Chapter 1: The basis of marriage and family

For whatever a person sows, this he will also reap. (Galatians 6:7).

To start off explaining the culture of Pakistan, we have to start from the very beginning: the fundamental unit of society. And what is a fundamental unit of a society? A family.

In order to see how a family works, we must look into how a family is made. After this we need to see how a family functions, how a family grows, and how a family finally impacts the society.

In the Bible, we see that it was God Who saw that Adam was alone and that it was not good for him to be so. He then created Eve and brought her to Adam. What was Adam’s reaction? He fell immediately in love (The bones of my bones and flesh of my flesh is actually the first love song mentioned in the Bible, Genesis chapter 2). This should be the basis for a family to be started, love.

But in Pakistan, it is not so.

The Society

Autumn of 2016, my first job as a English teacher at an NGO school which was funded by some foreigners. It is run by two of the most unfit women to run an educational establishment. But in Pakistan, we do with what we have, we don’t strive for betterment.

The school was in a village, and to better understand the context, imagine you're about a 100 years in the past. The roads are broken, the area gets frequent load shedding, unclean drinking water, dust and sand filling the air. The houses of people are half built, or half broken, however you want to describe them. Sofas in need of dire repairs. Old TVs that barely function serve as the only entertainment of the family.

You cannot run a modern educational institute in an area like that without problems.

And what was the biggest problem? Youth having smartphones. Imagine people living a hundred years back with their children having access to the latest trends.

It was a complete and utter disaster. There were love affairs between youth, children having sex as young as 14. Pornography easily accessible, the parents being unlearned to keep a check on their children’s activities on the phones. And now these children, they come to this NGO Christian school, a school which was supposed to educate them, both secularly and religiously.

In school, being the traditional Pakistani women that they were, the principal and the coordinator of the school weren’t interested in the education of young minds, but in spicy things happening in the school, the love lives of the children. It wasn’t surprising for us, we know that women who have crossed age 35 now have only one thing to do, gossip. So they spent their days gossiping about how utterly sin ridden this area is, girls are so immoral, boys are so unserious. How their parents are so gullible that they don’t even know what their children are up to. How they saw some boy and a girl hanging around with each other. Funny they should be saying things like these, with one of these women's daughters marrying a muslim guy just because he was rich, and the other one's nieces being flirtatious with the boys of their church in city.

In conclusion: this was a conservative backward area which teaches that love marriage is forbidden, while youth practices immorality. I had the chance to talk to some of them, and they knew that what they were doing was wrong. But the problem was that they knew that they were not going to be married to the person they love, but the one whom their parents chose. Thus, they think that this is the only time they’re going to have sex with someone they love, otherwise it'll be someone unknown, selected by their parents, living a loveless marriage life.

In the midst of it all, a modern, liberal, jeans-wearing, unmarried, young teacher arrives at their school to teach, “What does the Bible say about sexuality?”, the incredible taboo topic in society, not to mention a controversial one. Imagine the reaction of the children. Someone who talks openly about sex? No way Jose, not in this area.

But there I was, open, unjudging, understanding, listening, inviting them all to share their burdens, fears and problems with me. And everybody knew why I was there. It helped me to become an instant hit with the children. We couldn’t have sexuality classes with a co-ed group, it was forbidden according to our culture. So I was just teaching the boys. But boys had affairs with the girls, so they told them what we were studying. The girls spread the news to their friends, and thus, everyone knew what my views were on sexuality and on love.

This is why girls were readily comfortable talking to me just as boys were. It was because they didn’t have friendly women to talk to, everyone was just too judgemental. Of course, sin must be judged and people must be stopped from sinning. But you don’t do it with a spirit of condemnation, but of love, mercy and forgiveness. All the ladies there taught the girls that love is a sin, there is no such thing before marriage. Yeah I know, totally illogical. Trust me, it is just the tip of the ice-berg. The girls had nowhere to go, except the one guy who is open to listen to anything and everything they have to say.

