Stings Like a Butterfly: Moni Mohsin and Socio-Political Satire in Pakistan

Sucharita Sarkar
Associate Professor
D.T.S.S College of Commerce, Mumbai

sarkarsucharita@gmail.com

“Against all my own odds, I know what I must say. Because, I’ll answer slowly, there
are no women in the third world.”
- Sara Suleri, Meatless Days, p. 20.
When US-based academic and author, Sara Suleri, writes a memoir of her girlhood in
Pakistan, she writes about her grandmother, mother and the other women in her family, she
categorises Pakistan as “a place where the concept of woman was not really part of the
available vocabulary”, because the women were “too busy” negotiating “what it meant to be
a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant” (1). Suleri later extends this category of
Pakistan as a feudal, patriarchal society where women are without voice, identity and agency
to the entire third world. Sukrita Paul Kumar and Malashri Lal titled their anthology of Asian
women’s writing as Speaking for Myself, and they felt the need to question and revise the
“received stereotypical image of Asian women upheld generally by the rest of the world as
passive, impoverished or anaemic” (Kumar and Lal “Introduction” xxiii). There are diverse
ways of speaking for oneself, and diary writing is one way of breaking the silence and
stereotypes about women in Asia. The Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin, in The Diary of a
Social Butterfly (2008), Tender Hooks (2011) and The Return of the Butterfly (2014),
develops the fictional central character, Butterfly, through this self-writing diary format and
through the mediums of popular fiction and comic satire into an active, vibrant, opinionated
persona who is the antithesis of ‘passive, impoverished or anaemic’, besides being a prism for
Mohsin’s critique of Pakistani—and by extension, South Asian—social, political and cultural
structures that inherently subjugate women’s voices and identities.
This paper aims to investigate how Mohsin deploys comic tropes like the silly socialite,
the malapropism and urban upper class drawing room intrigues to critique the social
conditions and contradictions of contemporary Pakistan. Mohsin uses comic and satirical
devices in nuanced and layered ways to defamiliarise the familiar and Butterfly emerges as a
subversive character. By studying the Butterfly texts, this paper also aims to unpack the
growing popularity of comic social satire by women writers in Pakistan, as evidenced in the
works of Moni Mohsin, Saba Imtiaz, Maha Khan Philips and others, and to explore if and
how these works can be read as feminist critiques of Pakistani society specifically and South
Asian patriarchy more generally.

The Comic Satiric World(s) of Moni Mohsin

In an article on “The state of satire in the Muslim world” in 2015, The Guardian reports
on the vibrancy and variety of satirical writing thriving across Islamic societies in states like
Iraq, Palestine, Syria and Pakistan, which have seen a marked increase in “mayhem and
death, war and repression, dictatorship and terrorism”: the writers term this trend as
“laughing in the face of danger” (Black et al, para 1). I would like to contextualize the
writings of Moni Mohsin (and other writers like her) against this backdrop of simmering
violence, disorder and threatening disintegration in order to explore the precariousness of the
glittery, fluttery world of the Butterfly that Moni Mohsin creates in The Diary of a Social
Butterfly (2008; referred to herewith as DSB), Tender Hooks (2011; referred to herewith as
TH) and The Return of the Butterfly (2014; referred to herewith as RB), and the locus of the
social and political satire articulated in these texts.
The genesis of these books was Mohsin’s column in the Lahore based weekly newspaper
The Friday Times, a “satirical column based on the lives of the rich and the inane” (DSB
224). The column purports to be the confessional diary entries of Butterfly about her life in
Lahore (and holidays in London and elsewhere), her friends and family. Mohsin succinctly
introduces the cast of characters:
Enter the Butterfly. But in order to make her silliness apparent, I needed a
counterpoint. Hence, Janoo [Butterfly’s husband]. Janoo would need a family—The
Old Bag, the Gruesome Twosome; and so would Butterfly—Mummy, Aunt Pussy,
Jonkers [Butterfly’s cousin]. They would have one child, Kulchoo, and live in Lahore.
