marriage

Every ending is a new beginning: wrapping up The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings

Iqra Asad Khan Writing about writing , , , , , , , , ,

I am in the process of writing the last episode for The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings. It has been a great journey writing this series. While Hackschool Project, my first novel serialized in Us Magazine, The News International, was hugely popular for its coverage of the educational issues of Pakistani youth, The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings got a lot of attention for the issues it covered. Every time I highlighted an issue related to arranged marriages in Pakistan in The Eid Engagement, readers would write in to Us Magazine to share their experiences. I was always amazed how, no matter what I wrote, someone would write in to say that the same thing happened to them. It just goes to show that the issues related to arranged marriages in Pakistan are universal and can be appreciated by all readers.

According to the feedback I received, readers thought Hackschool Project dealt with a more groundbreaking topic than arranged marriage, which is a good assessment when Pakistani media covers arranged marriages from every angle. Still, I felt like I needed to add my viewpoint on this topic. While in Hackschool Project I covered a collection of various issues related to student life, in The Eid Engagement I dealt mainly with one topic: the right of a girl to choose the man she marries. I did not feel the need to cover multiple aspects of arranged marriage in one novel. Certainly, I can always address another aspect of arranged marriages in Pakistan in another novel related to this issue. For now, I am content that I followed Hina on her journey of deciding whether or not to marry Sameer. It was important to me to stress that a girl needs to be satisfied with her decision to marry someone before the families proceed with the marriage ceremony. Far too often, a girl’s view on her own marriage is brushed under the rug, pushed out of the way to make room for other things like what her parents want and what society demands from a young woman. Not every case of arranged marriage where the girl feels undecided about the match ends happily, and as I showed with the character of Sameer, the girl’s indecision about her own marriage can cause trouble after the couple starts their married life together.

It is a simple expectation, really. Let a girl decide if she wants to marry the man her parents choose for her. She is the one who is going to spend the rest of her life with the man she marries. The marriage formula “put a man and a woman together and the woman will make the marriage work no matter what the man does” is no longer relevant in the 21st century. Parents need to adjust their expectations from their daughters and accommodate their wishes about the most important decision of their lives.

I hope my readership enjoys the last episode of The Eid Engagement. I have the next novel lined up to start writing soon, but that is the topic of another blog post.

Shifting Gears from Hackschool Project to The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings

Iqra Asad Khan Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

When I finished writing Hackschool Project, I knew the story of the three Moin siblings remained yet to be told. I could see clearly them continuing along the lines where I had left them. With Leena in college, Inaya just having finished her O Levels and Jasir starting Matric, I see many tales of their educational years yet before us. I decided, however, to put the Hackschool Project sequel on hold to make way for a new story to come through. An older story with more mature characters and a different theme from Hackschool Project, exploring the world of young people once they are past their educational years. I decided to explore the topic of choosing someone to marry through the eyes of three friends, two who are already engaged when the story starts, and the main character, Hina, whose process of getting married is the focus of the story. Hina’s experiences of getting engaged and everything that comes with an engagement unfold in a backdrop of commentary from her friends, who have opinions about every step of the process and do not hesitate to share them.

The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings flows differently from Hackschool Project in terms of how story points connect to each other. The story builds over time as events progress and one thing leads to another. Wedding-level excitement cannot be present in the beginning chapters of the story, where the engagement is still in the planning stages. In this way, The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings builds from stage to stage: the pre-engagement stage, the engagement ceremony stage, the immediate post-engagement stage, and so on. At every stage, we see the friends’ commentary of it. The friends’ commentary is a recurring occurrence and its regularity in the story is the bar by which each stage is measured. Is it acceptable? Is it fashionable? Is it current? Hina’s friends run her ongoing engagement experiences past their personal standards. Their most strict standard is comparing Hina’s experiences to their own engagements. Hina’s engagement might fail one friend’s standards of being fashionable, or the other friend’s standards of being authentic, but in the end what comes to light is Hina’s development of her own standard. As Hina determines what she wants, she runs her engagement past her friends’ standards and finds it severely lacking. This, combined with her own wishes to get more out of the situation, ultimately leads her to prioritize what is important to herself first. Will she remain bound to her friends’ standards? Will she find what she is looking for in her engagement? Will she fall in love with her fiance? We will find this out together, as I am still writing The Eid Engagement, and Other Weddings at the time of writing this post. If you’re interested in my published work, you may get Hackschool Project, my story about students using the power of family, fun and friendship to survive school life, here at the Mera Qissa bookstore.

Love, a four-letter word?

Iqra Asad Khan Us Magazine , , ,

It’s that time of the year again, when the noblest of actions is reduced to a love-themed merchandising day. I am talking, of course, about love. Love is something that we as a nation must understand completely before we can accomplish anything worthwhile. If we keep misunderstanding love, we keep wasting our precious time and energy in chasing a lie.

Defining love

Love is a verb. This means that love is an act between two people. Love, the feeling, is a product of love, the verb, plain and simple. If you do actions of love for someone, it will result in creating a space for that person in your heart, and a space for you in that person’s heart.

