My Feudal Lord....

.... a book that I read over the last few days. It brought in some sleepless nights and still leaves me a bit disturbed. This was the first time I read such a book, about women abuse and traumatic experiences... there were points where I just kept the book down and couldn't read further.. coz I felt so disgusted abt things described in it. Authored by Tehmina Durrani, a Pakistani woman, the book is a real life story about her life... her traumatic experience in her marriage with Ghulam Mustafa Khar, the former chief minister of Punjab and a famous pakistani politician during the time of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Mustafa was also known as the 'Lion-of-Punjab' and came from the Feudal background ..... There's also a lot of info on the political scenario in Pakistan between 1950-1980...

If you look at the book as a literary critic, then you will be quite disappointed... becoz Tehmina is not a writer by profession. The chapters are not well organized, and the paragraphs are quite unstructured. If I left a chapter unread and had to get back to it in the middle, then there was no way I wud remember the context of the story. Anyways... she says that her aim of writing the book was more to break the silence and let the world know about the male dominated pakistani society, the plight and misery of the women, where they had to constantly go thru a lot of mental and physical abuse.. ......and... expose the hypocrisy of the elite ruling class in pakistan...

What really surprised me was the fact that Tehmina always went back to her husband even after going thru all those violent abuses, sometimes nearing her to death. She reasons that this was becoz a female divorcee in the muslim society was treated with no respect... and her life wud have been made hell... But still, would someone go thru so much, just coz of the societal pressure?!?! Well, I guess even these days there are women who do not raise a concern when they are physically abused by their husbands, for the sole reason of protecting their marriage... I guess it is easier said than done.... But hats off to her that she did not give up till the end, and finally managed to get out of the living hell and got a divorce from her husband...

I admire her courage for writing this book 'coz am sure it wud have been a difficult task for her to have exposed all those big names in the political domain and the finer details of her personal life... The book, when released, received a lot of negative criticism ... She says she had to even go thru some investigations and trials in the court becoz of some info that she revealed in her book...

All in all... it's definitely worth a read... a heavy book.... might put u into lot of introspection and trigger some 'deep thinking' about various aspects of life... especially about personal relationships