Janoo would be landed and educated, the Butterfly urban and foolish, and their
marriage would be built on mutual misunderstanding. (DSB 224-225).
The social comedy of manners that arises from such a mismatch and such an eccentric cast of
characters is richly mined by Mohsin, and provides much of the hilarity of the three books.
However, it is the interface between Butterfly’s upscale bubble and the realities of Pakistan
outside in which that bubble is embedded through a complex network of traditional and
changing relationships that is the locus of the political satire. Mohsin writes, “I have also
tried to include…the bigger events of our times that have reverberated even in the life of one
as coddled as Butterfly….[including] the larger socio-political trends of recent years” (DSB
226). I would argue that it is the juxtaposition of these disparate worlds—the world of the
‘haves’ and the world of the ‘have-nots’, or as Butterfly calls them, “poors” and “fundos”—
that are connected through inequities of labour and power, through structures as old as
feudalism and as new as terrorism, which makes Pakistani urban societies such a fertile
ground for both social comedy and political satire. Sharp divides and disparities based on
birth between social groups have long been entrenched in South Asian societies: “Muslims
are frequently distinguished in terms of ashraf (high-born) and aijlaf (low-born) groups….
[and] inter-group disparities are politically salient and consequential” (Hasan & Menon 7).
Mohsin says in an interview,
Despite a slowly growing middle class, there is still a huge chasm between the rich
and poor in Pakistan — this leads to a justifiable sense of resentment and anger
among the poor against the pampered rich like the Butterfly. This increasingly gets
channelled into what’s called religious violence as well as into straightforward crime.
(Mitra Das, n.pag).

In her self-introduction in the first book of the series, DSB, Butterfly proudly declares,
“Everyone knows me. All of Lahore, all of Karachi, all of Isloo—oho, baba, Islamabad—half
of Dubai, half of London, all of Khan Market, and all the nice-nice bearers at Imperial Hotel
also” (DSB vii; emphasis in original). Apart from the tried and tested satirical techniques of
anticlimactic diminishing of scale (from “everyone” to the hotel “bearers”) and hybridized
linguistic quirks (“Isloo”, “nice-nice”), Butterfly’s self-positioning encapsulates the
privileged geography of the ‘haves’. These “khandani, khaata-peeta types” live in “big, fat
kothi[s]” in ‘posh’ localities like Gulberg and spend much of their time abroad, preferring to
escape from, rather than engage with, the problems of daily living in Pakistan (DSB vii).
Even within Pakistan, their footprints are in restricted areas. “Khan Market” is both a
trivialization and a truth: Butterfly’s love for shopping is a caricaturized feminine foible
treated with indulgence by men, but Khan Market and other economic transactional spaces
are one of the primary sites where the lives of the haves and have-nots intersect. It is the
encounter of Butterfly’s fragile, minuscule, privileged world with the world beyond it, which
both sustains and threatens it, that expands the scope and scale of Mohsin’s work from
escapist comedy of manners to realist satire on the state of affairs. As Mohsin says, “My
columns, which were basically Butterfly jotting down entries in her diary, started off as fun
but turned into social critique” (Mazhar, para 4).

The Satiric Gaze of Moni Mohsin

 Mohsin’s literary strategy of intermeshing “fun” with “social critique” allies her satire to
the Horatian tradition. Mohsin’s approach is tolerant, amused and witty, and she gently
exposes and ridicules the foibles and follies of the society that she depicts from the inside out.