The stories I heard can only be described as heartbreaking. People are hurting, children are hurting, but instead of applying God's Word as medicine to heal their wounds, the people in power were condemning and ostracizing the youth who needed help.

All this comes down to one point: what Pakistanis think about family, and what they think is the basis of marriage and family. They think that love marriage is a sin, and all the problems start from here.

What we need to answer is:

Why do people think that love marriage is a sin?

Why instead of teaching the youth to wait for the right age and then get married, the children are taught that whatever they are doing is immoral and stopping them from even talking to each other?

Why do people still follow the same guideline when it never yielded any good results?

The reason is the cultural norm.

This is always very interesting to explain. I remember one time when I was in Moldova, in International Mission School. The boys from my room were late so I went alone for breakfast. In the dining hall, two girls came and sat with me on my table. They didn’t notice, but I was very nervous around them. Why? Because in our culture, we don’t have this ease of fellowship with opposite genders, even though we come to the same church. You must be family friends with each other and only then you can greet each other. I told this to these two wonderful ladies, and the first question one of them asked me was, “Then how do you guys get married?” And my reply was, “We don’t get married, our parents marry us off.”

This still brings tears of laughter to my eyes.

You see, here in our culture, you don’t, or rather should not, marry the one whom you love, but you should marry someone whom your parents choose. We have no courtship or dating culture here in Pakistan, except if you’re going out secretly with your girl/boyfriend, then that is allowed. Heck, you can even have premarital sex, just make sure you don’t get caught. But no, you don't do love marriage sir! That is forbidden.

There is some sarcasm involved, so please do remember while reading my comments.

This perhaps has been translated from the tribal times. In old times, the couple might not even have seen each other before getting married. They would see their spouse on the wedding night. Imagine that! For your surprise this is relevant today as well. Some might not know or even see the person they’re going to spend their lives with! This idea is quite strange and sometimes terrifying, and it really is! I had this fear from a very young age. I remember one time when I asked my mother, “We marry with our siblings when we grow up, right?” For me, this idea of living my whole life with a complete stranger terrified me. Even when I was a child I wanted to spend my life with someone I knew. But people do that! And they have successful marriages as well. Well, most of them. You learn to make do with whatever you have.

As westerners, it might be inconceivable to you, but it does happen that children are married off just by the consent of their parents. Now, you might be thinking, why don’t people let their children choose? What’s wrong with falling in love and getting married? Pakistanis give a couple of reasons for that:

Reason no. 1: your children are too immature to find a right spouse

Reason no. 2: love marriage is an evil and a sin

Reason no. 3: there is a special curse on love marriage, it will never prosper

Let’s go through each one, and see how the minds of the people work here.

Reason no. 1: Your children are immature to find a right spouse

Young, inexperienced, and therefore lacking in sufficient knowledge, a young person cannot choose a marriage partner for him/herself. Therefore, they need their parents to choose someone for them. The fact also remains that acquaintance between opposite genders is non-existent, therefore, even if one wanted to choose someone for themselves, they won’t be able to. Talking to someone of the opposite sex is considered shameful in this country.

I remember there was this lady in our church, her boy was in love with someone. She was quite furious about it. She said that they are not mature enough to find the right spouse for themselves to marry. Therefore, their choice is wrong and she should select a spouse for her boy!

What a horrible thing to say!

If you say that your 20 something year old son/daughter can’t choose their spouse means you have, quite frankly, miserably failed as a parent! If they can’t choose a spouse for themselves, that means they won’t even be able to choose a spouse for their children! And who will choose a spouse for their children? No one can be alive that long to choose a spouse for their grandchildren.

You should see the folly of this argument!

Of course, it doesn’t comply with what the Holy Bible says.

The Bible explicitly states that we should teach our children how they are to find the right spouse. Proverbs chapter 31 tells the details about how a mature woman looks like. One should consider that when looking for a wife.

And where should women look to see the qualities of a man? 1 Tim. 3 and Titus 1. Someone might tell you that these are the qualifications for the leaders of the Church, and that they don't apply to lay congregations. No! That is not the case. The leaders are examples for the Church, thus, they represent what a man who follows Christ diligently looks like. In effect, the qualifications for the leaders show how each man in Christ is to be like.

