T alaq is for sharaabis,” said Fatima’s friend. Fatima has been supporting her family with two jobs ever since her husband died a few years ago. Fatima’s friend sews and repairs clothes in the evening; in the mornings she works as household help.
She didn’t want to give her name —“These days who knows who reads what papers? Arre, our neighbourhood boys all know English”— but she was perfectly willing to talk. So was Fatima. “Talaq is a nuisance,” she concurred. “It’s mostly these men who come back home drunk and then get themselves into trouble.”
In their slum, they explained, several Muslim couples they know are in the twilight zone of semi-divorce. Many have gone through the triple talaq; some are reluctantly going through it, since the pronouncing of the first talaq itself creates very specific problems. The majority of these talaqs, both insisted, stem out of relatively small issues. An argument over in-laws, over the heat, over the lack of water, over the man’s drinking can spiral into the kind of quarrel where things are said that should have been kept silent. “Talaq” is one of those things.
With Nadeem and his wife, it’s a ritual: Nadeem gets drunk, comes home, his wife hits him over the head with the broom, he says “talaq”. This is apparently so common that there’s a conspiracy of silence: no one will tell Nadeem, when he wakes up hungover and unable to remember much that he pronounced the ‘t’ word.
Fatima is not very comfortable. “He’s said it so often that maybe they are no longer married,” she says. Her friend laughs. “They have three children, Didi,” she tells Fatima. “And he eats his rotis with her. They’re married. But all the same, it’s best not to tell the maulvi. He would make them live apart.”
They know five couples — no, six, says Fatima’s friend, pushing up her fashionable purple pallu — who have ended up living apart because the man pronounced talaq, once, twice or thrice. In only one case did the couple actually want to live apart, they say. “We hate talaq,” says Fatima suddenly. “From the day we’re married, it hangs over our heads. Even the best man knows that he can say these words and phut, that’s the end. My man would never have said talaq; but he used to tell me, see how lucky you are?” And what did she think? “I thought, what about me? What if I wanted to say talaq some day? Who would listen to me, how would I say it?”
Both of them know that the All India Muslim Personal Law Board is meeting soon and might discuss issues related to talaq; it’s been a hot topic of discussion in their slum. Fatima isn’t expecting anything. “They will just say the Quran says this or that and start squabbling,” she says. “But they should end it now. It’s a bad practice. We hate it.” Fatima’s friend snorts. “They won’t end it,” she says dismissively. “But Didi, sometimes I think of the maulvi and his wives, and I think it would be so funny if they all got up and said talaq to him! Then maybe he would think about ending talaq!”
It’s time for her to go; she says goodbye to us. Fatima’s still standing there, looking thoughtful. “It would be very funny, wouldn’t it?” she says suddenly. “If all the wives started saying talaq, talaq, talaq? The men wouldn’t know what to do!” We look at each other and burst into laughter, even though we aren’t really sure why we’re laughing.