The dissipation and ennui of the rich and well-heeled is well-documented in satire, from
Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to Eliot’s Prufrock. As Zareena Saeed comments in her study on
Mohsin, “Pope, in his The Rape of the Lock, is Horatian in tone, delicately chiding society in
a sly but polished voice by holding up a mirror to the follies and vanities of the upper class”
(Saeed et al 3595). This is also true of Mohsin, although she deliberately replaces the
“polished voice” of Pope’s narrator with Butterfly’s vacuous, voluble, error-strewn, less
urbane and less self-aware voice (she calls herself “very sophisty, smart and socialist”) so
that we laugh both at her and at the society that she depicts with seemingly unconscious and,
thus, unexpectedly sharp observations (she describes her friends’ husbands as “bank
defaulters but…very religious and upright otherwise”) (DSB viii-ix). Unlike Pope’s Belinda,
Mohsin’s Butterfly is both target and tool of the author’s complex satirical gaze at Pakistani
society.
Like Pope’s neo-classical tale of Belinda and her self-centred aristocratic high society,
Mohsin uses the trope of the silly, self-absorbed socialite (in all three books) and the plot
device of drawing room intrigues (in TH), deftly transposed to a post-colonial, South Asian
setting, to expose the trivial absorptions of Butterfly and her social circle. Instead of Pope’s
mock-heroic machinery of epical gods and guardian spirits, however, Mohsin deploys
juxtaposition with the real world as a tool to expose the incongruity and frivolousness of
Butterfly’s existence in a circularity of parties, festivals, get-togethers (which she calls
“GTs”) and intrigues with her mother and “Aunt Pussy”, which also involve arranging a
suitable marriage for her cousin Jonkers with a suitable, rich girl from a good “bagground”. It
is Butterfly’s monumental disconnect with the ground realities around her, as much as her
erratic English vocabulary, that makes her complain about the “stresses and stains” of living
in Pakistan and then reveal that she is about to have a “nervous break out” because her friend
is accusing her of stealing her maid, and she has to elaborately deceive her friend from
finding out (TH 204).
In DSH (and, to a lesser extent in the other two texts), Mohsin deploys a simple but
effective contrapuntal device to position Butterfly’s world in the context of the broader
Pakistani (and sometimes global) world. Each of Butterfly’s journal entries is preceded by
two brief headlines, one from the world outside and one from Butterfly’s life. The difference
in scale and magnitude between the two disconnected events yoked together thus is a device
that jars the reader out of any misconception that this is escapist, feel-good fiction, and
immediately and effectively situates Butterfly’s banal world as a burlesque through its
shockingly funny discrepancy with the ‘real’ world.
The first entry in Butterfly’s journal (dated January 2001) is preceded by the headlines:
“Taliban threatens to destroy all statues/ Floozie runs off with her best friend’s husband”
(DSB 1). The threat to marital harmony that is posed by Floozie’s (and her paramour Tony’s)
actions is make ludicrous by measuring it against the much greater threat to cultural diversity
posed by the Taliban. The satire is heightened by the implicit irony of the juxtaposition: the
Taliban would disapprove of Floozie’s actions and would probably punish her to death by
stoning for adultery. In Butterfly’s world, Floozie’s ‘punishment’ is social notoriety and
temporary ostracism.
In a similarly parodic vein, when “US forces search for Saddam”, “Butterfly embarks on
massive ‘girl hunt’ for Jonkers” (DSB 78). Again, the linking of the serious with the trivial
destabilizes our sense of scale. By treating a frivolous incident mock-seriously (Butterfly’s
search for a bride for her cousin), Mohsin makes Butterfly a parody of the official
investigator. Reading against the grain, we can find in Mohsin’s deliberately frivolous
treatment of the serious (the manhunt for Saddam Hussein) an indictment of the male world
of political intrigue as well: this world is every bit as wasteful, rivalry-ridden, vindictive and
selfish as the banal world of the Butterfly.
One of the major differences between the two worlds, of course, is in the consequences,
and Mohsin makes us aware of this when she pairs, with shocking impact, “47 killed in
Quetta mosque attack/ Butterfly’s neighbour burgled”, or “37 dead as terrorists bomb
London/ Butterfly wonders whether she will ever get a UK visa again” (DSB 81; 143).
