Book Review: Blasphemy

Blasphemy is a heart-wrenching novel by a Pakistani author, Tehmina Durrani. It is a tragic and an utterly shocking story which unveils the ugly faces of people in power. The book is set in South Pakistan and depicts male domination of the highest order, tyranny in its crudest form and religious fundamentalism at its extreme. It brings forth the easy distortion of Islam by the hypocrite and predatory so-called religious leaders. The descriptions are awfully repulsive and the very thought that several thousands of women, even today, are subjected to this sort of life, is enough to give you shivers.

The protagonist, Heer, is like any other teenager having her own dreams and aspirations. Just like she read in books and saw in movies, she is waiting for true love to knock at her door and sweep her off her feet. However, Heer’s widow mother gets her married at the age of fifteen to Peer Sain, a man of great honour and prestige, considered to be divine by his followers and thought of as the link between God and ignorant people. Despite the fact that Peer Sain is several years older than Heer, the marriage is fixed as her mother wants to redeem her own status in the society and Peer Sain helps her in doing so in every possible way.

Heer enters her new house with rosy expectations, but what follows this marriage is a series of torture, both physical and emotional. She is beaten, humiliated, abused, raped, trapped and made to live in the world her husband made for her.

A world where no flaw is permitted, no mistake is forgiven, no logic is applied and no explanations are given.

A world where she is not allowed to cross the threshold without her husband's permission.

A world where she is beaten brutally for coming in front of a six-year old ‘man’.

A world where asking about her mother and siblings brings her more misery.

A world where she has noone to share her pains with, noone to talk her heart out to.

A world where she has to protect her daughters from the evil clutches of men, including their own father.

In this world there were no ways of living and no rules followed. The only word heard was of Peer Sain, as and when he wanted.

Throughout his life, Peer Sain exploited the weak and ignorant people in the name of Allah and Islam. Anyone who dared to raise his voice against the system was crushed in a way that served as an example for other people to never question the authority of the Peer's ancestral Shrine in future. Kali, Guppi, Toti, Tara, Chote Sain, Sakhi Baba, Yathimri, Cheel, all were the victims to this system. Only those who meekly surrendered to the wishes of Peer were said to be loyal Muslims. Ignorance was the foundation of their system and was hence enforced at any cost.

Under his angelic façade, Peer Sain committed crimes which were not only against the religion, but against humanity. Taking advantage of burqa to present his wife to his friends as a whore, making his wife abort her child to make sure he is not devoid of pleasure in any way, molesting little girls, killing his own son as he makes the Peer's position in the society vulnerable, satiating his sexual hunger with any girl in vicinity, not sparing even his own daughter. The acts were gross, the crimes were gory and the emotions too disturbing to be imagined being even close to reality.

In Heer’s words,

‘To me, my husband was my son’s murderer. He was also my daughter’s molester. A parasite nibbling on the Holy Book, he was Lucifer, holding me by the throat and driving me to sin each and every night. He was the rapist of orphans and the fiend that fed the weak. But over and above all this, he was known to be the man closest to Allah, the one who could reach Him and save us.’

It was impossible to imagine someone living this kind of life even though, for me, it got over in around 200 pages, while Heer lived and suffered it for 24 long years. Life was so difficult for her that at many instances she had no other choice than to join hands with this Satan. Her only motive in life was Survival. Heer realized that to fight in this world of evil she had to be more evil. There was no way out but to keep spinning this endless poisonous loop until either the tormenter or the tormented gives up his hope on survival. And one of them does give up. One might call it a happy ending but after going through so much, for Heer, it would be far from being so.

For me, the most horrifying and disturbing of all the lines in the book was, ‘The novel is inspired by a true story.’