Portrait of a brief, violent marriage
She avoids gaze of ex-husband on trial
It's simple enough, it would appear, to arrange a marriage. It's
another thing entirely to engineer a happy ending.
No one knows that better than Shahida Jabeen, a 29-year-old Pakistani
who travelled halfway around the world to testify yesterday at the
trial of her former husband, the man charged, along with his second
wife, with killing Jabeen's first-born daughter.
If anyone wished to know what the child who would become known in this
city as Farah Khan might have looked like had she lived to adulthood,
a hint was to be had yesterday at the sight of her mother in court.
Pictures of the slain 5-year-old bear a powerful resemblance to the
striking young woman who stood in the witness box, speaking in
Punjabi, dressed in a white shalwar kameez and black headscarf.
Jabeen was 18, just finished high school, living with her parents in
Gujranwala, a small city north of Kipling's fabled Lahore, not far
from the Indian border, when it was decided she was to wed. Hers was a
Muslim family, not wealthy, "just normal," she told the Superior Court
jury, and arranged marriages were the done thing.
A mutual acquaintance of her family and the family of Muhammad Arsal
Khan, a man she had never met nor heard of, approached her father with
a proposal. The offer was accepted. "You just have to say yes to your
parents," she said.
Soon, the man's mother and sister came to see her. "They came to
approve me." Who knows what they looked for in the teenager?
Prettiness? Good manners? Proficiency at housework? Good teeth? A
breeder's hips? Worrisome signs of spunk, temerity and independence?
At any rate, they approved. Jabeen's family produced a small dowry of
ornaments and clothes. "It was not much," she said. And on April 19,
1993, Shahida Jabeen became a bride, married to man she first set eyes
on after the ceremony.
Jabeen found herself married to a bank cashier, about a decade older
than herself. She moved with him into his parents' house in a village
90 minutes by bus from her own hometown.
There, the newlyweds also lived with two of Khan's brothers and three
of his sisters.
In very short order, Shahida Jabeen was pregnant. Her mother-in-law
was present when the doctor confirmed the news. And it was her, not
Jabeen, who gave the news to Khan.
"He looked happy" when he heard, Jabeen said yesterday,
But the bloom, if ever it did exist, was quickly off the rose for
Muhammad Khan with his pretty young bride.
They argued a lot, Jabeen testified. And every day "he would say to
me, `This child you are conceiving is not mine.'"
Repeatedly, she told him "this is your child." But he kept saying,
"the child is not mine." He would say this also, she said, to his
parents.
She quickly learned, she testified, that her husband was a strict man,
demanding her prompt obedience. This, too, was expected, she said.
After Allah, a husband was the figure to whom a woman owed obedience.
"You do have to listen. You do have to obey."
But Khan was quick to anger, even over small matters. He would lose
his temper, she said, if housework wasn't done to his liking. When he
wanted his way, no one, not even his parents, could stop him from
getting it, she said.
When angry, he would hit her, she said. Once, when the housework
wasn't done quickly enough, he burned her hand. "He threw hot milk on
me." Another time, when she marred his clothes while ironing, he
locked her in the house all day.
The picture of a domestic bully drawn by his former wife stood in
stark contrast to the whimperings and pleadings for pity the jury saw
earlier this week from Khan in a videotape of an interview with
Toronto police the day he was arrested.
Within a few months, Shahida Jabeen and Muhammad Khan had separated.
She returned to her parents' home.
Not once during the remainder of her pregnancy did Khan inquire about
the well-being of his unborn child, she said.
On Feb. 4, 1994, Jabeen gave birth to a little girl. She named her
Maryam.
Not once, in the months after the baby was born, did Khan visit the
child, she said. Not once did he see her. Not once did he ask Jabeen
about the little girl.
Yet in the divorce that was granted, Khan was given custody.
It was a decision in which Jabeen had no say, though she had
desperately wanted to keep her daughter.
"What mother you will find who wants to send her child away from
herself?"
Her male relatives made petitions on her behalf to a body that decides
such matters in her part of Pakistan.
"These are some leading people in the village....Those who are elderly
and those who have the sense and knowledge to make the decision." But
to no avail. The elders ruled "that the girl will stay with her
father."
The dowry was returned to her family. And 6-month-old Maryam was taken
by the man who had not troubled himself to visit or ask after her.
Jabeen, who has since remarried and has two daughters, 5 and 2, never
saw her first-born child again.
In 1997, Muhammad Khan married Kaneez Fatima. In 1999, the couple and
the girl — since renamed Farah — arrived in Toronto.
That December, Farah's body parts were found buried in two Toronto
parks. Six weeks later, Khan and Fatima were charged with murder.
Yesterday, Shahida Jabeen kept her eyes on the interpreter as she
testified. But as she stepped down from the witness stand and left the
court, she glanced at the volatile stranger to whom she'd briefly been
married, with whom she bore a daughter, to whom she lost her.
No words were spoken.
No translation was required.
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