Butterfly’s inversion of scale and her complete (and completely non-hypocritical) self-
absorption makes her concerned only about how the suicide bombers are selfish “spoil spots”
who did not care that the likes of Butterfly would now face visa problems. There is a
delicious irony here in Butterfly’s complete lack of self-awareness; the crime of selfishness
that she accuses the bombers of may equally well be applied to herself.
Yet, there is more than irony in Mohsin’s satiric gaze; there is anger as well. What
exacerbates the angry response to Butterfly’s disaffect with and deliberate alienation from the
realities of Pakistan (outside of the glass bubble realities that she inhabits) is the context: such
wilful, uncaring disinterest may be forgivable in a society which is less disturbed, but in
present-day Pakistan, can its citizens choose to wilfully alienate themselves from the
mounting problems, including the problems of growing cultural alienation amongst the social
groups? Mohsin’s satire, thus, works at multiple levels. Beneath the critique of Butterfly’s
shallowness, is also an indictment of the state and its agencies and its failed administration
which cannot ensure a safe enough environment for its citizens or a shared cultural discourse
to emerge and thrive.
This response of anger at the world beyond the Butterfly introduces an element of the
Juvenalian satire of realism to the Horatian burlesque framework. In the texts, it is Butterfly’s
husband, Janoo, who is this Juvenalian voice of indignation, and his contempt is directed at
multiple targets, at the shallowness of Butterfly’s world, at the corruption and ineptitude of
state agencies, at the rising religious intolerance and violence, and at the failing promises of
democracy in Pakistan. It is Janoo who labels the near-farcical political situation as a
“Restoration comedy if it wasn’t so tragic” (RB 14). He scornfully criticizes Butterfly’s kitty
parties for “doing time waste” (Butterfly’s words) as much as he criticizes political leaders
like “Nawaz and Imran” as “cowards for not speaking out against the Talibans’ attacks on the
secular parties” (TH 36; RB 203). Mohsin creates an effective counterpoint for Butterfly in
the Janoo-Kulchoo father-son dyad. Ironically, while father-son dyads are traditionally the
locus of patriarchal family structure, in Butterfly’s topsy-turvy world, Janoo and Kulchoo
(and her cousin Jonkers) are the voices of progressive liberal critique, while Butterfly herself
—despite inhabiting a similarly privileged position at intersections of class, education and
socio-economic status—is the obscurantist, unaware, regressive one.
Whereas Butterfly is busy displaying her “new-found piety” during Ramzan by keeping
rozas, sleeping from sehri till iftaari, and doing her “namaazes all in one lump sum”, Janoo,
instead, prefers to spend time building a computerized library and a “free school for children”
in his ancestral “bore village in Sharkpur” (DSB 214-215). Although a member of the landed
feudal aristocracy, Janoo, who is educated in Oxford—Butterfly calls him an “Oxen”—is
pro-democratic, equal-rights-believing, left-leaning, humanitarian in his opinions and actions.
Not only does he spend considerable time and money on developing his villages in Sharkpur
educationally, agriculturally and economically, in his capacity as the enlightened feudal
owner, without any desire or expectation of political gains, Janoo also protests against the
growing cultural domination of the Taliban, and fights for the democratic rights of all
Pakistani citizens through various activist means, including voluntarily going to jail as a mark
of protest, along with other “Human Rights Commission “parha-likha, bore types” (DSB
218).
Janoo is not only the central critical conscience of Butterfly’s world, he plays a crucial
role of bridging the two disparate worlds together, by educating her about national and global
political realities—often to hilarious effect—and urging her to engage with this real Pakistan.
It is Janoo who persuades Butterfly to attend funeral of slain Punjab governor, Salman
Tasheer, where she realises how deeply Islamic radicalization has spread even among the
educated, affluent classes (“these people are like us only”), and dismayed and temporarily
alienated, she feels “that your home is not your home … and that you are safe nowhere” (RB
119). When Butterfly thinks that Arab Springs is “a chain of spas with branches in Tunisya
and Egypt and Libya and all”, it is Janoo who educates her “slowly and quietly”, as if
teaching “some backwards child”, about the inspiring potential of the “awakening”, and
Butterfly progresses to hoping that “Arab Spring comes tomorrow into Saudi” because they
are radicalizing the “innocent bhooka nanga unemployed” of Pakistan (RB 168-171).