What, then, is an action of love? Let’s stick to the basics. The most basic action of love is the way in which you look at a person, the way you use your eyes in his or her presence. If you look at the wording of our traditional poems and songs, you will find that they are filled with description of the language of the eyes. The poet talks about sitting in wait so that he may gaze upon the beloved, the singer sings about that one glance he is dying for, and we everyday people are stuck scratching our heads and wondering whether Cupid ran out of arrows when it was our turn. The reality, dear readers, is simple: whether or not you believe in your life partner being determined by fate, finding that life partner is hard work, arranging to be married to them is harder work, and keeping a marriage alive and working is the hardest job of all. Love is work, and work is effort. The concept of love being something that happens all by itself due to the beauty of a random person’s body and mind catching your attention, is a nice little story to tell by the fireside, but it is not a law of life to believe in.

The effects of “crush culture”

When young people decide to spend their free time admiring celebrities, the girl next door and the cousin from abroad, a “crush culture” is established that results in heartbreak. By “crush culture” I mean the time and energy spent in watching the crush, thinking about the crush and obsessively discussing the crush with friends. Schoolgirls are notorious for this–they do not even spare the teachers who they see all year round or the invigilators who they see during their annual exams. Any and every pretty person they see is a target for their whims.

What is frustrating about this is that this heartbreak is completely avoidable. It is simply a matter of how much you value your own heart and your own ability to love. Are you going to throw away your heart after every pretty face on the TV screen, or that cute boy or girl in the tuition centre? Yes, it is completely normal to be attracted to what appears beautiful to you. What I am asking you to consider is: is it worthwhile to fill your mind and heart with every person who attracts your attention? What do you get in the end, from all the hours you spend fascinated by that personality? The answer is that you get nothing at all. You, your mind, your heart and your time are worth more than that.

The myth of “the one”

This problem begins when we take our different forms of entertainment too seriously. The media sells the lie that there is only one perfect match available for you in the world, and that you have to be very high up in the social rat race in order to find that one match, and you will never have “chemistry” with anyone else. The reality is that there is a range of compatibility we have with many people, and out of them we can choose the one who appears to suit us the best. For a man, that would probably be the best-looking woman out of all the women of similar personality that he can approach for marriage. For a woman, that would probably be the most “well-settled” man out of all the men she finds to be compatible with her own self. The thing is, in real life, suitable matches do not line up for selection in this manner. Life is not a reality TV show. Really finding and choosing someone for marriage involves considerable patience, prayer, planning and preparation, and how can we grow all these qualities and techniques in ourselves when we are young, if we are impressed by fictional stories?

Love conquers all

In our experience of life, we come across many different people. There are people we like, people we dislike, and people who don’t matter to us. Out of all the people we like, we spend more time with a select few. The others are just there to pass the time with when our close friends aren’t around. The way we approach people in general has a big effect on our effectiveness as an individual member of society. The human heart has an incredible capacity to love, if only we understand this. If you consider love simply as a positive force that you use to brighten up your little corner of the world, starting with loving your own self, then the time passes more pleasantly. Don’t get me wrong: approaching every aspect of life with love is not easy, and discussing how to do it is beyond the scope of a single article, but it is possible. I will go beyond even the word “possible” and say that love is the purpose of existence–just don’t get stuck on the romantic version.

The importance of self-love

By self-love I mean regarding your own self in a positive way. A lot of us are caught up in self hate simply because of negative body image, peer pressure, family problems or some other reason. Call it self-esteem, call it self-care, whatever you call it, stop right where you are and take a deep breath. We are all human and certainly, desiring marriage to a suitable life partner is perfectly acceptable. It just doesn’t make any sense to waste our mental, emotional and spiritual energy on “time-pass” connections and end up neglecting our own poor hearts that need our urgent attention. Like they say, “bloom where you are planted”–easy to say but hard to do, certainly, which is why actually doing it takes a lifetime.

This article originally appeared in Us Magazine for the youth, The News International:

https://www.thenews.com.pk/magazine/us/185111-Love-a-four-letter-word

In an alternate reality

Iqra Asad Khan Iqrawrites Originals , ,

“Son, once you get married, there’s no coming back. Once you’re married, you’re married. That’s your identity for life.”

“Being a man, it’s your full responsibility to make your wife happy. If you fail in making your wife happy, you have failed as a person.”

“Brother, you must know, you have to keep yourself well groomed for your wife. If you leave your stomach hanging out and your nose hair untrimmed, she’s going to look at other men.”

“It’s a guy thing. You have to know how to fix your own breakfast and make a cup of tea. What are you going to do when your wife is sick or out of the house? Hang around starving until she’s there to serve you? No. That’s just not how we men do things.”

“Keep your wife happy. That’s very important. No matter what happens, never talk back to her. Never argue with her.”

“You are going to disgrace me in front of your in-laws if you do that. You’ll never be successful as a husband.”

“Thank you for doing this task for me. May Allah bless you with a good wife and children.”

“You have to do this degree. There’s no way anyone will choose you for a husband otherwise.”

“I am so angry at you! You are going to remain a childless bachelor all your life!”

“Go help your little brother with his Maths homework right now. How will you teach your children once you’re a father?”

“That’s not how manly boys sit. Sit with your legs closed. And don’t take up enough space for two people.”

***

I had lots of fun writing this. Add your own “marriage advice/remarks from an alternate reality” in the comments!