THREE PAKISTANI WEDDINGS IN TIMES OF WAR
Zehra Khan
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being woken up at half past three in the morning by missiles striking your city, you’ll know that, in a state of grogginess, they sound, oddly, like urgent knocking on your bedroom door.
That’s the sound my sleeping mind registered on the morning of 7 May, jerking me awake and upright in bed, then with feet on the floor in a matter of seconds. In retrospect, it’s telling that the thought that it could be guns firing never so much as crossed my mind, because that particular quality of sound, sonorous and brief, is so well-etched in the minds of Karachiites that it warrants no mistaking.
The noise that woke me up that morning was low pitched and echoing – a sound reminiscent in my mind of high school, my shot put meeting sandy ground. As I unlocked my bedroom door and walked out into the living room, the scene that met me made the source of the relentless thudding clear: my father scrolling frantically through X, my mother cradling her head in her hands, my uncle and aunt sitting huddled together, staring at the walls.
In the first few seconds after my father blankly stated, “Pakistan is at war with India,” I stood still, barefoot on the cold tile floor, registering none of the implications of this and instead having the most absurd, feather-light thought: This would make a brilliant opening for the 1995 hit Bombay. In fact, I imagined it: velvety darkness torn open by missile trails, a slow zoom in to show Manisha Koirala rising from sleep as the walls of her house tremble, a sharp cut to her in a red saree standing on a rooftop, wind teasing her aanchal, an A R Rahman score swelling just as the sky behind her erupts into fire.
A second later, I managed to decipher that my family’s distress possibly stemmed less from national concern and more from the impending wedding of my parents’ only child – me. With this, another incongruous thought floated in: “a wedding in the time of war” has a similar ring to it as Love in the Time of Cholera, a book I learnt to love through my father’s admiration of it.
When you come from a family whose fate has signalled migration for each of its last three generations, even the first misfire of war begins to cast massive shadows of impending doom.
LET ME START from what I know as the beginning of a debilitating anxiety carried in my family’s genes, the very genes that are heirloom and inheritance to me. Long before I had my own brief war-wedding dilemma this summer – following the Pahalgam attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, India’s retaliatory Operation Sindoor and Pakistan’s answer with Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos – my maternal grandmother, Nano, had hers.
It was March 1971. The eastern wing of Pakistan had declared its independence and stated that no price, including war, would be considered too high for its freedom. Nano was fortunate enough to narrowly escape the transmutation of East Pakistan into Bangladesh, arriving in Karachi via plane from Dhaka with her parents and her younger sister, war-weary and landless. Nano doesn’t recall the politics of the event that permanently altered her life as much as she remembers the smell of Dhaka burning: one big wildfire consuming every ounce of the congeniality that had helped her parents call the city home when they first sought refuge there in 1947, having arrived from Patna, Bihar, in what was until then a united India. She was 23 when she left with her family, a hurried departure after shoving whatever the extended hand could reach into duffel bags small enough to not raise suspicion on the way to Dhaka’s airport. Her memory of those last few days in the city that gently coaxed her into her prime and then violently snatched it from her is blurred at the edges, partially from age and partially from trauma’s clumsy shutter speed.
Karachi wasn’t home, but, like the Dhaka of Nano’s parents, it had the benefit of seeming like it could be. They stayed, temporarily at first, in a cramped house belonging to a gracious distant acquaintance of her father’s, who had chosen Karachi over Dhaka as his permanent abode following his own exodus from Patna in 1947. Then, as is always the case in stories of Southasian migration, the web of relations began its mysterious, untraceable work; Nano’s family found a small house to call their own and began to conceive of settling down. In time, the memory of a possible suitor for Nano returned.
