’d say, “I’m sorry this happened to you; I can’t imagine what it must be like to see that as a child,” I’d freeze up. I wanted to say, “You don’t know the half of it, let me tell you more.” But instead I’d brush it off because my mother’s words would ring in my ears: “Don’t let him in. Don’t let him see the real you.”
It was only after my father’s untimely death that I admitted to Sai how much help I needed moving past my tortured childhood experiences. Two days after his death, my mother and brother flew to Pakistan with his body and stayed there for months wrapping up his affairs. I stayed back in Canada to look after my teenage sister and deal with matters at home. My brave act lasted one week after my father died, after which a tsunami of unaddressed rage, bitterness and sorrow started to pour out of me.
I couldn’t pretend any longer that what I had gone through was normal, or it didn’t affect me or how I engaged with the world. I was desperate to be seen for the wreck that I was; my fragmented psyche wanted to grieve my father, but also hate him for all he had put my family through. In my devastation, I forgot all the rules and told Sai everything my mother warned me never to tell a soul.
I fell in love with Sai after I stopped hiding from him. The more I shared, the more I wanted to share with him. Instead of what I feared would happen—he’d see me as damaged goods and leave—the exact opposite transpired. We became more intimate, and he started to open up to me about his life. Over time, the potency of the pain I carried started to fade and we’d joke about holding “therapy sessions” where we’d often laugh together over some of the more absurd aspects of our upbringings.
It wasn’t easy for me to revisit the most unpleasant memories from my life, but it’s what I needed to do to heal myself and move past them. Every so often, I’d be gripped by a pang of fear and think, “Have I shared too much with Sai?” But the ecstasy of finally being free to live as myself—to own my fears and dreams, joys and disappointments—was too great for me to go back into my protective shell.
I stopped beating myself up for the things I couldn’t control when I was a kid. I stopped running away from the hurt and unlearned much of what my mother taught me about men. I was angry at her for coloring my view of the world as a treacherous wasteland overrun by villainous thugs, but I understood why she did it. She wanted to protect me from the despondency and grief she faced in love and life. As her first born—a girl—she had to shield me from the patriarchal violence all too common in Pakistan.
Every year on my father’s death anniversary, Sai started planning small commemorations at home so we could celebrate the good times I had with my father. We’d watch a beloved movie from dad’s childhood and make Pakistani snacks that he loved to eat. One year, Sai made a Spotify playlist of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan songs; a favorite of my father’s. He held me close while I cried in his arms as we slow-danced in our living room, the pitter patter of raindrops drowning out the silence between songs.
When Sai asked me to marry him, I said yes, and for the first time in years, my mother’s words echoed in my ears: “You can’t trust men.” I knew I had to reconcile the lessons I was taught with the choices I made as an adult. I went to visit my mother, to share the news of my engagement, but also to confess what I had done. I disregarded her hard-learned truths and embarked on a path that diverged from the one she started me on. Did I make a mistake? Was I doomed to relive her fate?
“Don’t live your life in fear of what happened to me in my marriage,” she said after I told her of my transgressions. “You’re not me, and you will never be me. Your life is your own. Don’t live it in the shadows of your past.”
From everything my mother taught me, this was the greatest lesson of all.