The friend was Pakistani-origin. She had started dating a Latino man. The Pakistani friend’s mother, somehow, had a dream. In the dream, her daughter had lost her virginity.

The dream was the trigger.

The mother went into a spiral. The father, it was said, lost his job. The mother had a nervous breakdown. A trip back to the Muslim homeland was arranged. The daughter refused to board until she saw the return flight in her hand. Only then did she get on the plane. When she returned to the Muslim country, they told her she wasn’t going back to Europe.

We lost the rest of the story, and, over the rest of the meal, we thought about Sana Cheema.

What Sana Cheema Saw

Sana Cheema was a twenty-six-year-old Italian-Pakistani who had lived in Brescia since 2002. She wanted to marry a second-generation Italian-Pakistani man of her own choosing. Her father took her back to Gujrat, in Punjab, under the pretext of a visit.

She was strangled the day before her return flight to Italy. Her neck was broken. Her hyoid bone dislocated. Her father, her brother, and her uncle were charged. They had buried her quickly, without autopsy, and told relatives she had died of natural causes. The body had to be exhumed on a magistrate’s order after Italian media forced the case into daylight.

Qandeel Baloch, in the Same Line

Fouzia Azeem, known as Qandeel Baloch, was strangled by her brother Muhammad Waseem in Multan on 15 July 2016, aged twenty-six. He told a police press conference that she had brought “disrepute to our family’s honour” and had no regrets. He was convicted in 2019 and acquitted in February 2022 after their mother pardoned him.

A mother who carried the daughter, then forgave the son for killing her.

The OnlyFans Line

A Pakistani commenter on this blog recently wrote that the only downside of the Islamic Revolution in Iran is that there is no OnlyFans.

Mock it if you wish; we take it seriously. The revolution’s first and most durable project, from the Iranian morality police has been the control of the female body. Everything else has been contested and revised: banking laws, foreign policy, bread prices, constitutional amendments. The control of female sexuality has not been revised. It is the one thing the project refuses to negotiate.

Q was offering a quip. We accept it as a diagnostic.

The Numbers

Honour killings: Many killings are registered as suicide, accident, or natural cause, as Sana Cheema’s was.

Khula, the women-initiated divorce: in Punjab, divorce cases rose thirty-five percent over the five years to 2024. Lahore’s family courts now receive roughly sixty khula petitions a day. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics records 499,000 divorced women nationally. Women-initiated divorce is running roughly twenty-five percent ahead of male-initiated.

Pakistan sits at 142 of 146 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index (2023).

The women are voting with the only ballots they have. The courts. The planes. The dating apps. The Latino boyfriends in European capitals.

Imran Khan, former Prime Minister, blamed the rising divorce rate on Hollywood and Bollywood films. We blame the mothers’ dreams.

The Diaspora Leak

Fascinatingly about the restaurant anecdote is its geography. The mother was not in Karachi. The daughter was not in Lahore. The dream crossed an ocean. The return flight was international.

Diaspora Pakistani mothers export the virginity economy. They transmit it to daughters raised in Berlin, London, Toronto, Milan, under legal systems that do not recognise the ledger the mother is keeping. The daughter lives under two sovereignties and has to choose. Sometimes she chooses the plane ticket home. Sana Cheema chose the plane ticket home. It did not save her.

The nervous breakdown, the father’s suddenly lost job, the family’s shattered reputation: all are weapons the mother has learned to wield across borders. The daughter is asked to pay the cost of a social order she did not build, cannot escape without cruelty to people she loves, and will hand on to her own daughter if she does not break the chain.

What Is Wrong

So, what is wrong with Pakistani culture? Not everything. Urdu poetry is not wrong. Biryani is not wrong. The Hindustani musical inheritance Kabir writes about on this blog is not wrong. The generosity of middle-class Lahori households is not wrong.

What is wrong is the insistence that a daughter’s body is the load-bearing wall of the family name. That insistence, carried from Multan to Milan, across three generations, through revolutions and constitutions and divorces and migrations, is the thing. It is what a mother dreams when she dreams of her daughter losing her virginity. It is what a brother reaches for when he reaches for the cord. It is what an acquittal ratifies when a mother pardons a son for killing his sister.

The khula numbers say the women know. The honour-killing numbers say some men are willing to defend the wall with corpses.

Closing

We finished our Ash-e-Reshteh. We paid. We walked past the girl at the next table, who was still talking, and her father, who was still nodding.