This was no new match; it was a thread from a previous chapter, one interrupted by war. My paternal grandfather, Nana – known then, and for the rest of his life, by his nickname, Gunnu – came from a family of Biharis who had settled in Hyderabad Deccan before the partition of India. In 1947, they moved to East Pakistan and made a life there, bringing with them their Hyderabadi grace and Deccani-tinged Urdu, embedding themselves slowly into the rhythms of Dhaka. As he came of age, Nana found work at Sui Northern Gas Company, which eventually took him to Punjab in West Pakistan.
Back in East Pakistan, long before cries of “Kill the Bengalis” and “Kill the Biharis” began alternating in the alleyways, a quiet idea had bloomed. Nana’s sister, Taj, had been best friends with Nano’s father, with a closeness that blurred the lines between friendship and kinship; she had dubbed him her blood brother and had imagined out loud a union between the families. Nana, visiting his family in Dhaka during holidays, had crossed paths with Nano once or twice: Nano helping Taj with marinating Bihari kebabs, which happened to be Nana’s favourite; Nano ignoring him to the point that he joked about gifting her a fictional book titled “How to Talk”. There was nothing dramatic, nothing that required witness, but enough for each family to tuck away into its memory for future reference.
When war came in 1971 and both families were forced out, they found themselves in Karachi, disoriented but not unfamiliar. It was Taj who picked up the thread and approached Nano’s father for her hand in marriage for her brother. What had paused in Dhaka resumed in Karachi almost seamlessly. It didn’t matter that the country had been halved. Some things, if carried carefully enough, could still be restored.
Nano and Nana’s engagement happened at Nano’s Karachi home in almost complete darkness; not metaphorical darkness, of the kind poets chase, but the thick, suffocating darkness that wraps itself around city blocks during wartime blackouts: a regular occurrence in Karachi in August 1971, with the threat of Indian strikes hanging over the urban sprawl as it engulfed the hordes of refugees from Bangladesh. There was a single candle lit in the centre of the room, flickering with such drama it seemed to be reacting to the sky outside, where aeroplanes thrummed low and steady. The air was full of waiting that evening, as Karachi and Nano held their breath for whatever disastrous happening or sweet release fate had in store for them. Rings, inherited by them from their parents, were slipped onto their fingers, and the wedding was set for September the next year.
Nano’s anxiety did not stem from Nana. The two had one of my family’s most overtly loving marriages until Nana passed away at 63, during and after which Nano always insisted he was a good man, the best she ever met. Instead, on the evening of her engagement, her anxiety came from the impossibility of celebration, of the performance demanded of a young woman standing at the edge of everything she had ever known. The country was in a gruesome war that had resulted in it breaking into two. Nano had left Dhaka without finishing her political science degree at Dhaka University, without her childhood friends, without so much as a quarter of all the things she had owned and loved. She had already lost a version of her life once, and now she was expected to start a new one with a man she barely knew, in a house that wasn’t hers, in a province she had no ties with, surrounded by people who wouldn’t be hers for long. That night, Nano’s fingers stayed clenched long after the ring was on.
And so the days began to pass in measured fragments, not of calendars or clocks, but of curfews and candle wax. The city moved in staccato then, shops hesitating to open in the morning, the streets yawning slowly to life, as if the night’s silence hadn’t quite loosened its grip. The useful window stretched between noon and the approach of sunset, when the last rickshaw would agree to take you home before curfew cemented the roads shut.
In that one fragile window of daylight, Nano, her sister and her mother tried to find everything required to make a wedding possible: glass bangles, bridal sandals, pins for the hairdo no one was sure they’d attempt. Karachi had a strange geography then, layered with wariness. Nano’s family had settled in North Nazimabad: one of the few areas in the city, including Paposh Nagar, Orangi Town and Korangi, where other migrants from East Pakistan had clustered, and so within the radius where you could walk without feeling exposed. The women of Nano’s family didn’t know where the useful markets were outside their own neighbourhood – and even if they knew, even if the horse-drawn carriages or rickshaws agreed to take them across the city, the injury of having escaped a war remained so fresh, and the political climate so precarious, that even the thought of leaving the area was dismissed without much consideration. The women went by whispers, instinct, the occasional generosity of a shopkeeper who didn’t overcharge. Being refugees demanded that they make do, that they prostrate themselves before God and Karachi-dwellers in thanks for being able to defeat their limited means and unfavourable circumstances.
