Chapter 1: Prologue

Chapter 1: Prologue

Why speak of a city, a neighbourhood or a family? There can hardly be a single house in which there is not a widow: an old woman, a middle-aged one, or (alas) a young one, or (alas, alas) a girl. And since in marriage a man and a woman bind themselves to each other for life, the necessary and unavoidable outcome of every marriage is that in the end either the man becomes a widower or the woman a widow. In marriage a man and a woman have pledged to live together all their lives, not to die together. True, the census has shown that everywhere, leaving aside the wild and savage tribes, women outnumber men by a little, but not so much that wherever you look you see nothing but widows. No doubt this great number of widows is partly because every wife is, to begin with, usually younger than her husband, by a little or by a lot; his span of life ran out first, and the woman was left a widow. But there is another great cause: men are feebler than women at bearing the hardships of a single life. Before even the shroud of the dead wife has had time to grow soiled, their faith begins to waver. And why should it not? One does not die along with the dead. As the line goes, "Glad or sad, one must live." The days of life have to be passed somehow; why lay torment on oneself, and why make life bitter? It is only women who have the heart for it, and what heart is that? Say rather that it is the very worst of ill fortune, that they endure the wretched life of widowhood. They say the Day of Judgement will be a day of "each for himself", when no one will care a whit for another's pain; but as far as we can see, for widowed women it is the Day of Judgement even now. To say it with the mouth, everyone will say that widowhood is a great calamity; but what is saying it with the mouth worth? We would believe it a great calamity only when we saw people doing something for those it has struck. To say "It is no calamity", and to say "It is a calamity, but we do not wish to do anything about it", come to one and the same thing. If widowhood is a calamity, it is a strange kind of calamity, for everyone you see sits with hands folded; even the one who is herself caught in it weeps and beats her breast and wastes away inside with grief, but of any thought she ought to give to freeing herself from the prison of sorrow there is no sign at all. We too have seen hundreds of widows, and, as far as we were connected with them, we have of course felt sorry for the helplessness of some; but God is witness, and God suffices as a witness, that until we heard the story of Azadi Begam we did not know what blow falls on a widowed woman's heart. Perhaps God meant some good for widows, that Azadi Begam poured out the poison of widowhood's bitterness to her dying breath. If, God forbid, Azadi Begam too had left the world unhappy and unfulfilled, with hundreds and thousands of longings in her heart and her mouth full of boiled grain [TN: an idiom for keeping silent], as hundreds of thousands and millions of God's handmaids have gone, neither speaking her own mind nor hearing another's, then there would have been the same widowhood, the same choking inside, the same:

If morning came, calamity fell on my wretched heart;
If night came, then I knew the Day of Doom had come.

the same formal condolence, the same false sympathy. Who can deny this kindness of Azadi Begam's? But she too, may God forgive her, did leave one thing lacking: in speech she held nothing back, but in deed she showed nothing. Had God given her the courage, and had she acted on, not all, but even two or four of the thoughts that came to her heart in her years of widowhood, the world would have opened its eyes wide and seen what wretched results come of keeping a widow unmarried: for the widow herself, for her relatives, for the family, for the community, and for the country.

Azadi Begam was not an unusual widow, but by chance such events befell her that she was certainly an unusual woman in herself.