We Heard Everything

A childhood rife with political upheavel, violence and loss. An adulthood overtaken by distrust and manipulation. And then, finally, the truest friend and companion -- a Jack Russell terrier named Coco--helps Fatima break free and discover the joy that awaits her.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
My life had been broken by grief, and then for
a period it was redeemed by love. But people do
not love each other in the same way, and sometimes
there is terror in love. I wanted a family more
than anything in the world. The man didn't. But instead
of acknowledging that we wanted different things and that we

(00:26):
might be better off in pursuit of separate lives, we
stayed together. It is difficult to look back now and
see that I tolerated this for as long as I did.
Some men take strong women as a challenge and derive
a pleasure in breaking them or trying to. And when
you are a strong woman, you also might not think

(00:47):
this can happen to you, that you might be in trouble,
that someone you care for might be dangerous for you.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
That's Fatima Bhutto, Pakistani writer and columnist and author of
several books, including the memoir Song of Blood and Sword
and the recent The Hour of the Wolf. Fatima's is
a story of growing up in a world filled with
magic and also marked by profound fear of impending loss.

(01:18):
When that loss becomes a reality, grief shapes her from
the inside out, until finally the waves recede, her sight clears,
and she finds herself feeling the kind of safety that
had never been her birthright. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this

(01:46):
is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your
childhood as early as you remember.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
The earliest I remember really is my father. My father
was the entire universe of my childhood, and besides him
was this enormous absence of home, because of course I
wasn't born in my country. I was born when my
father was in exile. And home this place that my

(02:26):
father loved and adored, but that we couldn't return to
because of danger, because of politics, because of a dictatorship.
It always loomed very strongly, not even in the background.
It was really quite foregrounded for us. And it was
a place of so much promise and so much beauty,

(02:48):
but also a threatening place. And I suppose somehow my
father made this world seem open and wondrous and exciting.
But he also didn't lie to me. He didn't hide
what was threatening about it.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
That's something that really struck me, is that somehow embedded
in the very atmosphere of your childhood was it almost
seems like it presaged loss.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yes, it was always there as well, because I was
born three years after my grandfather had been killed by
a military dictatorship in Bakistan, and three years after I
was born, my father's younger brother, who was only twenty
seven at the time, was also killed, And there was
always this sense that it was close by. That My

(03:44):
father didn't say things like you know, when I die.
He said things like when I'm killed, And even though
it upset me as a child, when I would tell
him that it upset me, he would say, well, you
should know that that's a possibility.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
Fatima and her father have a nighttime ritual in the
dark quiet of their Damascus flat. After he reads her
a bedtime story, He'll say, if anything ever happened to you,
I would die, and Fatima responds by saying, me too, Papa,
I would die without you too. She writes in her memoir.

(04:24):
We spoke that oath to each other as easily as
some people say sweet dreams.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
I have two babies now, and the thought of saying
that to them would just fill me with so much sadness,
but it felt normal. My father would tell me a story,
and he was a wonderful mimic, so he would do voices,
and you know, it was comedic and exciting and fun

(04:52):
to listen to him. And then he would sit there
and wait for me to sleep. But his good night
was always this quite sorry, full good night. And I
didn't really understand that there was anything unusual about it
because this idea of all the loss around us, it
made it seem quite possible that something bad would happen.

(05:14):
So it seemed a kind of normal thing to say.
But it really was a beautiful childhood in so many ways.
I mean, I knew there were bits that were not
normal about it, you know, I knew as a young child.
I mean, I was very chatty. I'm still very chatty,
but I was. I loved talking, and as soon as
I was old enough to answer the phone, that was

(05:36):
like incredibly exciting to me because imagine the chance we
just get to talk to someone out of the blue
in your own home. And I remember being told not
just by my father but by my grandmother, who I
adored and who was really a substandard mother figure for me.
I remember being told, you know, when you pick up
the phone, you can't tell people everything. You know, if

(05:59):
they ask for your far and he's not here, you
can't say he's not here. You have to say, oh,
he's busy with something, he'll call you back. And I
understood that was strange. And you know, there were a
lot of secrets, because survival depended on secrets. So you
couldn't tell people where you were, you couldn't tell them
where you weren't, and sometimes you had to leave your

(06:21):
home because it was dangerous. And then of course you
would return to your home as though nothing had happened,
or I mean, all the grown ups would return as
though nothing had happened. But I would be a little
bit stunned and confused. And I'm sure so there were
little clues that things were not normal. There were things

(06:41):
that felt very extraordinary, but I just understood it as
how it was. I didn't really see how we could
change that.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
And your mother was not in the picture right. She
and your father divorced when you were three.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
They divorced when I was three, and I didn't really
have very much interaction with her when I was older,
and I'm sure that affected me in multiple, multiple ways.
But at the time, again, my father was really the
sum of everything for me and I. As long as

(07:20):
I had him nearby, I felt safe. While I was
still in Damascus in Syria. You know, when my father
was a bachelor, I had kind of a bachelor life too.
We would go swimming on the weekends. You know, he
would play squash and I would. I would read a
book or swim at the pool. We'd go out and
have meals. My father thought he was a very good cook,

(07:43):
but I'm not really sure he was, so there was
a lot of dinners out. You know. I didn't really
have a bedtime per se. You know, I could stay
up late, I could travel where my father went. I
had to go because there was no one else to
look after me. When the grown ups were talking, I
was sitting there eating peanuts and you know, listening to

(08:05):
them talk. And I thought my father's friends were my
friends because I had to spend as much time with
them as he did. So was it worth quite a
bachelor life? But then he remarried and then they had
a baby, my brother's Ulfagar, and that certainly felt a
little bit more normal. You know, there was now a

(08:28):
bit more of bedtimes. There was a baby, you had
the routines that that babies have, and I went to
school and that felt very normal. You know. I had
friends that I loved, and I lived in a beautiful city,
you know, one of the world's most ancient cities, and
everything felt very normal until we had to return to