Decades later, in July 1999, as the Kargil War began to make itself known along the Line of Control between Pakistan and India, it was Nano herself who ran point on the wedding preparations for her daughter, my mother. Ammi knew she would marry Baba ever since she could spell his name. He was her cousin, her childhood playmate, the boy who’d always been there. Their marriage was inevitable; it wasn’t a question of if, only when, and when came with Kargil.
Weddings in 1999 had a strange silence to them. The war raged on, but it was almost like someone had drawn a thick curtain over it and asked everyone to whisper. There were no 3 am blasts in the distance, no curfews, no blackout drills that reached the confines of Karachi; just a vague discomfort, like a low-grade fever the city didn’t want to acknowledge. There was no social media back then, no real-time updates, no grainy cell-phone videos of soldiers in bunkers. Instead, the news was spoon-fed, doctored, interrupted at will. One day the newspapers would mention tensions at the border. The next day they wouldn’t arrive at all – banned by the armed forces overnight.
Ammi’s wedding passed in a surreal kind of calm, unlike Nano’s. The family had by then become accustomed to omitting “East” and “West” when referring to Pakistan, and their presence in their new home had been cemented to the point where they were aware of and had access to the right jewellers, tailors, florists – everyone required for the wedding to be a success. There was no logistical hurdle other than Baba being in Karachi while Ammi and her family were in Punjab.
WHEN MISSILES STRUCK Karachi earlier this year, I woke up in recognition of a memory that seemed to have skipped a generation and landed squarely in my lap. I was a month away from my own wedding, and suddenly war was knocking on the door again. But unlike the wars in 1971 or 1999, this one, thankfully, was short-lived, a thing more of threat and theatre than blood and gore. And most importantly: the internet was alive and well. My city could, quite literally, be bombed one night, and I could spend the next morning ordering make-up. There was something absurd in that, something so modern it bordered on the grotesque, which made planning a wedding feel like defiance, or denial. And amid all of that: the realisation that my family and I have inherited the skill of celebrating on borrowed time.
A migrant’s relationship with home is often suspended in time, and this frozen relationship is inherited by generations to come. This is not because time stops, but because memory does. Our expectations of life, of what is owed to us, of what we are meant to return to, rest quietly on the assumption that what we left behind is still there, unchanged. But no city stands still. Yet for many of us, especially those born to migrants, the image of home is built not on first-hand experience but on the retellings of our elders. The cities we inherit are described, not visited.
My image of Patna, for instance, was stitched entirely from the stories my grandparents narrated to me: narrow lanes and open rooftops, brass utensils washed with ash. So when, in 2021, I saw a photo of a new glass bridge in Bihar being advertised as a tourist attraction, I felt a strange rupture – not because the bridge didn’t belong, but because it didn’t belong to my version of the city. Similarly, when a literary friend video-called me from Dhaka and turned his camera to the street from his balcony, I was startled by how much it resembled Karachi; the same tangles of wires, the same unsteady footpaths, the same cadence in the honking. In my head, Dhaka had always been back-dropped by thick greenery and soaked in rain.
These cities, which I have never visited, still sit at the centre of my cultural compass. Their relevance is not geographical but emotional, because it is the idea of them that I’ve inherited, not the actuality. They shape what we cook on Eid, the words we use for street snacks and afternoon siestas, and – naturally – what we expect of weddings.