However, it would not be accurate to apply the comic Pygmalion paradigm of superior
male transforming the inferior female to the Janoo-Butterfly dynamics. One reason for this is
that Janoo is a genuine believer in gender equality, he persuades or mocks Butterfly but rarely
does he coerce her. Moreover, he applauds Butterfly every time she surprises him with her
perceptiveness or her determination. He is willing to learn from her and lean on her as much
as she does when they face any crisis, as for instance, when Janoo suffers from clinical
depression in RB. Another, less serious reason is that Butterfly is too stubborn to transform
completely; the lack of conventional plot structure in the confessional diary format of the
books (except for TH, which has a linear plot) aids this impression that Butterfly remains
incorrigible and as buoyed by confidence as ever. Butterfly’s resilience and her determination
to be herself at all costs not only makes her an interesting and memorable fictional character,
but may be further interpreted through post-colonial and feminist lenses.

The Inventive Vocabulary of Butterfly

One of the domains where Butterfly’s complete confidence is deployed to superb comic
effect is the domain of language. As Mohsin says in the Afterword:
I have enjoyed inventing the language that has become Butterfly’s sine qua non. And
in this effort Lahoris of my acquaintance have—often unknowingly—helped hugely.
On my own, I would never have been able to think up priceless phrases like ‘three-
tiara cake’, ‘paindu pastry’, ‘do number ka maal’ and, my personal favourite, ‘what
cheeks!’ (DSB 227).
Mohsin, thus, distances her authorial self from Butterfly’s language even as she claims to
construct a mirror to the linguistic peculiarities of a certain class of Lahoris (by extension,
Pakistanis, and indeed, South Asians). In satire, this distance between the author and the
object of satire is always present and is necessary for diminution and ridicule. Mohsin’s
target of ridicule is the combination of Anglophilia and classism that makes certain social
classes privilege English language skills and construct exclusionary hierarchies on the basis
of these skills. Butterfly asserts repeatedly, “I am convent educated and afterwards I went to
Kinnaird College, where all the rich illegible girls go” (DSB ix). To her, education is not
about what your learnt but where you studied. She is in awe of people who can speak “furr
furr English” (RB 199), and is dismissive about those who pronounce English words “in a
typical illitred desi way” (TH 36). Kalsoom Qaisar’s study on the neologisms in DRB found
“numerous instances of word formation, derivation, inflections and neologisms formed
through creative ways” (Qaisar 14835-14836). Mohsin’s playfulness with English language
introduces various types of neologisms and hybrids into Butterfly’s vocabulary. Butterfly
embodies the English language snobbery and misappropriation that is so often prevalent in
South Asian post-colonial societies.
The satire on English language snobbery becomes hilarious not just through Urduized
or Punjabized words and phrases but by a stylistic device that Mohsin borrows from the
Restoration dramatist Richard Sheridan: the malapropism (the mistaken use of a word in
place of a similar-sounding one, often with an amusing effect). The inventive stream of
malapropisms that are uttered by Butterfly is targeted for ridicule by Janoo and Kulchoo (as
family members, they ridicule gently) and also provides much of the hilarity for the readers.
Butterfly, in spite of having “such a self-defecating sense of humour”, remains unconscious
of her linguistic slippages: calling a shrink a “shrimp”, calling herself “soft-headed” instead
of soft-hearted, referring to her mother’s menopause as “memo pause”, and thinking that her
mother-in-law has had a “vagina attack” when it is actually an angina attack (RB 38; RB 198;
TH 246; DSB 147; DSB 12).