More information about marriage and marriage partners is given in the book of Proverbs, it shows us what kind of a partner we are to pray for and look for and what kind of people we are to avoid. In many chapters of this book, Solomon teaches his son, as a father, how a man should behave and in chapter 31, the mother of King Lemuel teaches him about the characteristics of a godly woman. Thus, the parents, father and mother both, are to teach their children and impart wisdom to them so they can make good choices in life.

It is interesting to note that Proverbs teaches to avoid immoral people. The immoral woman is called a strange woman, because in Israeli culture, the people said that an Israelite woman will not be a promiscuous woman, but a woman of dignity. Any woman who lives differently is not a true Israelite. And the adulterous man is called a foolish man, because the repercussions of adultery are very severe. Knowing those, if a man still commits this hideous sin, he is foolish indeed.

But no, the parents in Pakistan won’t teach their children these things, and there is another reason for it discussed in the upcoming chapters. For now, let’s move to reason no. 2.

Reason no. 2: love marriage is evil and a sin

Pakistan is a tribal country, which means families usually married in-between themselves to keep the property inside the tribe. If someone was in love and wanted to marry outside of the tribe, it meant that the property would go out of the tribe into someone else’s hands. Thus, to avoid this loss, the elders of the community deemed love marriage, i.e. marriage by the choice of the children immoral and a sin. They gave many different reasons, that the people are just acting out their love for another person because they want to grab a hold of the property. Of course, it could be true. But it can also be true that people marry because they really are in love, regardless of their social and economic condition.

Indian movies are notorious for making money on this idea, where a poor boy falls in love with a rich girl and her father doesn’t want her to marry him. Makes the story really spicy. Notable examples include:

Raja Hindustani

Student of the year

Kaho naa pyaar hai

There are many more, just do a Google search and you will find out.

Pakistani people are very wise in this regard, because they get all their knowledge from watching Indian films and soap operas. So they know what is true and what is not true. Whatever is in the T.V is correct. And they are always watching Indian movies, in which they see young, unmarried, beautiful and sexy couples kissing and hugging before marriage and they think that this is what love marriage means: kissing and hugging and having sex before marriage. Yes, I know it is completely illogical. In stark contrast, the people of Pakistan hold arranged marriages sacred in opposition to love marriage, because this is what the parents choose and what the parents choose is the only right choice. Note that I didn’t say that it is the best choice, but the only right choice, and if you go against your parents in this regard, you sin gravely. If you say something contrary to this, you are a heretic and a blasphemer. You dared to challenge not the culture, but God Himself. His wrath shall be upon you and none shall be able to redeem you from His curse.

This is deemed true even in Christian communities. And since this is a country where mob rules, a pastor can’t teach about love according to the Holy Bible. He can’t say that the first marriage was a love marriage (flesh of my flesh and bones of bones is actually a Hebrew love song, Gen. 2:23), Jacob was in love and worked 14 years for his wife (Gen 29), David proposed a young woman who accepted his proposal (1 Sam. 25), and Solomon sang a whole love song to his wife (Song of Songs), (to the original one at least). If he says any of these things, people will leave his church and go somewhere else. So much for speaking up for God’s Word!

In Punjab, which is more traditional than Karachi, a foreigner came and preached that a man should leave his parents and be joined to his wife, which is completely Biblical (Gen. 2:24), but the people of the church stopped him right there and told him to come down from the stage and never talk about such things ever again. This is a joint family culture, and leaving your parents is extremely shameful. So people saved their culture and stopped the preacher from speaking the truth. I really feel sorry for him. That happened in the city of Gujranwala, and brother, if you by any chance read this book, I admire your courage and feel sorry for you.

If teaching about such a notion can be that taboo, just try to imagine what happens with the people who actually do it. Love marriage is especially bad when a girl expresses her desires that she loves a boy. The way it is looked in our society is terrible. My wife had to go through terrible experiences because of it. It took a long time for her family to realize that her choice wasn’t based solely on feelings.