(08:51):
Pakistan and my father stood for elections and he won,
and that was it. This very romantic but tragic exile
was suddenly over. And this possibility that we had always
spoken about but never really thought would come true that
we would return home, suddenly was upon us. And not

(09:13):
only were we returning home, we were returning home in
a month.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
And how old were you when that return happened.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
I was about eleven, eleven and a half something like that.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, so you're also leaving the friends that you've made behind.
I mean, eleven, it's just nobody wants to be eleven again.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
No, I'm in the sixth grade. You know. It's like
the beginning of a very exciting period at school. And
we're in middle school. We have lockers now, you know,
it's just really kind of cool new period. And I've
got to leave and I've got to leave. And I
didn't think I was an exile. You know, my father
was an exile. It was not his country, it was

(09:56):
not the language he grew up speaking, it was not
his childhood home, but it was mine. So the end
of his exile was in a way the beginning of
my own. And he had spent sixteen years waiting, counting
days and months and hours and missing everything about home.
And that period for me really began when we left
Damascus and I returned to this place that up until

(10:19):
that point I had only visited, and I loved it,
but I loved it because my father loved it.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
And what was that landscape like, you know, you're eleven
years old, twelve years old, you're now in Karachi, your
father is elected, and there's this whole other world. And
also I would imagine the rhythm of just everyday life
must have shifted tremendously.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
Oh, it was not just a different world. It was
like a totally different life. Because Damascus at that point,
I mean, you know, in the nineteen eighties, even the
early nineteen nineties, was nothing like the Syria people imagine today.
It was a very sleepy town. It was a tiny place.
It was incredibly safe. Karachi was a mad city. It

(11:07):
was a city of millions upon millions upon millions of people.
It's a crash of people. It's super chaotic. There's motorcycles, rickshaws, cars,
there's no footpaths, there's no pavements, so you've got people, children,
families whizzing in between traffic. And it was not just

(11:28):
a megacity, but it was a very dangerous city. It
was a city where there was a law and order problem,
which is, you know, it's a nice way of saying
you lived in a really violent place. And there were shootings.
They were at that time. They want bombings. Those came later.
But also it was not anonymous city for me, because

(11:50):
whereas in Syria, I had just been, you know, a
sixth grader, someone from a strange part of the world,
someone from far away. In Bagistan, my family was very
well known, and that meant that people were curious about me,
and I'd not had that before. I'd not understood what

(12:10):
it felt like.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
We'll be right back. When Fatima is fourteen, her whole
world is upended, her beloved father, her son, and moon

(12:36):
is assassinated. This is not a haphazard or unorganized killing.
His assassination is well planned, very deliberate.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
We'd started to notice in the days before armored vehicles
were beginning to be placed around our house. So coming
back from school one day, I saw one, and you know,
an armored vehicles pretty hard to miss, especially when they're
men with colashnikos, you know, tending out of it. And
then the next day there were two, and then the
next day there were three, and we were basically surrounded.

(13:11):
And at that time, like I said, Karachi was a
very dangerous place. And I went to the American School,
and it happened once in a while that our school
was shot at. You'd be going to class and you'd
hear gunfire, and you know, you knew what to do.
We knew what to do. We were taught what to do.
So it was scary, but it didn't quite feel out

(13:33):
of the ordinary. And my father, because he was a
politician and he was very outspoken, he thought they might
try to arrest him, and that's what he'd told us
to plan for. But the day that he was killed,
he was going to a public meeting outside of the city,
and I wanted very much to go with him. And

(13:57):
usually my father was quite keen to drag me along
on him political outings because we could chat in the
car and we always had fun when we were together.
But that day he said I couldn't come. He said
it was too dangerous and he would see me when
he got back in the evening. And what we didn't
know is that as it got darker, the Karate police

(14:19):
were placed on our street. There were anywhere from seventy
to one hundred policemen stationed, some in sniper positions in
the trees, in these very old Banyan trees, you know,
which are very large, imposing sort of trees that look
a bit like weeping willows. You know, they've got very
long leaves. The police were put even as high up

(14:43):
as into those trees. And we live on a street
where there are a lot of consulates and all the
guards that these foreign consulates were told to leave their
posts by the police, and the street lights were turned
off and traffic was stopped from entering the road. So
when my father's car approached the road to come home,

(15:06):
the police stopped him and someone was charged with identifying
that he was who he was, And when they identified him,
then they gave an order to fire and my father
and all the men with him were were shot, not once,
many times, and they were all killed by point blank gunshots.

(15:27):
And we were in the house at the time, so
my brother was six years old and I was fourteen,
and so we heard everything. And this was in the
days before cell phone, so we had no way of
reaching my father to know where he was. But when
we tried to leave the house to find out what
had happened, the police stopped us and said that there

(15:48):
had been a robbery nearby. And again, because this was
such a dangerous city, they could say something like that,
and it was within the realm of possibility. It was
strange that a robbery would produced so much gunfire because
it was several minutes long. It felt like a lot
of weapons were being fired. It wasn't, you know, a
single shot all things like that. But that's what they said.

(16:11):
But what they were doing is they were cleaning the streets,
and they were moving all of the men, including my father,
to different locations around the city, none of which were
emergency hospitals. They were all just taken to different clinics
around Karachi.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
And when were you told what had happened?