I would argue here that the inadvertently inventive vocabulary of Butterfly, both the
chutney-fication and the malapropisms, serve another purpose: that of subversion of the
dominant colonial English that we have inherited. For instance, when Butterfly comments
that the death of her favourite British Royal, Lady Diana, made her cry “so much, so much
that everyone said I became almost historical with grief. Itna mein nay feel kiya tha”, she is
disrupting the readers’ expectations of English in two ways, by using an incorrect English
word or by diluting the English through addition of local language words (RB 187; emphasis
added). This is part of the project of writing back to the legacy of the Empire and reshaping it
in individualistic ways. When Butterfly thinks BC stands for “Before Coffee”, she is also
reinventing colonially inherited concepts in an amusing way (RB 204). Butterfly is subverting
the English language and making it her own: in the process pluralizing the colonial English
into many post-colonial Englishes. By playing with English incorrectly but with complete
confidence, Butterfly constructs herself as a rebellious post-colonial subject, although she
does this both unconsciously and unselfconsciously.

Butterfly’s Redemptive Character Arc

Since we have located rebelliousness in Butterfly’s subject position, the question now
arises: Is the Butterfly a feminist? The obvious answer here would be, no, she is not. In a
telling passage, Butterfly constructs her own life and happiness through the gaze of others,
revealing how hollow and materialistic her life is:
“Am I happily married? .... Mashallah, I have a husband, an aulaad, a big house,
servants, social life, status, cars, cupboards full of designer joras and jewellery, and so
on and so fourth. Everyone is always saying what a nice life I have. What else is
happiness, haan?” (TH 18)
Yet, in spite of this shallowness, Butterfly is observant, courageous and, sometimes,
empathetic. She is obliquely aware of the world around her and her inadvertently incisive
comments are usually surprisingly perspicacious. Yet, her engagement with this world is
sporadic and passive, and she does not actively seek any role other than that of the privileged,
party-loving, wife and mother.
In recent years, Pakistani fiction has seen the emergence of the chick lit heroine.
Usually university-educated with impeccable English, these privileged young women use
their self-chosen profession (often in the media) as a means of self-making and of
participation in the male-dominated external world. These young, spirited, iconoclastic
heroines—like the journalist Ayesha in Karachi, You’re Killing Me (2014) and the gossip
columnist-cum-documentary filmmaker Amynah in Beautiful from This Angle (2010)—break
the traditional mould of the good Muslim woman through visible markers of cultural
rebellion like wearing western clothes, smoking, drinking and being in non-marital
relationships with men of their own choosing (Imtiaz; Khan Phillips). They step out of the
threshold of privilege, they are agents of their own transformation and they also succeed in
disrupting the hegemonic patriarchal public discourse. As a non-employed mother of a
teenage son, Butterfly belongs to a different generation, and not just because of her
unrevealed age and her erratic English. Privileged women of Butterfly’s generation and social
class rarely chose to have a professional career. Their identities were crafted through their
roles in the domestic sphere, of which the social party circuit was just an extension.
 But Butterfly is not a static, two-dimensional caricature; her character develops new
nuances as the stories progress. Even within her home, Butterfly is not a docile or silent body.
Her voluble articulation of self and the world—although comic in effect—is in itself an
indication of a confident individual who refuses to be subjugated, silenced or disciplined. She
is unafraid of all the traditional power-sources within patriarchal family structures. By
dismissively labelling her husband as a boring “zindaa laash” (living dead) and her mother-
in-law as “The Old Bag”, Butterfly is—apart from mocking them for their old-fashioned
and/or rustic ways (a recurrent trope in urban comedy of manners)—also dismantling the
traditional structures of familial and patriarchal authority (DSH 12). Butterfly chooses her
own way of life, although her choices are overdetermined by prevailing fashion trends. She is
more a victim of social mores and modes than of social oppression.
