Don’t listen to what Sahib says about equality. Watch what he does with power. Sahib has become very eloquent in the language of equality. He speaks about women’s empowerment at conferences. He talks about inclusion in the boardroom. He knows the vocabulary: gender, leadership, participation, dignity, safe spaces. Clap. Clap. Clap. Welcome to the era of male involvement in promoting women’s rights.
Pause. Pause. Pause.
But perhaps we should listen less to what Sahib says when there is a microphone in front of him and watch more closely what he does when there isn’t one. Because power has a way of undressing language of its cosmetics. And sometimes the most revealing place to observe Sahib is not the boardroom. It is the bedroom.
This is not an argument that all men who speak about equality are hypocrites. There are men who practise equality when nobody is watching, who challenge other men, respect women’s autonomy and accept accountability even when it costs them something. I know three such men. I vouch that they are different. You may know some more. They are not the subject here. The subject is the distance between playing parity and surrendering supremacy.
On 31 August 2026, veteran Pakistani actor and writer Feryal Ali Gauhar appeared on Nida Yasir’s Good Morning Pakistan and spoke publicly about what she described as a nine-year abusive marriage. She alleged physical and psychological abuse, restrictions on her movement and being beaten with leather belts, which she said resulted in miscarriages. Her former husband, actor and filmmaker Jamal Shah, has strongly denied the allegations and disputed her account of the pregnancy loss.
I am not writing here to adjudicate between two people describing a private marriage differently. I am interested in something else: what happens when a woman speaks?
Disclosure changes the room. Suddenly, the private becomes public. The woman tells her story; the man responds; audiences choose sides. Her credibility is examined, his reputation is defended, and the familiar questions arrive. Why did she stay? Why speak now? Why didn’t she leave earlier? How could someone as strong, educated or accomplished as her be abused? What if she had “provoked” him? We rarely ask the corresponding question: What made speaking so expensive?
Pakistan has enough evidence to tell us that domestic violence is not an exceptional story occurring behind a few unfortunate doors. The Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2017–18 found that 24.5 percent of ever-married women aged 15–49 had experienced physical and/or sexual intimate-partner violence in their lifetime, while 14.5 percent had experienced it during the previous 12 months. Then there is the number that says something about silence: 56 percent of women who had experienced physical or sexual violence had neither sought help nor told anyone.
Silence, therefore, cannot be read as proof that nothing happened. Sometimes silence is evidence of the price of speaking. Pakistan has built institutions for gender justice, including courts designated to hear gender-based violence cases. But institutions on paper and justice in lived experience are not the same thing.
The real test of Sahib’s feminism is not the conference photograph. It is what happens when equality becomes personally inconvenient: when supporting a woman costs him a friendship; when believing her requires him to question a colleague; when respecting his wife means surrendering control; when his daughter demands the same freedoms he considers it natural for his son.
I thought about this recently because an avid, revered reader, in a private reading in a safe digital space, commented on my insomnia notes: “You are not sure whether to trust or not, and move like a pendulum from one intent to another within a single day.” The word pendulum stayed with me. It reminded me of my own pendulum. I have lived between two worlds of command and control.
In one, I was a Begum Sahiba: security, protocol, staff, Madam, a whole hierarchy around me, leading a team of nearly a thousand professionals. In another, I was the self-made, poor daughter of a dead, honest father—the daughter whose origins could be mocked, whose “auqaat” could be recalled when convenient. Even an entire community could be reduced to a sneer: “Tum Bihari log…”
I became a pendulum: from privilege to humiliation, from being served to being reminded of my place, from institutional authority to personal vulnerability. And after that, I kept working. One office to another. One job to another. Wherever people recognised who I was, the score could change. I had to work again to establish a separate identity of my own.
And yes, after becoming, unasked, the wife of a wealthy man with entitlements beyond audit, I was in full-time slavery in ways that do not fit neatly into the vocabulary of privilege. I never forgot my too-simple, honest, intellectually rich but materially poor father. Perhaps that is why I remained honest in that relationship too. What was given to me, I never cashed in. I continued working. Mine is not a disclosure. Not yet.
That dossier remains unaffordable on so many fronts. Not financially. The costs are elsewhere: privacy, family, reputation, professional consequences, other people’s histories and the exhausting possibility that after telling, one may still have to prove. Some truths are pricey to tell.
The man who occupied a mighty political position could also exercise power inside the home.
Tehmina Durrani understood something of this cost when she published My Feudal Lord in 1991. Her autobiographical account of her marriage to politician Ghulam Mustafa Khar placed intimate abuse beside public power. The man who occupied a mighty political position could also exercise power inside the home. That contradiction should have been shocking. It wasn’t entirely. We have always been remarkably good at separating the Sahib from the Sahib at home.
We appreciate the progressive politician, bureaucrat, academic, activist or intellectual and then quietly excuse what happens behind his front door. But power does not become less political because it is exercised in a bedroom. It becomes intimate.
Equality is easy from a podium. It becomes considerably harder across a dining table. It becomes harder when a wife earns her own money, when she disagrees, when she displays defiance, when she declines to discard her career, when she wants control over her own body, friendships, movement, money or time. It becomes harder when a daughter asks for the freedom that Sahib happily grants his son. And it becomes hardest when even an accomplished woman complains about another powerful man. That is when we discover what Sahib actually believes.
Does he ask what happened or who the woman is? Does he protect the complainant or the institution’s reputation? Does he insist on due process when the accused is his friend, colleague, relative or superior? Does he understand accountability as justice, or merely as a threat to the men in his circle?
And at home, who controls the money? Who makes the final decision? Whose career is interrupted? Who apologises first? Whose anger is considered dangerous? Whose exhaustion is called selfishness? These are not merely domestic questions. They are questions about power.
When the woman beside him becomes powerful in her own right and he has to decide whether he wants a mate or a minion, this is where the boardroom meets the bedroom.
So don’t listen too carefully to what Sahib says about equality. Watch what he does with power. In the boardroom. In the bedroom. And especially when nobody is applauding.