Honor Aside

Chapter 1

It turned out to be worse than I had expected, watching my older sister get married off to a guy she had only met three days prior. I was a fraud, smiling politely for the camera in a lovely dress I'd convinced my mother to buy. Three days prior, after the official marriage ceremony, I had choked down the traditionally-offered greasy desserts and hoped that everything might turn out alright after all, even as I continued to feel as if I couldn't breathe. I have re-lived those moments, broken them down into emotions, memories, actions, and sensations, both in therapy and otherwise. It never gets old. Seeing my sister struggle through that trip, cry, remonstrate, and refuse to marry. Watching as she was told that she would, after all, be able to meet him in person before the wedding to make her final decision, only to have no real clout at all - that changed me forever. It's a series of those "I'll never forget this as long as I live" moments that haunt you forever. 

My sister had received matches from other "acceptable" families within our small, insular religious community over the past few years, but this one stuck. In Pakistan, my paternal grandmother approved the match with one of our second cousins, who was in medicine. My sister was studying to be a teacher at the time. She had wanted desperately to be a doctor. She had completed a grueling undergraduate degree, taken the MCAT twice, and applied a couple of times to schools in our province. After receiving no interview offers, she had been heavily pressured by our dad to apply herself to teaching. She had been accepted into a teaching program but she struggled to find her place. She cried a lot in the early days and argued with our dad about not liking it. He would scold her to be quiet and be grateful, then scratch his head and act dumbfounded that she did not love or even see the obvious benefits of what he had coerced her into. You fucking made fun of her, you stupid bitch. Yeah, I made fun of her. I used humour to deal with most things, especially the things we couldn't discuss because of the unspoken rule of not pointing out what made us miserable. Especially when I'd seen my sister work so hard all her life and suffer so much emotionally without having any way to reach her. I'm so fucking sorry.

Anyway, she was in the last few months of her program, having struggled to feel that she was there for the right reasons, when she found out about this marriage prospect. Our dad thought it was a good idea. Thousands of kilometers away, his mother agreed that my sister would marry this distant relative. The relatedness factor bothered me less than the fact that this was our fucked-up family, our bickering, unhappy, suffocating family tree that was tightening its gnarled branches around my sister's neck.

She argued against the betrothal and upcoming wedding while our dad planned for a wedding trip that would bring many of our relatives together for the first wedding in our generation on both my mother and father's sides of the family. Every time I tried to approach or argue about the issue with my parents, I was shut out and told that I was too young to contribute to familial decision-making. My sister confided in our mom, something I hadn't done in years because I knew she wouldn't listen. As usual, my mother made things worse. She heard my sister's complaints, berated her, told her that her prospective in-laws would probably take one look at her and refuse to marry their son to her anyway, and told my sister that she was on her side. "I am with you," in her accented English, was her constant refrain. She said she had her back and she fucking didn't, because she may have argued with our dad about it a few times but offered no viable resistance. From my parents, I have learned to be unyielding even when I feel like walking outside and hanging myself from the nearest sufficiently-sturdy tree, and for that I am eternally grateful.

We flew to Pakistan without our dad, who joined us a week before the wedding. The grandmother who arranged the match had died a few months before, but the idea of this marriage had not. Before our dad arrived, my sister cried almost every day, almost every night. We all slept in one large room and I could feel her despair. I saw her, drained of energy and struggling through the days. I felt trapped just being there and not being able to do anything beyond having the occasional heart-to-heart that probably didn't help much anyway. Our mom continued to "comfort" her and tell her that she was on her side. My brother and I mocked our mom and poked fun at the situation to lighten the mood. I told my mom that her comments about my sister likely being rejected by the groom or his family weren't helping. My mom's other advice to my sister was to pray. She told my sister that they were praying for the same thing: for the wedding to not happen. She said our dad could change his mind after he arrived, or the groom's family could change their mind. I said she wasn't helping, because the wedding was only weeks away and relatives were flying in from around the world for it. Did she really think that our dad would put all this effort and money into something he was unsure about? I said she needed to actually fucking act for once, because this was clearly happening. Denial would delay or prevent nothing. When he heard the "they might say no anyway" excuse, our dad was incensed. He ridiculed our mom for being so foolish, saying that preparations were already underway, we had traveled halfway around the world, and we were not stopping.