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Well, we were waiting and waiting and waiting, and my
father hadn't come back yet, and it seemed strange that
he would be so late. And my aunt. This is
the less ordinary part of the story. My aunt at
the time was the prime minister of the country. And
after an hour or so of waiting, I said, I

(16:56):
was getting nervous, and I said, I'm going to call
my aunt and find out what's happening. And my aunts
and my father were quite estranged, and though they had
been very closest young people, he was a critic of
her government, and it was a government that was marked
by by a lot of exactly the kind of violence
that both of them would be killed, by a lot

(17:19):
of police excess and many other things. So I called
the prime Minister's house and the secretary, the ADC of
the Prime Minister's house, was very apologetic to me and
very concerned. I had no idea why, obviously, and instead
of putting me through to my aunt, he put me

(17:39):
through to her husband, who was who was not really
a favorite in the family, let's put it that way.
He'd been accused of a lot of corruption. He was
known in those days as mister ten percent because of
all the graph that he took off of deals going
through the government. He put me on the phone with
my aunt's husband, and I was a bit confused as

(18:03):
to why I was put on the phone with him,
And when I asked to speak to my aunt, he said, no,
you can't, she's hysterical. And I still didn't understand because
I really didn't connect that shooting and all the noise
to my father. I just I didn't want it to
be my father, but also I had hoped, really against

(18:25):
hope it wasn't. So I asked my aunt's husband why
my aunt was hysterical and tried to impress upon him
that it was very important I spoke to her, and
that's when he said, don't you know your father's been shocked,
and that's how I found.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
That, And where was your stepmother during that?

Speaker 2 (18:49):
She was there, And it was at that time when
I heard those words. I just dropped the phone and
everything went a bit black, and she picked up the phone,
and I don't really know what happened. Then. The next
thing I remember was just that she was screaming and

(19:10):
getting the car ready to go somewhere, and again she
tried to leave me behind and I refused, and I
insisted on going, and that's when we went to a clinic.
That was the kind of clinic you went, you know,
when you had to see the dentist or you had
to get a vaccine. It was not a place that

(19:30):
had emergency doctors. It didn't have an er. And that's
where my father had been taken, purposely so that he
couldn't be helped, and that's where we went. I was
totally heartbroken, and beyond that, I've been broken while my
father is killing and I had no choice but to

(19:54):
get on with it. I had to go to school,
I had to do the things you have to do.
And also I had to live in the same house.
I mean, anytime I went to school, if I went
to buy a pack of gum, I had to travel
on the street that my father was killed on. Anytime
I came home, any homecoming also meant passing that road.

(20:17):
Being on that road. I had no sense of how
wounded I was and how much work it had taken
to keep me getting through those ordinary moments as stably
as possible. I'm sure everyone worries about what happens to

(20:38):
their parents, but in my life, it seemed not a possibility.
It seemed a highly likely possibility. And I'd always had anxiety.
I'd always had pain in my stomach as a child
when I felt afraid, and as I got older that
became more obvious, it became much stronger and much rare.

(21:05):
And when I was older and I guess enough away
from what had happened and finally felt, you know, I'm
now building a sort of new life, was exactly the
moment that I started to get incredibly devastating panic attacks,
where they were so strong I didn't think I could

(21:26):
breathe or I couldn't stand up. I was unable to communicate.
And I mean, now, you know, we know all kinds
of things about how the body keeps the score, and
at that time there was no vocabulary for it. I
didn't understand. I thought I had dealt with a lot
of my trauma because I went to therapy. You know,
everyone knew what had happened to me, so it was

(21:47):
difficult not to talk about it. And I was lucky
to have a lot of support from friends, from people
at my school. I've seen a lot of sadness and
a lot of danger, but I've also seen the incredible
kindness of people of strangers, so I didn't understand what

(22:08):
was happening, and it carried on for really a rather
long time. I have to say. It was always somewhere
there in the background, and it made me even as
I dealt with it and I did more therapy, I
did yoga, I took medicine. It always stayed with me.
So I never felt far away from grief. I never
felt very far away from my anxiety. I never felt

(22:32):
far away from fear. And I did the best I could.
I suppose. I went to college. I then went to England.
I did a master's and though I wanted to be
a writer, I enjoyed it very much. I did also
choose to write about things that hurt me, that bothered me,
that worried me, that made me fearful, And eventually I

(22:54):
wrote about my father's life and his assassination in what
was my first book, and so put myself to the
experience of the trauma all over again, by finding people
from my father's path, finding policemen that had been present
on the scene that night, finding doctors. And I did

(23:16):
that really because I didn't think I was going to
get justice anywhere. I didn't think I was going to
get it in the court. So I didn't think I
was going to get it in my country, and so
I had to find a different way of reckoning what
had happened. And it seemed like a record of it,
a reckoning of it, and a testimony, a document of

(23:37):
what had happened, was going to be the closest I
could get. So I spent six years working.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
On that book, and not surprisingly and unsurprisingly, and also,
I mean, what were you going to do? Write a
romance novel? I mean, yeah, our theams are just it's
a fancy literary word for what obsesses us. And it
would seem to me that it would have been absolutely
impossible for you to do anything other than that. And yet,

(24:06):
of course, with everything that we know about trauma now
and the way that it does live, you know in
our bones that it would retraumatize you. You know. I
think in some way too, people have the misunderstanding that
that there would be catharsis around something like delving so

(24:29):
deeply into this story that was just this defining, terrible
story tragedy of your young life, and it does something else,
It embeds it. So you had written that during this
period of time you're on tour and you lose your voice.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Yeah, I finished the book, it comes out, and I
go on this tour with it. Of Course, I know
nothing about how books work, and I just assumed you
write the book and then someone else does you know
the rest of it. But it doesn't work that way,
and so you kind of have to go out and
shepherd this thing around. And it was incredibly important to me,

(25:14):
the story. So whenever I was asked, will you come
here and talk about your book, I said yes, of course,
and I went, and just as I'm doing now, I
had to relive really the worst moment of my life
over and over again, and not always with I mean
not often, I should say, with sensitive interlocutors. You know,

(25:35):
at that time, Pakistan was very much in the news.
The war on Terror was still, you know, in its throws,
and I was interviewed by journalists and war correspondents who
treated me, you know, in a way like I was
answerable for Pakistan in a lot of ways, and they
would forget really that I'm I'm someone talking about her father,