With the preparations for Nano’s wedding in full swing there had come the more pressing concerns: What does a Southasian wedding look like when half of the bride’s rightful inheritance is missing? For Nano, the answer came slowly, bitterly, and from across the border. Most of the gold amassed by her parents, slowly and over many years, in the form of jewellery, with the intention of passing it on to her, had been left behind in Dhaka, tucked away in lockers. When the war broke out in 1971, the banks where these lockers lived were sealed; some were broken into, some were swallowed whole by the system. What was lost was not just ornamentation, it was the architecture of security, a kind of unspoken pension scheme passed from woman to woman in preparation for a life that would demand endurance.
That meant the gold had to be remade. But, mistrustful as the family were, there was a fear of fakes, of haggling gone wrong. In a new city, with limited resources and no access to familiar jewellers, this remaking was not merely a question of cost, it was a crisis of authenticity. The gold here felt different, looked different and was designed differently. North Nazimabad or not, Bihar’s dholnas, matar malas and dou rayya kangans were simply not part of Karachi’s aesthetic vocabulary. And so, for the second time in one lifetime, Nano began reconstructing her identity, trying to remember her mother’s tastes while developing her own.
Solid silver paandaans, trays, envelopes and jewellery boxes, which were as much part of a Bihari bride’s dowry as clothes, all had been lost to the war and needed to be repurchased. But you couldn’t find them in Karachi’s bazaars, and if you did they cost too much and came with the burden of compromise or the suspicion of fraudulence. Between pure silver, what the shopkeepers called chaandi and German silver, there was a chasm that separated what was remembered, what was affordable and what was available.
And perhaps most quietly painful of all: the chhaapas and saris. In the Karachi of 1972, it was hard to believe that, once, the two wings of Pakistan had been one – because Karachi, separated from East Pakistan by India and the perceived superiority of Pakistan’s biggest metropolis, had never bothered to acquire the tastes of its Eastern counterparts. So all the chhaapas one could find were too synthetic, with faux silver leaf pasted on cloth instead of real chaandi stamped onto saris. With the partition of the country, saris became congruous with Bengali-ness and East Pakistan, and even the few that had circulated just months ago in the city’s markets began to disappear. A whole identity was being swallowed by ready-mades and prejudices.
Nearly 30 years later, when Ammi got married, Nano still carried the memory of war in her bones; the same tension in her shoulders, the same sharp ear for aeroplane engines in the sky. She was the one who couldn’t sleep when the wedding was being planned, who checked if the shops had reopened before every errand. Because while my parents’ wedding did not have to navigate the logistical upheavals hers did, these preparations carried new difficulties of their own, ones shaped not by migration but by distance. Nana was stationed in Punjab, posted from city to city, while Baba’s family remained in Karachi, which meant that every fabric chosen, every gift bought, every utensil packed had to travel.
One would imagine that more than 50 years after their fateful departure a migrant would begin to loosen their grip on what once was, would cease to shape their expectations of life through the past. But that’s hardly ever the case for any migrant, until the imagined and the real collide: until a video call shows a skyline their grandmother never described. What follows is mourning, not for the old city itself but for the certainty of your version of it. And uncertainty lingers. It enters how you plan your wedding, what you pack, what you leave behind, what you insist on including, even if it no longer makes sense.
I’ve been lucky in ways Nano and Ammi weren’t. Most of my wedding jewellery is not new but inherited: gold bangles, chains, earrings and rings from Ammi, pieces that have already done the work of travel and time. Her saris, too, came to me. Some she wore for her own post-wedding events, others for Eid or dinners or just because: soft silks in deep tones, smelling faintly of camphor and cupboard wood. Nano, meticulous even in her planning for what she might not live to see, had already placed an order for my chhaapa two years ago, through an acquaintance from Bihar. The sarees I wanted from India had been ordered in time, before the war brought with it the most recent freeze in cross-border trade.
But when I began looking for jewellery to match the rest, Bihari dholnas and matar malas, Dhaka balis and kangans, I found nothing. Not in Bolton Market, not in Tariq Road, not in the smaller shops that still claimed to stock “vintage designs”. It was as if that particular aesthetic had skipped Karachi’s markets entirely. What lingered instead were Rajasthani and Rajwadi sets, matte and elaborate, with a red stone here and a green one there. These were not designs from Lahore or Multan or Quetta. They came from across the border in India, from the people most like those who call Sindh home, who had also left and settled and stitched their tastes into new geographies.