Within her family, Butterfly is an autonomous decision-maker in matters related to
her own body, household and lifestyle. Her husband, the long-suffering but deeply liberal
Janoo, despite voicing his own contrary opinions (often cryptically) about her excesses and
silliness, does not attempt or desire to control her, although he usually decides for himself
and for his son. In an interesting study on the correlation between women’s autonomy and
happiness, Ali and Haq point out that, of the “established autonomy indicators”, “women's
education”, “decision making authority” and “possession of assets” are important factors in
determining a “very happy” status in women’s life, whereas “labour force participation” is
“indicative of unhappiness” (Ali and Haq 121). This is an accurate descriptor of Butterfly’s
self-making project as an autonomous, happy subject. She proudly defines herself through her
English-medium convent education. She reiterates, and indeed, seems defined by, her
considerable material possessions; and she is, initially at least, antagonistic of working
women, considering them to be social inferiors and upstarts, and not “fair khaata peeta girls
from good bagground” (RB 209). During the course of TH, though, she reverses her opinion
of women in the labour force. After being persuaded by Janoo about the importance of
mutual respect and companionship in marriage (as opposed to matching social backgrounds),
she actively initiates the social code-breaking wedding negotiations of her cousin Jonkers
with the travel industry professional, Sana. Butterfly chooses what to wear, what beauty
treatments (often invasive) to perform on her own body, which parties to attend and where to
vacation. In fact, as noted above, there is, especially in critical moments, shared decision-
making in Butterfly’s family, in spite of the apparently abrasive arguments she and Janoo
have and her incessant stream of complaints about him: she shapes their social calendar while
he, often gently and imperceptibly, shapes her emerging—and admittedly inconsistent—
political consciousness. It is Janoo who, along with other male characters like Kulchoo and
Jonkers, who is the feminist in the books, believing in, an being comfortable with, equality in
relationships and empowerment of women.
In her non-Butterfly novel, The End of Innocence (2006), Mohsin writes of Rani, the
rebellious granddaughter of a family servant that “Rani was different to her mother. She
wasn’t meek or submissive like Fatima. And she certainly didn’t want a life like hers…. She
wanted to live a life of her own choosing. And she wanted to be free to make that choice.”
(Mohsin End 348). Butterfly does not desire complete freedom or radical change, not for
herself at least. There often a retreat into the cocooned, classist world of privilege and socio-
economically exploitative luxury, disconnected from the ‘other’ realities of contemporary
Pakistan, or even from any consciousness of feminist autonomy. Yet in each of the books, the
endings reveal a new aspect of Butterfly’s character that somewhat redeems her silliness and
selfishness. In DSH, her last entry sees her mourning the death of Benazir Bhutto. Although
she is aware of Bhutto’s corrupt machinations, Butterfly feels too distraught, as if “someone
in my family’s died”, to go to “any parties, any weddings, any GTs even” (DSH 220). In TH,
Butterfly, with her husband Janoo, hosts the wedding of her cousin Jonkers with Sana, the
proud working woman who belongs to a lower social class. Hosting this marriage—with “just
nears and dears and not thousands of distants”— is an act of defiance against the unwritten
rigid rules that control advantageous marital alliances and ostentatious wedding celebrations
amongst the upper classes (TH 248). RB ends with Butterfly wishing “all her friends Marry
Christmas”, attending a Christmas party with a few of her friends, and sharing a
reconciliatory, intimate moment with her husband Janoo, who thanks her for “sticking with”
him during his phase of clinical depression: Butterfly’s final retort is that she always intends
to stay and stick with “you and me … and Mummy and Jonkers and Aunty Pussy and The
Old … I mean your mother and Mulloo and Imran Khan and Nawazu and the Talibans. You
know, na, us lot only” (RB 230-231). In this final statement, we see the two worlds—the
world of Butterfly and the world outside that cocoon—coming together. At a time when so
many of her friends and family are opting out and choosing to migrate to safer places, we see
the determination of Butterfly to survive, and thrive in this conflict-filled, risky space, in the
face of the constantly increasing threats to her way of life.