(26:00):
I'm someone talking about someone that they love. I'm not
an official. I'm not a government official. I don't hold
any office I'm not really answerable, and I had to
be calm. You know, I couldn't cry on stage. I couldn't.
I couldn't get angry, I couldn't get upset. I had
to be calm, and I would do it. I don't
know how, but I would do it night after night

(26:20):
after night, sometimes several times a day. And then I
would just crumple, you know. I would get off stage,
and if I couldn't find my hotel key, I would
just fall down crying. I would spend days where I
couldn't sleep, where I couldn't eat, and then finally I

(26:40):
lost my voice and I went to doctors. I went
to see specialists, and there was nothing wrong. I had
nothing wrong with my throat or my vocal cords or
anything like that.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
It was just my body saying it had had enough.
During this time, something else is crumpling, something unexpected. Fatima's
relationship with her dog Lama.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
I got Lama at a time when, again, you know,
there was a lot of uncertainty and danger in Pakistan,
and and she was this wonderful, long haired daccent who
was so gentle and so steadfast. I mean, that's the
best way to describe her, and I adored Lama, and

(27:27):
then this book came out. I hadn't even begun writing
it at the time that I got Lama, but I then,
you know, begin the process of writing the book. I
then have to go out and tour with the book.
At that time, I felt, none of this is going
to work. If I'm if I'm sitting here in Pakistan,
you know, I've got to get away from from everything,

(27:50):
from this life or the grief, the you know, my
old life I'm trying. I wanted to build something new,
and at that time I was still touring with that
book about my father, and so I started to distance
myself from home, from you know, my life at home,
my life as I knew it, and even my dog

(28:11):
and even Lama, because it became harder and harder to
say goodbye, hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye and carry on this
nomadic existence that I'd thrown myself into when there was
always this little creature who was waiting for me and
who felt lonely without me. And in trying to make
that distance, and in trying to cement that distance, I

(28:32):
was careless. I was cruel. I just wanted to cut ties,
you know, and be gone. And when I was traveling
during one of these periods, Lama died. She had she'd
been fine, she just got ill, and before I could
get back, she was gone. And I felt horrible. I

(28:55):
felt I had been so careless and so on, and
to do that to an animal. You know, who's who's
so loving and and all animals are, you know, they
just love us. They love us at our most negligent,
at our most distant, at our most selfish and thoughtless,

(29:16):
because they can, because they do well.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
They love unconditionally, which is something that we long for
as humans and is rare.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yes, yes, And to be honest, you know, we don't
do it with each other very often. We're very stingy
when it comes to doing that with each other. But Lama,
I really I've felt horrible about.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Before Lama's death, Fatima meets someone, a man who will,
for better or worse, become a fixture in her life

(30:09):
for the next decade.

Speaker 2 (30:12):
I had put myself in this situation where I was
really retraumatizing myself on a daily basis, and I had
already spent most of my life quite grief struck, but
I did sort of believe what people said. I did
think maybe there's some kind of catharsis in writing a
book like the one I had written. I thought maybe

(30:34):
there might be some justice. And actually it wasn't. And
that was a really rude awakening for me. It was
a really unpleasant surprise to find that, actually, no, I
didn't feel better. I didn't feel, you know, healed in
one way or another. I felt even more afraid. I
felt even more undone, because so much time had passed

(30:58):
and and I was still very much in pain. And
at that time I met a man who was older
than me, and he seemed at the time possessed of
this unearthly intelligence and confidence. And when I met him,

(31:21):
he told me that he could see I was wounded,
that I was in pain. He said it was written
all over my face, and I was telegraphing it and
everything I did. And he said it was strange because
he could see right away that I didn't have to
be in pain, that I could press a switch almost
by understanding things in a different way, and I could

(31:43):
end all my sorrow, I could end all my suffering
and grief. I could be done with it. I could
be cured of all my sadness, and it was easy,
and all I had to do was to believe him
and to listen to what he said, and he would
help me. He would help me erase it. And it

(32:04):
was really too seductive a promise not to jump at.
And I was entranced by this possibility. I was in trance,
and he sort of did it. I mean, he had
a totally unusual, confident, very primal way of being in
the world, and he didn't think what had happened to

(32:27):
me was all that unusual. He didn't think it meant
I had to ruin my life. He thought it could
be a matter of just changing my perspective. And he
did help me. I have to say, he did help me.
To give him credit where he does deserve it change
my thinking. And that was one of the secrets he

(32:48):
told me that, you know, we do our thinking. It's
not done to us. It's not like a thought just
magically appears in your mind. You put it there, and
just the way you put it there and take it out.
What I didn't realize at the time was that he
was grooming me as well. In many ways. He was

(33:09):
grooming me to forget a certain kind of treatment that
he would dish out to me. And though he was
very charismatic in this way, though I wouldn't call him charming,
because he was confident, because he had this sureness about himself.
I was quite entranced by him.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
Well, and some of it came true, right Like your
voice returned, Yeah, I mean that was so striking to me.
Is that literally your voice which had troubled you and
had disappeared on you? And could there possibly be a
more powerful metaphor? And then he is at least tangentially
responsible for, you know, for your voice returning to you.

