‘Heart Tantrums’: A memoir about a troubled marriage lays out the compromises of womanhood

Boy meets girl: the beginning of a story. Ever-afters follow, plural; some happy, many not. But how do you tell the story when it is more complicated than that? Heart Tantrums, as author Aisha Sarwari describes it, is a memoir of marriage and misogyny. Candid and bracing, it pulls apart thread by thread all that coheres to create the impression of family life done well, balancing brave revelations with refreshing vulnerability.

Divided into three sections, the memoir sees Sarwari reach into the past for experiences that can help us – and her – make sense of what seem like obvious contradictions: she is a committed feminist, a vocal advocate against cruelties towards women, and yet in a marriage that she indicts with charges from domestic violence to infidelity. Without falling into the trap of using Heart Tantrums either to justify or placate, Sarwari uses the pages to lay out the often incongruent pieces that make up the messy reality of living as a woman, and the compromises that hold it together.

Being a ‘good’ wife

As a student in the US, Sarwari encounters a passionate young man on an online message board, arguing about the subcontinent’s history and setting the facts about Pakistan straight. This young man is Yasser Latif Hamdani – a lawyer, committed patriot, and Jinnah fanatic. Bound by their optimism for Pakistan’s future and belief in its potential, they waste no time: in their early twenties and right out of college, Sarwari marries Hamdani.

Soon, however, dawns the realisation that this is a life different than promised. A childhood in Uganda and the company of Konkanis for a family has instilled in Sarwari a fierce love for Pakistan, but it is tested only once she goes to live there for the first time after marriage. It is a conservative society, and no amount of idealism can free her of the expectations of a good wife. The prison-like domesticity is made worse by the sudden discrepancies in Hamdani’s behaviour: irritable and obsessive, his outbursts of anger take the form of mental and physical abuse.

As Sarwari lists the number of things she had to go to the doctor for, ranging from a black eye to broken teeth, the point of no repair in the marriage seems to have been breached. Hamdani’s outspokenness on social media platforms – and often impertinence – costs them friends and social support, financial troubles appear, and familial dysfunction makes them question what the point of it all is. Their marriage teeters perpetually on the edge of collapse. But each time he apologises, almost as if the violence is alien to himself too, and she stays – for their daughters, for the life she can fight for from within the marriage, and without a doubt, out of her love for him.

The turning point

Then one day, clarity. Medical reports reveal that around the time that they got married, a tumour had started growing in Hamdani’s head, affecting, among other things, his emotional regulation and expression; as Sarwari says, it had always been a marriage of three. It is not the kind of truth that sets you free, nor a discovery that can be called a relief, but it is a turning point. Though what is broken is changed, newer ways of defining the nature of their companionship emerge, albeit beset with their own challenges.

But relationships are not just the sum total of two people’s actions and reactions: they are, perhaps more than anything else, a terrain to exhume the ghosts of our pasts. These hauntings mark Sarwari’s reactions and recollections. On reading her account of her childhood – the images and tragedies that made it – it is apparent that in writing this, she is also making to herself the tender admission that part of growing up is witnessing the slow death of so many people that you thought you would be.

At 475 pages, Heart Tantrums is a lengthy book; by the third section, you begin to feel the need for tighter editing. Trimming it down might also have helped maintain the intensity that Sarwari develops in the first two sections, losing momentum only when a barrage of new characters is introduced in the segment devoted to her professional trajectory. The chapters move fast, and the absence of a clear thread in the last one-third of the memoir makes it the weakest link in the memoir, despite the richness of experiences that she draws from.

What works for Heart Tantrums is Sarwari’s willingness to offer her fears and her confusion the same place as she does her obstinacy about principles, sometimes unintentionally letting slip more than the sentences mean to. Most affecting of all is the generosity she grants her closest relationships and her most painful – especially her husband and mother. When writing about the former, she arranges fragments of their shared history into the narrative, following reminiscence with reflection. In writing about her mother, Sarwari is the hurt child again from all those years ago, in the garden of her old house, far away in the foreign country that is childhood, but always compassionate, even in the apportioning of blame.

Honesty is not all, but perhaps it is the only demand can we really make upon love. In dedicating the memoir to her mother, she touches upon the latter’s fear – what if her words are used against her? It is a reasonable monster to cower from, but as you read Sarwari, you see that silence is just as dangerous a phantom. In writing about her life, she puts away every label of good and bad, instead christening them all miracles, all mundanities; in Heart Tantrums, like flowers and like stars, all bunches must make stories out of their rot.

Heart Tantrums: A Feminist’s Memoir of Misogyny and Marriage, Aisha Sarwari, Penguin Vintage.