The irony is sharp. At a time when borders had hardened and diplomatic relations had thinned to a thread, what remained most accessible, most aspirational, were the aesthetics of those we’re not supposed to be like. I found myself caught in the contradiction: unable to find jewellery from my own heritage, and surrounded instead by imitation kundan, meenakari, uncut polki, imported, replicated and recirculated from a lineage that runs parallel to ours, but from which we are blocked by the state.
WHAT WAR DOES to a wedding isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes, it doesn’t arrive with the sound of air-raid sirens or the image of weeping brides. It creeps in quietly, in the slow unravelling of plans, in the tightening of the day’s options until all you are left with is the bare minimum: a small gathering and a sharp awareness of what’s been stripped away.
When Nano got married, in 1972, a tent was what most people had, not out of sentimentality or thrift but because that was the norm. The infrastructure for large-scale weddings wasn’t yet in place, especially for migrants still learning the shape of a new city. There were no expectations of banquet halls or coordinated themes. Guests bought clothes from shops near Paposh and Jama Cloth, where Bihari families had begun to cluster. They weren’t tailored to perfection, and no one expected them to be. Salons weren’t part of the routine and make-up came from a shared compact. For Nano, this wasn’t a loss; these were her expectations. She didn’t feel like she had less; she had what everyone else had. The simplicity felt familiar, even manageable. There were no illusions of grandeur suspended by geopolitical tension, just the quiet logistics of doing what people did.
By the time my mother got married in July of 1999, tents were still around, but the aesthetic had changed. Karachi had evolved. The war was farther away, up in the mountains of Kargil, and so, too, was the fear. Or at least that’s how it looked from the outside. By then, the state, under the thumb of military control, had imposed a strange kind of discipline. The Nawaz Sharif government of the day had banned food at wedding events, not for wartime rationing but as a gesture of austerity, an attempt to reduce financial pressure on middle-class families. What it succeeded in doing, however, was something entirely more absurd. At weddings where upper-class families insisted on offering extravagant buffets, brides began to carry their dupattas on their shoulders instead of their heads to avoid being caught as brides. Weddings were rebranded as “gatherings”, loopholes sprouted like weeds, and no one knew exactly what they were celebrating anymore.
Ammi’s wedding followed this strange rhythm. But she was not willing to compromise on appearing as the bride on the one day she was one, which meant no food could be served at the actual event. Bottles of 7Up, Fanta and Pakola stood like silent guests on the tables, sweating in Karachi’s July heat. The actual meal, biryani and qorma, was delayed until later, and was served at home to the guests who followed the couple there after the “event”. This workaround, Ammi says, took more energy than serving food at the wedding hall would have. Yet the real problem wasn’t the hassle but how it made them feel, like the natural act of feeding your guests had become taboo.
Nano, of course, found this all horrifying. A wedding without food was, to her, the same as a home without prayer. It was unthinkable, and she feared the signs. She recalled that her anxiety stemmed from her own lived experience, because the last time things had felt this strange, this censored, this much in the hands of men in uniform carrying guns, was before a greater disaster.
The irony was, of course, that in spite of the war, Karachi felt steady to some. It didn’t have the checkpoints Lahore had and it wasn’t at the edge of the frontlines. Here, the threat was ambient, not immediate. Baba – attuned to political upheaval as a journalist and, thus, calm as ever – argued that the war wouldn’t reach Karachi. But that dissonance, between what was happening and what could happen, sat amid every plan, every phone call.
By the time it was my turn, over two decades later, weddings had become a multi-platform operation across Pinterest boards, Google Sheets and WhatsApp groups. Now, salon appointments are made six months in advance, and skin prep begins a year before the wedding. But a booking is just a promise, a hope carved into calendars. For families like mine, migrants, middle-class, marrying in times of conflict, every booking comes with a question: Will the world hold?