(33:56):
And yet simultaneously he's also embarked on a process that's
going to rob you a voice in another way.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Oh completely, In fact, I've never actually thought of it
that way, but that is what happened. He he does
this kind of magic, you know, and he did this
not just with my voice but with other things. I
used to be incredibly, incredibly panicked about time. You know,
if I had a flight, I had to be at

(34:25):
the airport three hours before the flight. If I was
going to meet you for a coffee and we agreed
to meet at ten, I would be there at nine
point thirty, just you know, ages before, because if I
was even five minutes close to being on time, I
would be just wrecked. And this man turned around and

(34:46):
said to me, oh, you've got to stop doing that.
And you know I'd heard that before, obviously, but he said, no, no,
you've got to stop doing that. The reason you care
so much about the time is because you couldn't save
your father, because your father was dying while you were
locked inside the house and you couldn't reach him in
time to speak to him. And that's why you panic
about the time. And he was right. I mean, he

(35:08):
was right. I would I would drive myself into a
into not you know, to be on time, and if
I was late, I felt like my system was exploding.
So he really did help me in a lot of ways.
But at the same time, he was building a new
a new set of boundaries and anxieties. And as confident

(35:35):
and sure as he was, he was also very controlling
and he was very coercive. And because I thought at
this point that he had helped me so much, and
that his help required on a belief, on a lack
of resistance from my part, I was too afraid to

(35:56):
upset that I thought I needed him really to be
all right. And he also because he knew very well
what my wounds were, he knew how to activate them,
and he knew what to say to remind me of them.
And we began a relationship that went on for a
very long time, and that was really quite toxic.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
Yeah, I mean, it also seems like it was quite secret.
He did not want to meet your friends. He did
not want you to meet his friends. He wanted to
keep things. He asks you at one point, do you
want a normal relationship or do you want a special relationship.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Yes, he was quite unusual as well, because at that
time in my life, you know, I did feel very wounded.
But though I was young, I felt like I had
been through a lot for the age that I was,
I was in my late twenties. And he sort of
thought not really, or at least that's what he said,

(37:01):
you know, And and he didn't seem to want to
be a part of you know. He had his own rules.
He was very independent. I was very independent. I traveled
all the time. I remember counting once and realizing that
within a six month period, I had not spent more
than seven days in the same place. And he traveled
and you know, he just I don't even remember how

(37:24):
he explained it to me, to be honest, But it
was a slow unraveling, you know. And in the beginning
it was not the right time, and then later it
was the wrong time, and then it was you know,
people are jealous, and you know, we have to protect
what's special, and then it was all manner of things.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
It was also, you come from a public family. I
don't want to be a public Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
It was also you know, I had done this book.
I was talking about people that were still very much
empower in Pakistan. They remain empower. The people involved in
my father's killing never went to jail for it. They
were never punished for it or held accountable. They were
promoted and promoted and promoted. And there was a certain

(38:16):
amount of attention on me, and you know, in a
way there still is. And he didn't really want any
part of that. And because I was quite independent myself,
and you know, I have my own life and I
had friends in different places and things to do, in
the beginning, it sort of suited me. I thought, Okay,

(38:37):
it's quite spontaneous. This is you know, unusual, and I thought,
like many before, me. I thought he'll change, I'll change him,
you know. And it's a rotten kind of thinking that
a lot of us tend to fall into. And of
course he didn't change. I was the one who was

(38:57):
very changed by the whole experience, and not good way.
He was incredibly manipulative. He gastled me constantly. He had
in almost sinister patients that he employed, he weaponized to
teach me lessons to keep me in place. And again
I had fallen prey to this line of thinking that

(39:19):
I think is so damaging. I didn't really understand what
an abusive relationship was, but I was pretty sure that
it was physical. I was pretty sure that it happened
if you were weak, and I was absolutely sure that
I was a strong, confident, independent woman and such a
thing could not happen to me. And I didn't understand
that abuse is not in violence, necessarily, but abuses in

(39:43):
the total disrespect of your boundaries. It's in the breaking
down of any place in which you might erect a
space in which someone can't intrude on. And I also
thought that if someone is going to become coercive and
controlling with you, they do it loudly and dramatically, and

(40:04):
I didn't understand that actually it's it's a quiet process,
and it really is a menacing process because it begins
very softly, very slowly. He had already made me feel
that I needed him, I needed his understanding and his
help and his insight in order to be okay. And

(40:24):
when I did question him, there was a reaction. There
was a consequence. So I had to start making choices
like is this worth me saying something about or is
he going to get mad? And then if he gets mad,
it's going to be a process that lasts three days.
Do I want to go through that?

Speaker 1 (40:40):
No?

Speaker 2 (40:40):
Okay, I won't say anything. Yea.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
And there was also this, I think something that this
variety of narcissists does so brilliantly is create an exquisite
sensitivity to their every flicker of a mood.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
Yes, and you know that. I mean. One of the
things that really I had to understand and recognize, and
I hope anyone listening to this will take from me,
is that a lot of the reason I didn't fight
back against him is because I thought he was special.
I thought he had something special that I needed that
to feel okay, to feel safe, to feel well. But

(41:16):
actually this type of person, emotionally abusive person, is not
They're not special. They're generic. They are so basic they
follow exactly the same pattern wherever in the world you
find them, however old they are, whether they're your partner
or your boss, or your parent or your sibling, they
are absolutely identical. And they isolate you, you know, whether

(41:39):
that's by keeping something secret or making you share a secret.
They isolate you. They punish you for reacting, They reward
you in small enough ways you know that you need
more of the reward, and on and on and on.
I just I didn't realize it was being done to

(41:59):
me the time, but it very much was. And the
gas lighting is just especially pernicious because if someone lies
to you, they've got to do a load of work
to keep that lie up, you know, They've they've got
to constantly have this file running in the background of
their lie and keep you from from accessing it. They've

(42:21):
got to keep you away from the truth. It's really
quite onerous on you know, on them. But when someone
is gaslighting you, the onus is on you because you're
being told you're imagining things, you're being told you're crazy,
you're being totally put off balance of equilibrium, and it's
it's it's really damaging, it's really painful because you no

(42:45):
longer have any sense of confidence about your own life
and your own ideas in your your own place in
the world.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
Fatima has many friends, close friends, and a best friend, Allegra,
but her relationship with the Man is a secret. Four
years into her relationship with the man, Fatima adopts a
Jack Russell Terrier puppy she names Coco. She initially adopts Coco,
intending her to be a gift for her younger brother,
but two things changed that plan. First, Fatima falls madly

