Room (Un)occupied: Repression, Precarity and Autonomy in Sadia Abbas's The Empty Room.

Women and their identity constructions in Pakistan are inordinately determined by the matrix of a rigid institutionalised patriarchy operating through religious, familial and customary social discourses. Shehzad's family vilifies Tahira and incessantly throws tirades about Tahira's parents and the dowry they had sent with her, making Tahira feel extremely angry but helpless. The Empty Room begins with a married couple, Tahira and Shehzad, hesitantly "trying to feign sleep"[25] after their wedding night, and then, within the first few pages of the novel, Abbas brings home to her readers the staunch patriarchal ideologies of Shehzad and his family, who consider Tahira as a mere trophy wife and daughter-in-law. Tahira ponders how to 'persuade him [to think] that she was willing to be the most dutiful of wives.'[43] Through her day-to-day activities, Tahira earnestly aspires to fulfil Shehzad's expectations, and in failing to do so every time, "she tried apologizing, taking the blame upon herself."[44] As pointed out by Atkinson,[45] Tahira, like any other ordinary woman, is driven to believe that Shehzad's teaching her of the appropriate notions of wifehood is his way of loving and caring for her. [Extracted from the article]