Hamza Alavi, tracing the women’s rights movement in Pakistan, writes that the
process of Islamisation that began during the regime of Ziaul Haq was “designed to
undermine what little already existed by way of women's legal rights”, although this has “no
sanction in Islam”; this “galvanised the women of the country into militant action in defence
of their rights and, indeed, for a just extension of their rights” (Alavi 1328). Butterfly’s
assertion of her rights is not done through any radical or militant challenge to male political,
religious or patriarchal authorities. Instead, we may here deploy the argument made by Saba
Mahmood in Politics of Piety, that “to understand women’s agency, we should look not look
primarily for evidence of resistance to patriarchal (religious) norms, but investigate how
women inhabit norms with plural projects of self making.” (qtd. in Jamal 57). Mahmood
explores, among Muslim women “feminist subjects”, “different modalities of agency whose
operations escape the logic of resistance and subversion of norms” (Mahmood 167).
Borrowing Mahmood’s argument, we can read Butterfly as an embodiment of agential self-
making who defies the logic of feminist resistance. Butterfly is often content and complicit in
the perpetuation of classist social hierarchies and patriarchal norms like son preference,
smugly declaring, “I’m tau very modern and all, but frankly speaking, boy is still boy” (RB
215). In fact, Butterfly is so unaware of conscious feminist subjectivity that, when her son
Kulchoo says that his career-oriented friend Sara is a “feminist”, she retorts: “if she is
feminist then why she is not more feminine, haan?” (RB 210).
Yet, Butterfly is also clear-eyed about how the “guvmunt”, “under pressure from
mullahs”, have banned the traditional kite-flying festival of Basant because “mullahs can’t
stand the sight of anyone having fun, being the killed joys that they are” (RB 120). She
refuses to change her expensive, modern, fashionably “sleeveless” dressing style even when
public dress codes become more and more restrictive (DSB 193). When she attends a reunion
of her school friends, many of whom have Islamized their attires and are in “hijab” or “ninjas
—full black burka and niqab”, Butterfly defiantly stands out in her “skinny Versace jeans”
with “rhino stones” and her “Maje ka green lace ka sleeveless top with no lining in the back”:
using her “stilettoe” and “false eyelash” and “spaghetti strap” to “lift [her] mood” and disrupt
the Islamist normativity (RB 101-103). Through her fashion choices, she empowers herself.
She refuses to give up her joie de vivre and her love for parties despite the pressure of the
“beardo weirdos”, as she terms the Taliban fundamentalists (TH 11). When Butterfly attends
an “anti-extremism rally” along with Janoo, her family and friends, she articulates her
resistance: “because the fundos are not prepared to live and let us live”, because they will
gradually erase all her freedoms and her pleasures and her rights, including her right to
protest, “THAT’s why I went to the march” (DSB 198-200).
When she actually encounters a “strange man with a beard, turban, and small red
eyes” who—part of a gang of thugs—swears, scares and threatens to rob her and her friend
Mulloo in the marketplace during broad daylight, Butterfly has enough presence of mind,
resourcefulness and determination not to give: she saves herself, her friend and her loyal,
long-time driver not just from robbery, but from certain physical injury and possible death
(TH 154-159). Butterfly’s courage, as much as her common sense and her clothing choices,
is an unexpected but necessary modality of her agential self-defence and self-making.
Butterfly’s defiant determination to claim her happiness, to not let others dictate or dominate
her right to live the way she wants to, to ensure the survival and perpetuation of her fragile
and precarious world in the face of threats of erasure, can be interpreted as a feminist
resistance to Islamist patriarchy, although Butterfly herself would probably never term it
such. To conclude, I will refer to the quotation with which I began this paper, Butterfly, in
her own self-important way, and against all the odds—of convention, of superficiality, of
trivialization—speaks out to break the silence that binds Pakistani (and other South Asian)
women, and emerges through her self-reflexive texts as a self-articulated, self-narrated
woman.

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