So when my phone began buzzing not with congratulatory messages but news alerts about India and Pakistan exchanging fire, my first (sensible) reaction wasn’t fear; it was thought of logistics. Should I cancel the florist? Should we delay the make-up appointment? Should we re-check the advance paid to the decorator? Should we move the date? We didn’t cancel anything, not because we were brave but because we didn’t know how long it would last. The tension felt like a wave: rising, crashing, gone. In that in-between, everything was already set. The bookings weren’t broken. The cards had gone out. The food was ordered. The salons were open.
In Southasian tradition, a trousseau is a gesture of continuity. It stands in for the comfort of permanence, for the idea that even if a woman leaves the home she grew up in she is not stepping into emptiness. She arrives with linen, cookware, jewellery, clothes and some inherited sense of certainty. In many parts of Southasia, it is customary for the bride’s family to furnish her new home: to send along not only bedsheets and pillows but also beds, sofas, wardrobes, sometimes even appliances. It’s a way of smoothing the transition, of saying: we know you are going, but we have softened the edges of where you will land.
But what does this look like when the landing place keeps changing? When Nano was married, she knew from the outset that her future with Nana would not be still. Postings changed frequently and nothing ever lasted more than a few years. Houses were rented, lived in, and left. Her trousseau reflected that, and was designed not for grandeur but for movement. The clothes were saris, either inherited or purchased locally, folded into trunks carefully but with practicality in mind. In place of the furniture her parents would customarily have bought and transported to the couple’s new home, there was simply money. It didn’t make sense to risk damage – or worse, loss – by sending actual furniture across provinces, especially when the place still felt unfamiliar.
Even years later, Nano didn’t shift her gold entirely to Punjab. Much of it remained in a Karachi locker, her site of trust. That the new cities belonged to her on paper didn’t mean she felt safe enough to leave her valuables behind in them. The trousseau was never consolidated; it trickled with her across time and place, item by item, following her as best it could.
My mother’s trousseau didn’t carry the same logistical burden. She was returning to Karachi, her city, her family’s city, after years of following her father’s postings around Punjab. There was no shift in region and no uncertainty about where she would live. Karachi offered stability, familiarity – and, because she was marrying someone from within the family, there was no need to guess at what might be needed. The clothes, jewellery and gifts were assembled in a manner both efficient and expected. There were no last-minute changes, no interrupted shipments, no unresolved mistrust of a city. The trousseau arrived with her and stayed.
To me, the idea of a trousseau had already become faint, not because I rejected it but because I was leaving. In the third migration of my family as I know it, I was soon moving to the United States, to acquire a postgraduate education. But to think that this decision was purely academic, and thus optional, would be reductionist. In the fast deteriorating socio-political and economic climate of Pakistan, my planned move was just one more example of this country’s rapid brain drain. I would not have wanted to leave – at least not right then, right after getting married and settling into a new life – if I didn’t absolutely have to. And so the idea of taking things with me, carefully selected, culturally familiar, designed to make a new space feel like mine, felt beside the point. Nothing I packed could simulate the life I was leaving.
The trousseau, as it stood, was mostly gold bars instead of jewellery, dollars instead of rupees. There were a few clothes and accessories of Southasian sensibility chosen for me to wear at dinner parties in the two months I remained in Karachi after my wedding. The rest were sets of t-shirts, trousers and warm jackets, chosen not for tradition but for utility. I did not expect to be packing saris or embroidered dupattas, and there was to be no vanity case, no trunk lined with heirloom bedsheets that I’d be leaving behind either.
Admittedly, this version of a trousseau is thin emotionally because it carries no real past and, thus, lies outside of history. What I left behind, in fact, feels heavier than what I took. The jewellery I inherited from Ammi, I was too scared to risk being taken away at airport security; the red bridal Banarasi sari was too heavy for my baggage limit. So the real trousseau became a list of omissions, of things I chose not to pack, things I could not carry.
