I looked down at the paper in my hand again.

HE WAS IMPRISONED SEVERAL TIMES DURING THE 70s BY THE BHUTTO GOVERNMENT FOR HIS POLITICAL VERSE INCLUDING ‘UJALA’ (DAWN) AND ‘AIK AADH LAMHA’ (A LITTLE DISTANCE).

He was one of Bhutto’s strongest critics, but even so he was filled with apprehension when the anti-Bhutto movement pulled religion out from behind its veil of privacy and into the realm of politics as both secular-minded and hard-line religious politicians banded together to campaign against the government. Bhutto tried appeasing the hardliners by introducing Islamic laws, but the General in the wings took over and decided to show everyone how Islamization was really done. My memories of those days are all about fear. The Poet and my mother were in Karachi at this point but I used to feel claustrophobic in their presence, all that pessimism sitting so heavily on them, evident even to a six-year-old, that part of me was actually relieved when

IN 1977, FOLLOWING THE MILITARY COUP WHICH BROUGHT GENERAL ZIA TO POWER, HE WENT INTO EXILE IN COLOMBIA to stay with his great friend Rafael Gonzales — my mother went with him.

HE RETURNED TO PAKISTAN OVER A YEAR LATER.

He was unable to write a word in his time away, and my mother claimed that following Pakistan’s news from a distance had almost given her a nervous breakdown. They saw in the New Year—1979—with a promise to their friends that they weren’t going to leave again, and I moved half my toys and books back into the blue bedroom in my mother’s house with every confidence that I would have no reason ever to move them out again.

IN 1979 GENERAL ZIA INTRODUCED THE HUDOOD ORDINANCE WHICH NAZIM, WHO KNEW SOME WOMEN ACTIVISTS, WAS VERY CRITICAL ABOUT.

‘How can words be used for such indignity?’ the Poet said, when he heard the details of the laws being passed in the name of Islam. (And my father’s father, the most gentle and pious of men, wept himself to death over it.) The Poet wanted to get back on a plane and leave the country, leave for anywhere. But my mother told him he’d have to go without her. Something in her broke free the day she sat at her dining table in dressing-gown and slippers, smoking a cigarette, and reading out loud every detail of the Hudood Ordinance. When she got to the part about ‘Zina’, which said an accusation of rape could only be proved in a court of law if there were four pious, male Muslim adults willing to give eye-witness testimony, she looked up at me and said, ‘For the first time, I wish I’d given birth to a son.’

LATER THAT YEAR, ZIA HANGED BHUTTO AND THE POET WROTE ‘ZEHER’ (POISON).

When he heard of Bhutto’s death the Poet locked himself in his cramped, dark store-room, and when my mother finally found a spare key and opened the door she found him whimpering and shaking. Within days of the execution he produced ‘Zeher’ and no one dared publish it. Undeterred, he made twelve copies of the poem, called twelve of his friends over for dinner and handed a copy of the poem to each one. ‘It was all very Last Supper,’ my mother later said, recalling the dinner. It was hardly the most accomplished of his poems (‘“Eyes expelling barbed wire in place of tears?” my mother said, holding the page away from her, between thumb and forefinger. ‘That’s what you get with instant poetry.’) but within forty-eight hours there were thousands of copies circulating throughout the country, being set to music, and through song entering the nation’s consciousness. That’s when he and my mother devised the code — they knew imprisonment was inevitable, and given previous instances in which letters smuggled into the prison ground had been intercepted, they decided a secret code would be a sensible safety measure.

HE WAS IMPRISONED YET AGAIN AND PLACED IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT.

My mother knew the climate wasn’t right to agitate for his release; she had nightmares in which he was hanged and she was taken to cut down his body with nothing sharper than her own teeth to sever the rope. So she turned her attention elsewhere. That’s when the third and final phase of her activism began, and it’s the phase people today almost always refer to when they talk of her life in the public realm.

In the wake of the Hudood Ordinance the women’s movement in Pakistan began to assert itself, though it wouldn’t be until 1981 that it went into high gear with the formation of the Women’s Action Forum. But as early as 1979 my mother was going from city to city, and often to smaller towns, sometimes covered up so no one would recognize her, and talking to different groups and individuals about the need to politicize women, to bring them together, to do something.

HE WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON SOME MONTHS LATER with the understanding that he had a week to leave the country if he didn’t want to be re-arrested

AND WENT INTO EXILE AGAIN.

This time my mother told him she was staying in Pakistan. But once he was in Colombia she began to pine — after all those months in which she’d borne his imprisonment with remarkable fortitude. ‘You yearn for his release so you can be with him — you fear that might never happen — but then he’s released and further away from you than ever,’ I heard her explain to Beema one day. So it didn’t surprise me too much when Rafael sent word the Poet was ill, that my mother packed a suitcase and left. She said she’d be back in a few weeks.

HE REMAINED IN EXILE FOR THREE YEARS.

And she remained there with him. She seemed to be on the move a lot during those years; often at conferences and the like, drumming up support for the women’s movement in Pakistan.

THE FIRST YEAR IN COLOMBIA, THEN IN EGYPT.

My mother insisted on the move — she saw that her own belief in secular jurisprudence was not sufficient to take on a government intent on claiming its laws were God-ordained, so she went to Egypt to work with women’s groups there and discover the feminist traditions within Islam which would allow her to battle the hard-liners on their own turf.

WHILE IN CAIRO HE WON THE PRESTIGIOUS RUMI AWARD, CHOSEN BY A PANEL OF POETS AND SCHOLARS FROM THE MUSLIM WORLD AND RETURNED TO PAKISTAN having received government assurances that he wouldn’t be arrested on his return.

It was 1983 by then, and the Women’s Action Forum, spearheaded by some of my mother’s closest friends, was taking on the military government with an astonishing show of bravery. Between the Ansari Commission’s recommendations that women should be barred from holding high public office, and the proposed Islamic Law of Evidence which equated the evidence of two women to that of one man, and the Safia Bibi case in which a blind eighteen-year-old girl who was raped found herself sentenced to a fine, imprisonment and public lashing on the charge of adultery, there was plenty of work to be done, and my mother rolled up her sleeves and entered the mêlée.

I decided to enter it with her. I didn’t tell anyone about it beforehand, but I managed to convince one of my cousins to drive to me to a rally to protest the Law of Evidence. There were so many people there that my mother didn’t see me, but I saw her as she addressed the crowd. Grazia, grazia, grazia. When I came home that evening, Beema saw the bruise that had been left on my arm from falling in the street while running from policemen who broke up the rally. We had the worst fight of our lives. Rabia, eight years old, phoned my mother to tell her what was happening, and Mama walked into our house in time to hear me say to Beema, for the only time in my life: you’re not my real mother, anyway.

‘Say that ever again and I’ll disown you,’ my mother said.

She told Beema she’d have no objection to having me locked in chains next time there was a rally if I refused to swear on the Qu’r̄an that I wouldn’t attend any organised protest unless Beema told me I could or until I turned eighteen, whichever happened first. So I swore, but I wasn’t happy about it.