(43:19):
in love with Coco, and second, conveniently, Coco also falls
madly in love with Fatima and doesn't want anything to
do with Fatima's brother, and so Coco becomes, in a way,
the only witness to her secret relationship. As Fatima writes,
she is the only one who knows the full truth
about the situation. Because that's how Fatima thinks of this ensnarement,

(43:44):
A situation.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
I mean quite intentionally. I think you know, the relationship
was constructed the way it was by the man precisely
so that I would be rendered helpless. I don't say
anything to my friends because I understand secrets also as
being necessary. You know, I remember those moments of being

(44:07):
a child and being told you can't tell people on
the phone where you are, you can't tell people where
you're going. You've got to you've got to keep your
own little bubble private and protect it. And I am
in any way, so it certainly doesn't sound like it
a private and guarded person. So for a while I

(44:28):
understand his requests, But at the same time I have
to admit that I'm quite sure I knew what my
friends would have said to me, and I don't want
to hear it because of course, And here's where you
realize how how generic all these things are. They don't
know him like I do, and they don't understand him

(44:50):
like I do. So I don't. I want to at points,
but I don't, And I do really think I believe
number one all of excuses for himself, which he has
pretty handy. But I also think he'll change. I also
think I can change him. I can I can make
this person who is often cruel and often cold and

(45:15):
often mean. I just think, well, maybe he's been hurt
in life too, and you know, I have to, I
have to help him, so I don't. And it's really
just my dog who sees what goes on and who
at the same time as I'm in this relationship that's
very manipulative and very unpleasant. My dog teaches me really

(45:41):
about care about what tenderness means, and what it means
to love. I mean, to be cruel as a choice.
You have to go out of your way to be cruel.
You know, to love is natural, It's an instinct. It's
an instinct to be kind, you know. And she reminds
me of that constantly at this point into my life,
when I don't really have any reminders of it at

(46:03):
all anywhere else. I think. Also part of the reason
I didn't talk about this to friends is because I
was ashamed. Is because I knew what was going on.
Whether I had the right word for it or not,
I understood that I was being treated badly, and I
was ashamed because I didn't know how to justify why

(46:25):
I was putting up with it. And the man was very,
very protective of his own boundaries and his own privacy
and space while absolutely disregarding everyone else's. And one of
the things he would like to do, is he would
want to you know, he would wait hours and hours

(46:45):
and hours before agreeing to go out for dinner. You know,
so the normal time to go out for dinner would
be six or seven, and he would deally deadly for
as long as possible, so you were just absolutely at
the end of your tether by the time, you know,
you reached. And one of the ways he would do this,
which was also you know, it's a it's a small thing,
but I think it betrays a certain calculation and disregard

(47:07):
for other people, is he would he would meander into
stores that he had absolutely no interest in and and
spend hours in them while the person he's with was
hungry or had to go to the bathroom, or you know,
had an appointment to get to. And one day we
were going to dinner and he wanted to stop in

(47:31):
an electronic store which we happened to pass by, and
we go inside and there's no one in there, and
he finds a singulary like a salesman who is alone
in the shop, and he starts to ask him question
after question after question, you know, how is the machine made,
what kind of decibel? Who was the inventor of the speaker.

(47:54):
I mean, he's just going on and on and on,
and that's point, you know. He mentions to the salesman
that who's Egyptian, that I grew up in the Middle East,
and you know, I understand some Arabic and and this
salesman talks to me a little bit, and at some
point he says to the man and I in English,
she says, you know, if you and your wife who

(48:16):
wants to recommend something. And the man looks almost offended
at this, at this inference, and says, oh, no, no, no, no, no,
she's her, No, she's not my wife. And the salesman
was confused, you know, I think he wondered, why would
it be like did he say something wrong? So he
then says, oh, well, okay, your you know, your partner,
your your girlfriend, And the man now doubles down and

(48:41):
says her, no, no, I'm not I'm not with her.
Would you like her? Ask her out? And then walks off.
And it was the kind of thing he did, the
kind of thing that would stund me stand the other
person and then pretend it was nothing. If I was
to get upset, he would say, oh, come on, I
was joking, Oh, you're so sensitive, do you have to

(49:02):
make a big deal out of everything? And it was
this salesman who turns to me and in Arabic says,
is he serious? And I was so shocked and so
thrown off guard that I said to him, I said, no,
he's not, He's just awful. And the salesman looks hurt.

(49:24):
I mean, the salesman really kind of ends the conversation
with the man and he says to me, I would
never talk to you that way, you know, and he
sort of walks off, shaking his head. And this happened
often that cab drivers would tell me, someone on the
bus would tell me, someone in the subway, someone walking by.

Speaker 1 (49:43):
In the street would say, what are you doing with
this guy? And it was a pretty good question. Now
it's twenty twenty, and we all know what happened in
twenty twenty. Lockdown puts pressure on everything, especially what was
under pressure. Fatima is thirty eight years old. She plans

(50:04):
to ride out the pandemic with her best friend Allegra
and with Coco. The man is elsewhere, elusive and secretive
as always, but the age of thirty eight is a
real inflection point for a woman who longs to have children,
and Fatima longs to have children. The man has played
with her endlessly in this regard, never saying no, never

(50:27):
saying yes. She has frozen her eggs an insurance policy
of sorts, and the man is not supportive. She's alone
in this longing. And then, in a strange parallel in
the animal universe, Coco is about to have some puppies
of her own.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
I had always wanted a family because mine had been decimated,
and I always felt that my father having me really
changed his life. It turned it from something that could
have been sorrow and tragic to something filled with tenderness

(51:06):
and warmth and joy, and I very much wanted the same.
And the man, of course didn't want to have children,
but instead of just saying that, just kind of made
excuses after excuses, and at the same time pressured me
to have Cocoa have puppies because he wanted a puppy

(51:27):
of cocos and insisted and insisted. And again I think
it's it is something to do with boundaries, But it
turns out that Cocoa does get pregnant, and just when
we have it confirmed, lockdown happens. And I with my

(51:50):
best friend go to Oxfordshire to stay with another friend
of ours MC in the countryside. And I was angry.
I was angry because I think a lot of women
my age had been told, you know, to focus on careers,
to have, you know, to pursue our careers, to be told.

