the upstairs wife

Farida Zakaria's memoir-by-proxy of her aunt's experience of being relegated to the role of second wife a few years into her marriage, and of major events in Pakistan's history from the perspective of its women. The structure of the book doesn't quite work, switching back and forth between vignettes from her family and narration of events that were happening around them at about the same time. But I liked the book all the same. Zakaria's a good writer and it was an education for me to read what plural marriage can look like in the context of middle-class (eventually wealthy) Muslim Indians-cum-Pakistanis. That's a world I'm aware of, that's around me all the time -- all of my Pakistani colleagues and friends are educated and middle-to-upper class -- but one that I'm still very much outside of.

And I always appreciate a narrative that's told so conscientiously, deliberately from women's point of view. Even when Zakaria is talking about something men are doing, she talks about women.

Now I've got to find another light book to keep me company while I work my way through Debt: the First 5000 Years. Which, interestingly enough, has just got around to describing the dawn of Judeo-Christian patriarchy.