Zia’s Pakistan is the only one most women have known

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Four women in a room, on a chai break during the final assignment of a personal development course. One of them was describing a country the other three have never seen.

Mahnaz Rahman is 77. The Karachi of her girlhood is hard to place now. She remembers it as clean, various, unbothered. This was before Ayub, before the first martial law, before the sequence that every account of this country seems obliged to start with.

Then she told us about the police at her door.

Her husband, the journalist Ahfazur Rahman, was underground. She was a working journalist at a paper the regime would close. The officers came looking for him and she stood there and fought with them, and what she remembers about it, more than 40 years on, is that they were polite.

I have not stopped thinking about that.

This week marked Zia ul Haq’s 38th death anniversary. The other two women in that room turn 40 and 30 this year, which means one of them was two when he died. Both know exactly what he did, and both have spent their whole lives paying for it, in the particular way women pay.

What they inherited did not come to them as history. It came through their parents: the adjustments, the sentence left unfinished, the way a household learns to arrange itself around a state that has changed its mind about what women are for. None of it was handed........

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