(52:12):
We were told we could, we could have the family
and the life and all that later there was time
for everything. And now here we were in our late thirties,
basically cut off from the world. Where was all this
time we were supposed to have. So we all had careers,
and we'd all worked really hard at what we wanted
to do in life at the exclusion of things like

(52:32):
children and settling down, and now we're stuck inside for
god knows how long. So I was annoyed. I was annoyed,
and I had frozen my eggs again, gas lit really
by the man who kept saying to me. When I
would say that I wanted to have children, he would
turn around and say things like, well, how do you
know you can? Maybe you're infertile. Why don't you go check?

(52:55):
And I would go and check, and the doctors would say, yeah,
you're fine, you can have kids, and then he would say, okay, well,
if you can have kids, just wait while are you
bothering me? Or you know, if you're so anxious about children,
why don't you go freeze your eggs? And then of
course I would freeze my eggs and then he would say, well,
you can freeze them again. So this was going on

(53:15):
in the background, and Coco has this pregnancy. It doesn't
look anything like a real pregnancy should. But I don't
know anything about dogs and pregnancy or humans and pregnancy
at that point, and it's lockdown so no one will
see us. And I did what we all did, you know.

(53:36):
I read the books. I spoke to friends who'd had litters,
and I was as prepared as I could be. And
the night that Coco goes into labor, something immediately goes
very wrong. And she doesn't have a puppy. She basically

(53:58):
has just pop that is deformed. I mean, it's just skeleton,
it's it's not it's really dead before you know it's
even born. And we go back and falls from the
ved to the house to the vet to the house,
and I have to do a lot of it myself
again because of COVID. But Cocoa comes out and it

(54:22):
was so hard to see her in that sort of
a situation. But I was assured by everyone bets friends,
you know, acquaintances, that dogs don't feel the way we do,
that they don't they don't remember things the way we do.
But all I could see was that there's a dog
who was grieving, who who had everything in her body

(54:44):
telling her she was a mother, but she had no baby,
and I had to care for Coco over that period
after this happened, and I was incredibly moved by her reaction.
She would didn't leave me. She slept with me. She
wouldn't need anything unless I ate it first. She wouldn't

(55:05):
let anyone come into the room where we were. She
started to sleep on my hand. She started to sleep
on my hand, and if someone came into the room,
she would protect my hand. She would sort of pull
it away and sit on it, and she started to
lick it to clean it. And I realized she was
hormonally a father and she didn't have a pup, so

(55:27):
she was turning my hand into her pup. You know, dogs,
dogs as puppies, they can't they can't do anything for
the first two weeks. They can't see, they can't hear,
they can't really walk for you know, they sort of squirm,
and they can't even expel waste. Their mother has to
expel the way simulate the waste production for them. And
that's what Coker was doing when she was licking my hand,

(55:48):
and the vet on the phone said to me, you've
got to take your hand away because she'll never recover.
She's just going to keep thinking she has a baby.
And he said to me, whatever you do, don't get
her to Obviously, I got her a toy because I couldn't.
I just couldn't bet jigging over my hand and then
leaving her with nothing. So I got this long snake

(56:09):
that she carried around. It was like seventeen times bigger
than her and she carried it around and would carry
it upstairs and downstairs, you know, until she felt okay,
and then you know, she put the snake down one
day and just never picked it up again. But it
was a really extraordinary experience because animals are not that
different from us. I don't think, I really don't think,

(56:31):
and they feel exactly what we do because they're capable
of such enormous tenderness and love. Why wouldn't they feel
pain in the same way that we do.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
And so you end up really with this just this
crash course in I mean so many things, in maternal grief,
in unconditional love, in caring for being the center of
Cocoa's universe while this is happening. And then it's the

(57:05):
summer and Coco's recovered, and you take her and you
go to visit the man's first time you're seeing him
since the pandemic started, and you decide you're going to
meet in Florence, and this really does feel like what

(57:25):
happens there is the beginning of the end.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
Yeah. Yeah, it's really the first time that I see
his cruelty that I've experienced so often turn towards someone else,
and it's hideous to see. It's hideous, you know, in
the same way that I don't think controlling relationships begin

(57:50):
with a loud, dramatic lap. I'm not sure they end
with a loud dramatic lap. But seeing him be cruel too,
my dog, it really took the mask off for me.
I wish I could say I left immediately, though, I
mean it was my instinct to. I always wanted to,
but I wasn't able.

Speaker 1 (58:11):
To things are never that neat and tidy.

Speaker 2 (58:14):
Right, yeah, no, no, never, but it is. It is
an eye opener for me because I lose respect for him.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
His behavior in this moment is indeed anything but respectable.
It's deplorable. He baits the dog, makes pincers with his fingers,
snapping at her, toying with her very nature, and because
she is a dog, she snaps back at him. At
one point, he hits cocoa. Characteristically, he doesn't own up

(58:46):
to this bad behavior. He never did and never does
and never will.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
Someone used to imposing their way on others is not
going to be accountable. Or let's put it this way,
what the man told me was true. You can make
your mind forget anything. And in fact, he was exactly
the person who taught me how to do that, and
he made sure that I used that really often with him.