But there is another reason why people condemn love marriages, and that is…

Reason no. 3: There is a special curse on love marriage and they will never prosper

Perhaps the most foolish conception that people have, Pakistanis believe that love marriage will never work, period. Because they are in opposition to your parents, and are a sin, thus, they are not divinely blessed but are cursed and are bound to fail.

What surprises me the most, that so many times, people have seen arranged marriages fail and yet, they still believe that they will work out anyway. Men addicted to substances, women being toxic towards their husbands, spouses cheating on each other, divorce rates climbing higher and higher. But data and statistics doesn’t mean anything to Pakistanis, their beliefs matter to them even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Ask any foreigner who has spent a considerable time in this country. People here don’t look for the character of a person, but rather his / her education, financial status and social position. Thus, marriages fail miserably, and no one has the courage to talk about it. Men are horrible husbands and their wives, women, protect them. They have to. They have to show that whatever their parents chose was good. If they did not stand against being forced into marriage, it was a good decision because the marriage worked out all good in the end. They don’t have the option of divorce, not that it is Biblically wrong, but because if they get divorced, they’re the ones who’ll be shamed by the people. Women are demonized in our culture, and to save themselves from a lifetime of curse, rejection and abuse from the whole community, they select the option of being abused by their husbands for life. In that way, at least that’s just one person tormenting them, not everyone else.

This has been so damaging to the women in our society. Over the years, I have seen so many women suffering, all because of the bad choices which their parents made in choosing the wrong guy as their husband, and then their husbands making wrong decisions in the family. But no one says anything. In fact, people say that getting beaten by your husband and still being obedient to him is Biblically correct. In this manner you show respect to your husband whom God has given you as your head!

For example, my father would tell us of a story that a man would be so drunk that every night he would beat his wife, kicking her while she lay on the floor. And the wife, crying, would still thank the Lord. She would say thank you Lord for this beating.

Can you imagine that a degrading thinking such as this exists in our society? Many husbands/men believe it. Heck! even women believe it! Children see all this and then act it out when they are playing with each other! This is the reason that arranged marriages work, women are told to just bear it out whatever they go through with, and God will definitely reward them. But this is not a healthy marriage, this is abuse! But no, you cannot call this out as abuse. If you do, everyone will turn against you, even the woman who is abused severely by her husband. Everyone says that what the husband, the father says, goes.

The hypocrisy of the people is also sky high. These things are ignored in arranged marriages, but when something like this happens in a love marriage, people are ready to jump in and accuse the couple of going against the elder’s suggestion. For them, love marriage is the only cursed marriage. And if the love marriage is successful, people will say that everything is good for the couple, but the children will be the fruits of their disobedience.

The Holy Bible says that marriage is to be held honorable among all (Hebrews 13:4), it is not written that arranged marriages are to be held in honor, but marriage. Whether it is by the choice of the people themselves or arranged by their parents, it doesn’t matter. Let the people just be joined together in the covenant, that is what matters.

This is how Pakistan is living in the 21st Century, cavemen thinking. But go back about 70 years, and it was even more terrible. Some people who were caught in love were actually killed.

So why do people really get married? They don’t. If you independently get married to the person of your own choice, that is terrible. We have arranged marriages here, the parents decide your spouse for you. This is a duty no one should take away from them.

So now it comes to this, if people are not married for love, so what are they married for? If the parents choose and marry away their children, why do they do it? The reasons are pathetic, and this is why families are weak, communities are on the brink of collapse, society is wild, and the country is in ruins.

It is honorable obligation

If you are in your late 20’s and not married, you’re going to bear the ridicule of society. Everyone will force you to get married. The parents who don’t get their children married are thought of as irresponsible and unloving. The children who defy their parents and don’t get married soon enough or don’t want to get married are thought to be disobedient to their parents, and evil.

