From America to Pakistan, the First Ladies’ Club is making an impact on the national scene
What do you say, will sweet Laura, the dowdily dull former librarian get the pushover from the red-hot Heinz heiress on E-Day? Teresa, 65, who calls husband John Kerry ‘Lovey’ is a loose cannon, loved by the liberals and lampooned by the conservatives who think First Ladies should be whittle down wallflowers in the White House, not women of independent views.
But then Teresa — who calls herself an old fashioned modern woman — if she does make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, is no shrinking violet. She is in a league of her own; with a snarl of a billionaires, a sneer of superiority, ‘yeah! I am loaded, richer than all of you,’ kind of attitude.
“Shove it” she told a reporter who was giving her a hard time recently. The chattering classes imploded to dub her “too outspoken”; “too opinionated”; “slightly zany”; “eccentric and unpredictable”; “the queen of direct” and — cover your ears, kids — “says what she thinks, when she thinks it”.
Rambunctiously real, with her auburn rich hair blocking her Botox-injected face, she insists: “My right to speak my mind, to have a voice, to be what some have called ‘opinionated’, is a right I deeply and profoundly cherish. My only hope is that, one day soon, women — who have all earned the right to their opinions — instead of being labelled opinionated, will be called smart or well-informed, just as men are.”
With Portuguese parentage, the African-born became an American citizen at age 32 when she was married to the first John of the tomato ketchup empire, Teresa has retained her European accent and her hate for hypocrisy.
“He was the love of my life,” she is always talking about her first husband who was killed in a plane crash in 1991. She remarried soon thereafter. Over the seven-year-itch hump with John the second, she says of Kerry, her husband of nine years, that they are good soul mates.
But she’s no Eleanor Roosevelt, no Hillary Clinton. Her views on first ladyship are very Mame Eisenhower. “The stream of consciousness rifts on the benefits of sunscreen and growing up in Mozambique are mostly gone. Now she’s more likely to introduce her husband by giving his speech,” comments Candy Crowley of CNN.
Will First Lady Teresa Heinz Kerry (if she ever becomes one) wear a shalwar kamiz and stand in visitor’s line to shake a thousand hands at the home of the American ambassador in Islamabad, as Hillary Clinton did when Bill was the president and Benazir the PM? Wearing a Rizwan Bayeg creation in black silk, Hillary held a powwow with all the guests wanting to paw her. Self-absorbed, she has an agenda, all her own.
Many wager, this law school Yale graduate will become the president of the United States some day creating history by making president Bill Clinton the First Man!
But I digress. Back to First Ladies daring to be different at the peril of being labelled pushy opinionated broads... like Teresa — will Pakistan ever have a First Lady who speaks her own mind, is an icon to the feminists, calls the shots challenging convention and custom?
Or will Islamabad be forever lumbered by ladies who are just flaky?
The begums whose husbands ruled us were a varied bunch, two of whom had Iranian roots: Naheed Iskandar Mirza and Nusrat Bhutto. They were classic beauties, tall, statuesque and oh, so fetchingly detached. The latter was used to her own company gathered around Persian cats, while the former had a firmer handle on the husband, our first general president.
Joining the ‘second-wives’ club was Raana Liaquat Ali Khan. Fatima Jinnah didn’t think much of her, but after her husband’s assassination, ‘Begum sahiba’ as the deferential APWA ladies would call her, nimbly climbed up the career ladder to become a 3-time ambassador and finally the governor of Sindh in her traditional gharara kamiz with a gauzy dupatta always pinned to the head.
In an interview to the famous journalist Mary Anne Weaver of Sunday Times, ‘Begum sahiba’ lashed out at General Zia after he had introduced the Hudood Ordinance in July 1985, weeks before a UN World conference of Women in Nairobi. I happened to pick up the widely circulated pamphlet carrying the Times’ interview during the conference and on my return to Pakistan referred to it in an article. Here was a woman with guts to speak the truth and she made me proud. Remember, in those xenophobic days of press censorship, criticizing Zia was like committing felony.
An agitated APWA diehard lambasted me the next day over the phone, saying that Begum Liaquat was livid and how could I have done such a thing. As a cub reporter in Karachi, I graduated that day by learning that what our worthies tell the foreign press is only for western consumption and absolutely out of bounds for home audiences!
From ’50s onwards, Nathiagali and later Murree, in summer saw the government shift to rarefied climes with diplomats and foreign dignitaries in tow. That was the gilded era of the Great Gatsby verisimilitude: Home theatre (Field Marshal Ayub Khan and Mrs would watch a movie a day), gin and tonic lunches and whiskey soda dinners roared at the lavish Governor’s House with wealth and privilege outclassing all else. Our vacuous string of First Ladies excelled in pomposity demanding servitude from officers of all ranks and stripes and their cowering spouses.
On Eid especially, not paying salams to the Begum Sahiba at the President’s House or the Army House in Rawalpindi was akin to breaking the ten commandments. Women with their brood in gotta kinari, with cheesy smiles and in-gratingly humble according to their husbands’ rank and place, with cabinet wives showing a tad bit more muscle, would show up.
Milad sharifs hit a new high during Begum Zia’s time as did weekly religious sermons when Begum Farooq Leghari was the First Lady. During this pious era, Ms Manners was the best etiquette to follow if you wanted that certain promotion for your husband, the general or a jump to grade 22 for the federal secretary.
And what to talk about state visits? It’s so old and tired and nothing new: Our First Ladies’ infatuation for uplifting the fallen lives of ordinary Pakistanis, make no mistake may be phony, but whoa, when it comes to hopping on Air Force One with hubby dear in full regalia to receive a theatrical welcome with a stay in the finest palaces and hotels of the world’s capitals, the First Ladies are on their mark. In attendance are ayahs, girl friends, single and married kids with spouses, their brats...
Pray, who pays? You guessed it right, we the people!
After stealing our dollars in the shadows of the night, Nawaz Sharif came to America one July 4th and wags say Kulsoom his wife with caboodle shopped till they dropped!
First Ladies (army as well as civilian wives) have certainly not come a long way from the days of ribbon cutting; sapling planting; sewing machines gifting; meena bazaar opening, prize distribution ceremonies; foundation stone laying and mothers’ clubs or women welfare centres inaugurating.
Like Rip Van Winkle who slept in Sleepy Hollow while the world went places, perhaps one day, not so far in the future, Pakistan too will have a First Lady, not necessarily tailored on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but someone who will reinvent the part and also keep that husband of her’s on the straight and narrow, forfeiting forever the right of the army to eye the President or the PM House on the hill.
From America to Pakistan, the First Ladies’ Club is making an impact on the national scene 