(59:15):
One thing that I remember, I always used to have
a fifty pound note in my wallet because I traveled
so much, because I was, you know, catching planes and
trains and ending up in cities that I didn't know
or where I didn't speak the language. And I always
had this fifty pound note just in case, you know,

(59:37):
I lose my wallet, or I lose my credit card
or my ATM card doesn't work. At least I've got
enough money to get myself wherever, to the airport, to
the train station, to the hotel. And it's also because
I am an anxious person, and you know, I've dealt
with anxiety all my life, and the man, at every

(59:58):
chance he could get, would take that note for me.
Why you know, I want to have an ice cream,
Well you buy it. Well, I don't have cash, I
don't want to put it on a card. Why not, Well,
it's just an ice cream. Come on, what's the big deal?
What's the big deal? And actually it was a big
deal because that was a small talisman for me. It

(01:00:20):
made me feel safe, It made me feel like, you know,
in an emergency, I'm okay. And it was a matter
of principle for him to take it away from me,
to make me uncomfortable. And I think that kind of
person essentially takes from animals exactly what they give so freely,

(01:00:41):
which is love, you know, attention, care, compassion. But do
they walk them, no, you know, do they go to
the ved with them at three in the morning when
they're throwing up? Now and all they started to become
incredibly clear to me. I stopped doing that thing he
convinced me to do and me, which was to believe him.

(01:01:01):
I just no longer believed him after that. And when
you don't believe someone, there's quite little you will tolerate
from them. And it started to make me see all
the other behavior unmasked and he fell apart.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
That's such a full circle what you're describing, because in
the beginning it was all about believing him. There were
very powerfully good things about believing him that were helpful
to you. But in the end, sort of when the
scales fell from your eyes, it completely unmasks someone like that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Yeah, it does. And I think I really do think
that part of the reason women find themselves, I mean
not just women everyone, but certainly a lot of women
find themselves in these kind of situations is because the
discourse we're given really is damaging to us. You know,
it's that strong women don't end up in these situations.

(01:01:55):
But it's also don't make a scene, you know, be polite,
don't make a deal out of something, And it's really
it's the opposite. Someone makes you feel uncomfortable, you should
absolutely make a rioting theme. And you know, if you're wrong,
you can apologize later, but you should make the biggest

(01:02:16):
scene possible if you don't feel good, or you feel uncomfortable,
or you feel someone is invading your boundaries or your space,
and that's the thing we should tell each other. And I,
you know, at the end of the day, I never
wanted to talk about this kind of thing, but I did,
and I wrote about it because I wish I had
come across something like this when I was in this relationship,

(01:02:40):
because it would have snapped me out of the delusions
I had so willingly accepted and created. If I had
read a book about this abusive sort of nature, it
would have forced me to ask uncomfortable questions of myself

(01:03:00):
because it would not have been with the judgment of
a friend or a stranger or a It would have
been a safe space in which to quietly investigate something.

Speaker 1 (01:03:10):
And I just, yeah, I didn't come across anything like that.
Fatima finally cuts all ties with the Man. Praise the Lord,
and Coco eventually has a litter of five healthy puppies.
Fatima can't keep them all as much as she'd like to.

(01:03:31):
She keeps two and has a pack of her own
now Fatima, Coco, and Coco's pups, Carlo and Tokyo. She's
forty one and she's reached a point of thinking, maybe
this is okay, Maybe I won't bring children into the world,
maybe this is my story. But then one night she's

(01:03:51):
out to dinner with Allegra and she meets an American
man and the rest, as they say, is history.

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
I end the relationship. Cocoa has another litter of puppies
that goes everything goes absolutely wonderfully. I didn't want her
to have puppies because I was so horrified by the
bad pregnancy that I just thought, I want to avoid
this at all costs. And you know, Murphy's law was
that the day I visited the vet to talk about
having her Spade, she met a very handsome Jack Russell

(01:04:24):
in the park and they have these puppies, and I
acted as though I'd had the puppies. You know, I
was so excited by it, and I looked after them.
I'm basically a VET. At this point, I end the relationship,
and I have been so lucky. I mean, I've really
truly been so lucky in my life with the friends

(01:04:45):
that I have I've had so much love and support
that it's hard not to believe in God because I
always had it when I needed it. And so at
some point I thought, well, maybe I'll just have another dog.
You know, I don't I wanted to keep one of
Cocoa's puppies, but of course the man said he wanted one,

(01:05:05):
which I now think he did only not to take
the dog, just so i'd be saddled with three Jack Russells.
I mean, if you know Jack Russell's, you know, one
Jack russell is the equivalent of like three normal dogs,
you know, so it's like having yeah, it's like having
a four hundred dogs, to have three Jack Russells. They
are absolutely without any kind of chill or calm. They're
just go twenty four hours a day. So I have

(01:05:28):
these three barking, yapping, jumping Jack Russells. And I really
did think. I thought, okay, well I'll just adopt another dog,
and then another dog, and then I'll just look after dogs.
And I was with my best friend Alegra having dinner,
and I was precisely showing her the next dog that

(01:05:48):
I was planning on saving from some very sad story.
When the man who I would marry, walked into the
restaurant and sat behind us. I really didn't want to
go out that night, and the legras sort have dragged me.
And I'm so glad that she did. And I make
Graham thank her all the time because we wouldn't have

(01:06:10):
met if it weren't for her. And we met. He
was traveling, he went back to the States, and you know,
I really didn't want to be in another long distance
you live far away, you don't live in the same
place kind of relationship. And I did he and we

(01:06:31):
got married and quite soon after actually, and we have
two little boys, and we have the three dogs, and
Graham lives in the perpetual fear that we will have
a fourth dog. And I think he's right to live
in that fear. And it is a house filled with

(01:06:54):
noise and chaos and a lot a lot of joy.

Speaker 1 (01:07:12):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider, and if you'd

(01:07:36):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

(01:08:06):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.