A dirge for Sania Khan

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IT could not have been more depressing and horrific. She had become an online sensation after the rendition on her experience of a dark marriage and an eventual freedom from it through divorce on TikTok went viral for the candidness of touching an issue very dear to many from the South Asian communities. She was very open about what she had experienced and gone through and how she now felt liberated getting her freedom and autonomy back. As a Pakistani-American and very conversant with the culture of her South Asian roots, she knew it was not expected that she would talk openly about her experience, but she apparently wanted many women from the same cultural background to learn from her. According to her, in her culture, ‘women are always expected to stay silent, …(and) it’s what keeps us in messed up situations in the first place.’ And for divorce – it is not to ever be contemplated. It is a woman’s duty to keep the family and divorce would tear family apart and only selfish women would want to do that. Not to talk of presenting divorce as leading to a happier life as she was doing online. For she had said: ‘Going through a divorce as a South Asian woman feels like you failed at life sometimes, … The way the community labels you, the lack of emotional support you receive and the pressure to stay with someone because ‘what will people say’ is isolating. It makes it harder for women to leave marriages that they shouldn’t have been in to begin with.’

So she separated from her husband and got the processes of divorce completed despite pressure from her family against her decision and action. She really was trying to start a new chapter of her life, even if the process was heart wrenching, as she got her own place in Chicago, miles away from the man she described as ‘toxic.’ She thought she had left all the pains of her dark marriage in the past with the new, independent life and work as a photographer in a different location. She had defied the culture and was showing herself in the bright light she wanted for herself outside of the strangulating inhibitions of culture. But the culture was not yet done with her. Her former husband, Raheel Ahmad, made the 11-hour drive from his Alpharetta, Georgia, home to Khan’s Chicago apartment, uninvited and unannounced. When his family found he was missing from his home, they did not had to wonder too much about where he could have gone as they asked for a welfare check at Khan’s apartment, where they thought he might be. And when the officials hearkened to the family’s request and decided to check at her residence, Chicago police officers found a 29-year-old female and a 36-year-old male there unresponsive, both with gunshot wounds to the head. The woman was pronounced dead on scene, and the man was transported to the hospital, where he later died. Coroners identified the bodies as Sania Khan and Raheel Ahmad. They ruled her death a homicide and his a suicide. Ahmad had driven all the way there to kill Khan!

The cultural narrative was that the man could not take it again and had to act to put a stop to the shame. ‘For her to have not only left him, but being able to survive and be happy and do well, that was not something he could live with’, is how a member of the community puts it. The happiness of Khan outside of a toxic marriage was a shame to the toxic former husband. He did not expect Khan to survive the divorce or get along with and in a better frame of mind after going against the cultural precept of staying put in marriages no matter the excruciating conditions experienced in them. Except that his action is the proof that the cultural precept would and could not be because of the interest of oppressed women in toxic relationships and marriages. The culture is essentially looking out for the interests of the men in the relationships and marriages and wants women to pay the price and sacrifices to keep men happy under any and all circumstances. Says RachnaKhare, the executive director of a survivor organisarion, Daya: ‘There’s this stigma in our community that puts pressure on women to sacrifice, … To sacrifice their emotional and physical well-being for the good of others. And while we all want to be altruistic human beings, it’s an undue burden on women specifically.’ And she is right – how could only one partner in a relationship be expected to carry the burden of sustaining the relationship in and through all circumstances?

Khan had to pay with her life because of this undue cultural expectation and burden. And the whole vacuous valorization of the importance of keeping the family together no matter the reality of the relationships and circumstances in the family. Again Khare submits: ‘We don’t want to break up a family, … That’s fine, but now there’s a woman who’s dead. How is that not the ultimate breaking of a family?’ How do we insist on keeping families under conditions that could lead to the death of the women in the families? What benefits accrue to the society when women pressured to remain in toxic relationships and marriages end up getting killed? And what is the essence of culture in a context that leads to and produces trauma and killing for women? Khan’s avoidable killing and death ought to ignite and force a rethinking across the South Asian communities about the obvious limitations and danger of their cultural precept of seeking to keep families intact and together away from divorce even on the altar of the maltreatment and unhappiness of women in marriages. It is time to leave the province of the old reputation culture and allow for the expression of the true feelings and objective reality of those in the relationships and marriages.

Marriages and relationships should be allowed to fail or be sustained only on the basis of the true feelings of the participants and not on the cultural expectation of being kept aloft always by women even at the coat of their own lives. The community evidently has failed Khan and part of the restitution for this failure should be the readiness and affirmation to not allow this kind of horrendous killing again by ensuring the revisiting of the cultural precept that allows for the acceptable oppression of women in marriages. Perhaps in this way, Khan’s death would not have been in vain.