The Story of a Courageous Woman

By Aparaa Lohani 

My Feudal Lord is a memoir written by Tehmina Durrani. It shows the condition and role of women in the Pakistani society. It is basically a memoir about her life as a wife of a Pakistani Politician Mustafa Khar and how he cut her off from the world, how she rebelled and how she had to pay a huge price for freedom.

The book begins with her first meeting with Mustafa Khar at a party. Around this time she was already married to Anees. Anees in my view was a good man but Tehmina didn’t seem to be happy with him at all. She thought it was bad that her mother didn’t think that Tehmina and her husband were worthy of respect because Anees was a poor man. This led to her being attracted to Mustafa Khar. In other words, she was attracted to power. Mustafa Khar was an aged but wealthy and powerful man. He had four ex-wives and one current wife named Sheery. In spite of that Tehmina developed relationship with him. Soon people began to whisper about them. Then Tehmina got divorce from Anees and married Mustafa Khar. After marriage Tehmina discovered that Mustafa was a violent man who would gave no freedom to the females in his house. Soon he divorced Sheery, who was desperately trying to keep her marriage intact. After divorcing Sheery, Mustafa became even more abusive towards Tehmina. Very often, she would get brutally beaten. She had to follow rules that didn’t make any sense. She could not buy anything like newspapers, magazines etc. If she did anything without asking him she would get punished. 

In the meantime, Mustafa developed a relationship with Tehmina’s younger sister, Adeela, who was just fifteen at that time. When Tehmina came to know that, she decided to bring the whole thing to light. When her sister finally accepted that she was having a relationship with her sister’s husband, Tehmina was forced to choose between her family and her husband. She writes that her sister enjoys the fact that she is favored above her sister and every incident between her and her sister’s husband would put her sister in trouble. She writes that once she had bought a few magazines without Mustafa’s knowledge. Adeela told Mustafa that and Mustafa beat Tehmina. Adeela is said to inform everything Tehmina did to Mustafa which very often led to Mustafa beating Tehmina. It is beyond imagination what led a fifteen-year-old to do such sadist things to their own sister! However, I felt the way she wrote about her sister was very vulgar. Adeela was wrong in getting into a relationship with Mustafa but Tehmina could write the whole situation in a more sophisticated way. 

Mustafa Khar was a politician and had a friendship with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. When Bhutto was arrested by General Zia all the senior politicians close to Bhutto and his party had to go in exile. Tehmina too went in exile with her husband. When Bhutto was hanged, Mustafa Khar decided to return to Pakistan to promote his political status. But General Zia, the then president of Pakistan put him in jail. Tehmina did everything to get him out from there. Soon after getting out of jail Mustafa Khar and Adeela, who was already married by then, resumed their relationship once again. This time her mother decided to support Adeela and save Adeela’s marriage.

Tehmina then felt that she had had enough and decided to rebel and get a divorce. The state of women after divorce in Pakistan is unimaginable. People whisper and shun women for having a divorce. Once a woman gets divorced she loses everything. Tehmina was left with nothing but her freedom. She got nothing during the divorce either and her children were also taken away from her. However, later she did get her children back. Now I think that the root of the entire problem she suffered was her mother. First, she didn’t like Anees and encouraged Tehmina’s relationship with Mustafa. Later she did her best to hide the entire Adeela situation and didn’t support Tehmina in any way.

As the book goes on my sympathy for Tehmina lessens more and more. The reason for this is that she makes her self look good in every way and promotes herself. She is from the elite class. But in the book she says that she represents the masses. She looks down on the people who are not from her class. She does not like to mix up with common people and does not like her children play with dirty boys in the village!  All in all it was a good book and I enjoyed reading it. It gave me an insight on things I had not even imagined about. The life Tehmina lived and her later struggle tells the value of freedom in one’s life.

(Aparaa studies in the eighth grade in Kathmandu.)