Whatever the reason, love is not the center of creating a family here in Pakistan, it is an obligation. And God hates things which are done merely for the obligation of it. This is why He says things like these:

“What are your many sacrifices to Me?” Says the Lord. “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams And the fat of fattened cattle; And I take no pleasure in the blood of bulls, lambs, or goats. When you come to appear before Me, Who requires of you this trampling of My courtyards? Do not go on bringing your worthless offerings, Incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and Sabbath, the proclamation of an assembly— I cannot endure wrongdoing and the festive assembly. I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts, They have become a burden to Me; I am tired of bearing them. So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide My eyes from you; Yes, even though you offer many prayers, I will not be listening. Your hands are covered with blood (Isaiah 1:11-15).

Were they bad practices? No. The reason was their heart wasn’t present in it. It made all these loathsome in their own sight and in the sight of the Lord (Isaiah 1:16-17).

If love is not the heart of the family, or marriage, it is bound to fail. This is what the people of Pakistan need to understand.

To simply show-off

When the time came for my wedding, I didn’t know what customs to follow and what programs were to be arranged. That was a mess. You’ll enjoy reading it. The problem starts because of the intermingling of cultures and religion. In Pakistan, the bride and the groom wear western wedding clothes of black and white as well as the traditional red dress for the bride, and a special suit called “Sherwani” for the groom. Then we have intermingling ceremonies of different religions: marriage vows to be done in the church, but an Islamic event called “Walima” is mandatory for every wedding. Then we have cultural norms according to ethnicities. Punjabis, Gujratis, Sikhs, Pashtuns…. Everything is mixed and everyone is confused. To be precise, a wedding is a week-long celebration, which I don’t mind seeing as it is a grand event. But a week-long event means food, guests, preparations, decorations and dresses, especially for the groom and the bride… which makes weddings the most expensive affair in our society. So why do people get married? To show-off, to show how much money they can spend on their son/daughter, to show how much they love them. Quite a foolish notion to me.

To give just a glance, we have:

Roka (literal to stop, figurative to book)

This means that you have booked the girl/boy and now they’re not allowed to engage them with someone else. It is just like engagement, the only difference is that the bride and the groom have separate Rokas and the ring is presented by in-laws.

Engagement

Even though Roka means the same, some people say that engagement is different. In an engagement ceremony, the girl and boy usually sit together and close family members attend the celebration. It is a small event held only in the house.

Roka/engagement doesn’t last for months, it lasts for years. Some people got married after seven years of engagement. Others break after such a long period. If the Roka or engagement survives, then we move to the week before and after the wedding.

Dholki

This event alone lasts the whole week until the night of the wedding. The relatives gather and have fun, sing songs, dance and make fun of the in-laws of the boy/girl.

Mayon

In this event, a paste made of herbal products is to be rubbed on the skin of bride and groom (separate occasions for both) to cleanse and make their skin glow, beautifying them for the say of the wedding.

Mehndi

Mehndi means Henna. Beautiful patterns are made on the hands, arms and feet of the bride so it amplifies her beauty.

Nikkah

The wedding vows, to be held privately in a Muslim wedding or in a church for Christians. Also, the bride and groom are not allowed to kiss in front of the public.

Baraat

The groom comes with a limited number of his guests to take the bride, whose side can be as many people as the bride’s side can afford to feed.

Walima

This time, only a selected few of the bride’s family come and the groom can have as many guests as he wants.

Each of these events will have decorations, separate dresses, food, and entertainment. You can imagine the cost of a simple wedding. Then on Baraat and Walima, the number of guests can be as high as 1000 people. Yes, 1000 people, that is normal here. And if you cut down the number of guests or the number of events, that means you’re not loving your child enough or you actually lacked in your preparations.

And now the third and final reason why parents marry off their children:

3. To have a name in the society

The first two work together for this final point. The parents want to have a name in society, to show that they fulfill all their obligations which are required of them as responsible, loving and hard working parents. Having an extravagant wedding ensures that people are left with the idea of people who spared no expense in making their children’s wedding memorable. All in all, the family is created not for the purpose of family itself, but for society. A society which breeds hell for the families. This is why, individuals, families, communities, societies, cities and then the whole country is going toward ruins.

