Heartbreak in a golden cage

This is a moving tale of a woman's lifelong struggle.

Sophia Naz’s biography of her mother, simply titled Shehnaz, is a moving story of a woman’s struggle to reclaim her children from a failed first marriage. In many ways, it’s a familiar story, a tale told too often, but one that bears repeating over and over again.

Shehnaz, born Fatima, belongs to a noble family in Bhopal. Brought up in a sheltered environment, surrounded by royalty, she grows up wanting for nothing, except perhaps a window to the world and the chance to explore life outside the somewhat stifling folds of an overprotective family. As a teenager, after much cajoling and pleading, she is finally allowed to attend school in Lucknow, where for the first time, she makes friends with girls who are not siblings, cousins or nieces. But, despite her desperate efforts to avert an early marriage and seek higher education, she is married off to a lawyer from Bombay and there begins an ordeal that takes up, in a way, her entire life.

Trapped

Shehnaz’s husband is never named, only referred to as Monkgoose, a moniker she gives him right from the start (and one that the author chooses to stick with, likely for purposes of privacy). Being beautiful herself, and apparently aware of it, she finds him to be ordinary, repulsive even. Maybe looks matter more than other qualities in an arranged marriage, but even so, such observations or implications can make a reader squirm. Unfortunately, however, the groom’s looks match his personality. Shehnaz soon finds out that not only has she been trapped in a completely loveless union, but it is also an unrelentingly violent one.

The one thing the young bride doesn’t lack for is creature comforts. Her husband is well-connected and well-heeled because of the job he holds and Shehnaz’s social life includes rubbing shoulders with the who’s who of Bombay high society. There are the big film stars of the day, musicians and dancers, industrialists and prominent political figures — including a memorable meeting with Nehru — and the constant entertaining keeps the young lady busy (in fact she almost gets cast as Anarkali in Mughal-e-Azam, but fate intervenes). She doesn’t always enjoy the parties and soirees because, horrifyingly, her husband also expects her to agree to sexual favours.

Eventually, Shehnaz goes on to have two children, a girl and a boy, but a heartrending chain of events later, she is divorced, estranged from her children, soon remarried and living away in Pakistan. Sophia Naz is her daughter from her second, mercifully loving, marriage. It must have been difficult for her and her brother to watch their mother pine for her lost children.

Shehnaz is not an easy read. The first few pages are slow and read like a roll-call of names. There are too many to remember, but Naz clearly wants to establish her mother’s pedigree. The fair-skinned women who people these pages are always described as beautiful, like it’s the only hallmark of physical beauty, though their teeth must have been in a state with all the betel chewing. Parts of the book feel dramatised, but the writer assures us that the people in question kept extensive diaries, which is certainly believable.

A little harder to digest is the way some are cast as cardboard cutout villains, so that the book reads like a film from the 60s. This includes the monster husband, who is certainly a character no reader will have any sympathy for, but a view from the outside, maybe through interviews, would have given us an inkling as to how a prominent lawyer and writer-turned-politician managed to hoodwink the whole world.