Unlike Nano’s slow and staggered migration, where gold shifted over time and furniture was added as trust developed, mine was singular and sharp. It happened at once, with no room for follow-up. And unlike Ammi’s, which was completed and settled before the war could reshape it, mine feels like it will remain unfinished. I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know how long I will stay. I don’t know what I will need. The trousseau reflects this in its incompleteness, not by mistake but by design. And perhaps that is the truest form of it: not a collection of what you own, but a measure of what you leave behind.
As my family geared up for my wedding, I wondered what it meant for us to follow Bihari wedding customs and rituals – suhaagan ki saat cheezain, paan leaves warmed over coal and pressed to the groom’s cheeks – when India and Pakistan were once again on the brink of all-out war. This is the question that undergirds every wedding in my family, whether we voice it or not, because while the border runs between two states, its shadow falls over migrant lives. To perform these traditions is not a simple act of continuity, it is also a form of political contradiction. These customs belong to the place my family has left behind, not the place where we now live. But we still press the chhaapa under layers of clothes with care, insist on serving Bihari kebabs at weddings, and we do this while the television news blares headlines about “enemy states” and airstrikes light up the border.
It is tempting to shrug this off as the banality of diaspora. Immigrants hold on to what they can, after all. But this is not diaspora in the classic sense. We are not Non-Resident Indians or their Pakistani counterparts. We are people who live in Pakistan, who vote here, pay taxes here, build lives here, and yet our rituals point eastward, to Patna and Dhaka.
Take suhaagan ki saat cheezain, a Southasian equivalent of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”, the seven things a married woman gives to another, younger woman on the eve of her wedding: henna, bangles, anklets, a nose ring, sindoor (in the case of Muslims, afshan), paan and a mirror, all to symbolise the tradition of singhaar. The custom’s language, its order, even its logic, is unmistakably Hindu in origin, and yet the ritual remains, modulated perhaps but not erased, among generations of Muslim families too. A wedding becomes a palimpsest. What is performed today sits atop what was performed yesterday, with no certainty about what can still be claimed as “ours”. Even language stutters under the weight of this contradiction: the tonay we sing come some in Bhojpuri, some in Urdu, some in a hybrid that only our elders understand.
This isn’t a lament for purity. I am not mourning the loss of coherence. If anything, what I am trying to name is the stubbornness of cultural survival, its persistence even in the face of contradiction. We are Pakistani, but we also carry within us a map of older affiliations, and wedding customs make that visible. They refuse to fall in line with geopolitical logic, they remember where we came from even when we are instructed to forget. This remembering is not free of cost. There is a fatigue that comes with it, a quiet exhaustion from always having to explain, to justify, to soften the edges. Every time I wear my sari pleated in the way Ammi taught me, I prepare for questions, some benign and others not so much. “Isn’t this Indian?” “Why not wear a gharara?” “This is a Hindu custom.” And then, beneath it all, the real question: “Why are you still holding on to this?”
The answer is both simple and impossible. Because this is what I have. Because this is how I understand where I come from. Because weddings, for us, are not just family affairs, they are moments where history resurfaces. And in that resurfacing we get to see, however briefly, the many selves we have been. To follow Bihari traditions while living in Pakistan, especially during a time of open hostility with India, is to sit inside contradiction and make a place of comfort there. It is to understand that the border is not just a line between nations, it is a tear in memory – and memory, unlike territory, cannot be redrawn so easily. It shows up in rituals. It simmers in the kitchen. It folds into sarees. And perhaps that is the final paradox: that even as countries fall out of dialogue, as soldiers line up across ridges and ceasefires break, we keep preparing for weddings. Because we do not know any other way to hold ourselves together.?
Zehra Khan (she/they) is a writer and artist from Karachi.