So, to save everyone from the ridicule of the society, children are married off. And to save everyone from the ridicule of the family, they are not allowed to marry by their own choice, as already explained why. To save the name of the family from the taunts of the society, people spend heavily on the weddings but nothing on the bride and groom.

Thus, now we come to my beginnings.

Living independently

It was the 1970s, the worst time to get married with a person of your choice. My grandmother, a qualified nurse, fought with her parents because she wanted to marry a boy who only studied until grade 5, my grandfather. I don’t know how she convinced her parents, but they relented and gave in to her demands. Thus, my grandparents married each other, the love of their lives.

For my grandparents, that was a dream come true wedding. They were married and after that, both worked hard, very hard. They managed to buy two houses and were living a comfortable life by their 60s. They were rich, retired and influential: my grandfather was a pastor. They had two children, born with a silver spoon in their mouths. The eldest one was my dearly despicable father.

For a long time, I wanted to write all the real names of the people from my life, but while writing it, I came up with some other information which was necessary to include. Thus, to save my life and to save some people from humiliation, even though they deserve it, I won’t write my father’s or anyone else’s real name.

Being a pastor in Pakistan comes with a lot of perks in our society. And my dad and uncle enjoyed all these perks of being the children of highly influential and well-off people. You might have heard or read that Pakistan is an honor/shame culture; logic doesn’t matter, what matters is what people think. And the thinking of Pakistanis is that if a person is rich and has a high status in the society, they are to be listened to. They are to be obeyed, they are to be, in other words, honored. So was with my grandparents, not only were they rich because of all the hard work they did, they were religious leaders, thus, very famous in the Christian society. Naturally, their children also enjoyed their fame and fortune. Getting in their good books meant getting in the good books of the pastor, getting in the good books of the pastor meant getting respect from everyone else. This is why my father and uncle enjoyed the life they were bestowed on, a careless and lenient life.

Freedom should never go unchecked. There should be limits to everything, the sinful and troublemaking nature of ours seeks to rebel and cause trouble at every opportunity.

And this is exactly what happened with my father and uncle: they were spoiled. Having everything done for them and nobody to tell them off, they became rebellious, womanizers, and greedy. This is the second sphere where our culture fails miserably, the raising of the children.

When you don’t allow any hard time for your children, they don’t grow, they can’t grow. You cannot pamper them forever, they need to experience failure, rejection, pain, want, and many other things to mature up. Here, my grandparents failed. They wanted to be very good parents, and thus, spoiled their sons. They wanted to give everything to their sons. My father and uncle knew it, and became undisciplined, irresponsible, and extravagants. Since their parents overlooked their faults, they were in debt to their parents for everything that they have done for them in spite of their disobedience. Fair game I would say, you should show respect to your parents when they do so much for you.

Being two boys and deeply loved by their parents, dad thought that they would agree to get him married to the woman of his choice. So he very readily tells his mother, my grandmother, that he has fallen in love and would like to marry that girl. She is not overjoyed, but she finally saw the thing she had been waiting for: a desire in her son’s heart to get married. This is what the parents in Pakistan live for, to see their children get married and then have children.

Personally, I do believe this is one of the greatest blessings in your life. To see your family thrive, but I also believe that you shouldn’t force your children to get married and have children, you should let them go at their own pace. You teach and encourage and help, but you don’t force your decisions on them, especially regarding such critical matters as marriage and family.

Another cultural aspect about which the westerners are going to gasp is the boy never proposes to the girl directly, neither goes to talk to the girl’s family. This is considered extremely shameful and utter disrespect and disregard for the elders. You cannot even go to your own parents and tell them that you’ve fallen in love, much less tell someone else that you’ve fallen in love with their daughter. This will infuriate the father and the brothers of the girl to utter rage, this is a blow to their dignity. The only acceptable way to get her hand in marriage is to send your family to her family and they will arrange the wedding, the boy and the girl are not meant to see each other until they are married.

