At the heart of the book is a search for identity which finds its physical expression in the author’s roving for her roots.
I was on Facebook when the chat flap popped up. “There is a hardly a substitute for a husband”, the girl wrote. “Yes I’m dating but there is no romance. It’s a void that can’t be filled.” Coincidentally, I was reading Nighat M. Gandhi’s book at the time. The girl chatting with me was Hindu, but her emotional crisis could have come straight from the pages of Alternative Realities.
For women, regardless of religion, the condition of being without a man remains a problem. Yet, even here, for Muslim women the rules are definitely tougher because, post 9/11, the gender game has changed. Nighat, the daughter of an enlightened man who encourages his daughters to study abroad and shares poetry with them, suddenly finds herself imprisoned at home for wanting to marry a Hindu. From this first betrayal at the hands of a man she loved and trusted a kind of disillusionment began to unravel. Alternative Realities is the story of Nighat’s wanderings through the terrain of women without men.
Nighat sets out on her travels to write the book acutely self-conscious about being alone, about doing something forbidden by strict Muslim tenets. Her quest as she travels through Pakistan, India and Bangladesh is to find out how women really define their own existence with or without men, with or without emotional stability.
Everywhere she looks, Nighat finds women involved/trapped in some kind of compromise. For example, the women devotees at Nizamuddin’s tomb are not allowed beyond the verandah, so they are forced to make their bargains with the saint from a distance. Then there is Ghazala, who prefers living like a single woman in a long-distance marriage over more conventional ties. In most cases, in fact, marriage itself is a compromise—women alone are vulnerable and as a wife one can escape drawing unwelcome attention. On the flip side are two women who set up house together as an alternative to the unfeelingness of men and in their take on marriage Nighat encounters a kind of Sufi perfection of feeling.
At the heart of Alternative Realities is a search for identity, which finds its physical expression in the author’s gypsy roving in search of her own roots. As someone belonging to three nations, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, Nighat finds her existence fluid. She finds peace in simple things like the heart of marmalade-haloed sunsets, or purple blossoms on a vine in the early morning haze. Her writing style has touches of poetry and what she has to say is delivered with easy directness.
The song poems of the Sufi mystics who lost themselves in the search for love hum a leitmotif. For the writer, a kind of conclusion is reached with greying hair and menopause, though I am not really sure whether reaching fifty really frees a woman from anxieties about love and rape.
There is no doubt that Alternative Realities is an important book. There is also no doubt that the book could have gone even deeper. Nighat has chosen the milieu of most immediate importance to herself, but the girl I was chatting to on Facebook would have related to all of it and asked for more.