27 Jun Violence, deception, and redemption: Portrait of a marriage in Heart Tantrums
Aisha Sarwari’s memoir is an uneven book which is still worth reading because of its unflinching honesty.
The effort in Heart Tantrums to look unflinchingly at issues that many women in the subcontinent face, makes it worth reading. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock
That love can be destructive, delusional and often irrational is historically well chronicled—from Anna Karenina to The Crown, to name only two from a massive selection. What Heart Tantrums does is to deconstruct this process as a memoir of a marriage; it is a discursive, partisan, unembarrassed look at the lies, manipulations and occasional redemptive unfolding of a long relationship. Aisha Sarwari’s account of her marriage shocks not only because of the violence her husband inflicted on her, but also because of her choice to stay with him despite their two little daughters and her dislocated jaw, broken teeth, and frequent black eyes.
The memoir begins some years into the marriage when the violence was at its worst and when no one suspected that her husband had a brain tumour and was not in control of his increasingly erratic behaviour. In the beginning, the central question of the book seems to be: how could any wife, especially if she is well educated, financially independent and a successful career woman—and Sarwari is all three—accept being hit by her husband? But quite soon it becomes apparent that the realities are more complicated. Sarwari writes with exemplary honesty, “ [My] marriage… gave me not just status, but oxygen. How does a Muslim girl like me, now a woman, go back into the world without that status?”
In his Foreword to the book her husband acknowledges—somewhat disingenuously—“I was thoroughly undeserving of a partner like Aisha. I plucked a beautiful flower and then trod on it.” And Sarwari admits she decided that her intelligent, charming, interesting, and often devoted husband was worth the blows, the anger and the agonies. In one of the most disconcerting sentences in the book, she writes, “ [He] hurt me. Big deal. He stopped soon enough, didn’t he?” But she does not, intentionally or otherwise, minimise the shock quotient, even describing how, after a blow, a tooth fell out of her mouth and bounced down the stairs. It feels as if she is forcing you to ask how she could risk her daughters’ safety, her self-respect and her sanity for this man.
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