Without much choice, considering the context of the culture, my father goes to his mother and tells her how he feels. My grandmother goes to the girl’s house to get her hand in marriage for her dearly beloved son, my father. But she loved him a little too much. She loved him so much that she knew his choices were wrong, that the girl he’s selected is not suitable for him, not suitable for their family. But she didn’t tell my father, of course. She went for him anyway. I suppose he might have been waiting anxiously for the answer, as I did, many months ago, when my father went to ask Rose’s hand for my marriage. He messed up so much that I almost lost her. Now she’s sitting across from me, and I can’t imagine a more beautiful scene than this one.

Coming back to my father’s story, unfortunately for him and me, the answer didn’t come in as positive. He might have been sad, as was I, not to mention devastated by this news. But that doesn’t give him the liberty to do the same with his children.

Not long after, my uncle broke the truth. The parents of the girl declined was just the official story. My uncle went with my grandmother to the girl’s house, and he told my father that she never actually went, she just lied to him that her parents said no.

This was the utmost betrayal from his mother. His father was a pastor, his mother was respected because of her husband’s position. Everyone respected their word, they had power over the community. No one would deny them their child’s hand in marriage if they would ask them. Heck, pastors are actually consulted by people to look for an eligible person so that people can get good marriage proposals. She could get that girl’s parents to agree to the marriage, but she didn’t. She didn’t want her son to marry that girl and she didn’t tell the truth, that it was actually she who declined the offer. Goodness me, people would’ve been very happy to give their girl in marriage to someone whose father was a pastor, and owned two houses! But why? Why didn’t my grandmother go to that girl’s house and straight up deny her son the joy of being married to someone he loved? Because she wanted her son to marry a girl of her own choice: my dearly departed mother.

You should realize what kind of resentment it created in my father. He couldn't marry the love of his life, and he's forced to marry someone who is the choice of the same woman who denied him his love. Of course, he was never going to forget this. And this is what happened: even now, after my mother has died, father still reminds us that he never chose his wife, even though she was the best wife he could ever ask for, the resentment still stays.

I would like to teach all the young men reading this book of mine to man up! If you really love someone, stand up for her! Your parents will leave you, sooner than you think. And what will you have in return? You will look at the woman they chose, they're now dead and it doesn't matter to them, but it matters everything to you. She is living with you! You could have chosen, you could have spoken. You could have been spending your life with the love of your life. You could have had children with the woman you loved. And yet…

And yet, here you are. Fifty years later, sitting on your couch, wondering that if you could have spoken up, things would have been very different.

This is true for my father. He looked at my mother, at her children, and he knew that the place given to my mother and us was to be given to another woman, other children. He saw his family, and he saw that he didn't love them. Knowing that someone else could've been his wife, and he could've had children with her. His whole life could’ve been so much different. Unfortunately, he didn't. And now he's stuck with what his mother chose for him. He had no say in that. Whenever a fight would come up, whenever a disagreement would come up, which usually does in any marriage, he knew that this was the fault of his mother, and life could’ve been very different if he’d married that other girl.

If only he’d married that other girl whom he loved….

But even more than that, he saw me, who stood up for his love. Who fought against damn all odds and won his bride as a prize. I am editing this book at night now, and Rose is sleeping. I took one glance at her and couldn’t help but smile. Man, I really won a trophy!

Coming back to the story, how did my grandmother meet my mother? Another cultural aspect. If you’re good friends with someone, or are relatives, you can easily ask for their children’s hand in marriage. This is the norm, and people are ready to arrange something like this.

My maternal and paternal grandpas met each other in Dubai. One was a pastor serving there and another one was a businessman. And so, we come to where everything was joined together so that it could fall apart later. A womanizer who was denied the love of his life, married to a woman who didn’t know what she was getting into. Great recipe for disaster.

This marriage was bound to fail, and it did fail miserably. You shall see. The only reason that it didn’t result in divorce is because, first: Pakistani law doesn’t allow Christians to divorce. This has been in effect since British rule of Indo-Pak. Second: as already mentioned, because of the shame in the society. But now, let’s look at how this marriage, like many others like it, went onto the path of destruction.