The Mard Ra’aj

What It Did to Me

A note before reading.

This is written as autofiction. The names are Owais and Saad. Certain details have been changed because the people in this story did not all consent to being written about, and because I have to live in the same city and the same country and the same family that produced what is described here.

Some readers will say what is in this essay did not and does not happen. They will say it could not happen. They will say men do not do this to other women or men, and even if they do, they do not write about it.

I am writing about it.

If what I have written makes you uncomfortable, I will let you figure out what to do with that discomfort on your own, because that is your burden to bear as much is mine.

For the ones who already know.

“Agar aap ko meri kahaaniyan bardasht nahi hoti to is ka matlab hai ki zamana na qabil-e-bardasht hai.”

Manto

Aurat March, Karachi, 10 May 2026.

Unhappy in Love, Living in Lies

It has been quite recent that I am beginning to come to terms with the fact that at a very significant pivotal point in my life I was in love with someone for four years, who was five years younger than me, who I believe was Machiavellian. It is colored by my own biased view, and needs to be read as my side of the story. But even if it is self-deluding fabrication, every lie has the taint of truth in it.

This person was a typical Southern Punjabi hot-blooded young man coming from a modest family, retrospectively he had very little to offer but how he looked to recommend them when we met. That same flair, as I learned later, he wielded with the practiced edge of a Qasaai skinning a goat. I had somehow presumed, quite naively to my detriment, that being with “Him” would insulate me from a certain kind of betrayal: the soap-operatic theatrics, the parallel households, the mistress-and-wife architecture that already exists quite rampantly in the Bourgeois Pakistani life. Unfortunately for me, I was wrong on every count. The machinations takes a different equally insidious shape when the protagonist is a young man who has correctly identified his physical appeal and masculinity as marketable assets, and is determined to siphon out the maximum value from them before time takes them away.

Et tu Brute?

For me the deepest wound in being cheated on is not the sex but what the cheating reveals about the bones of the relationship itself about how much of it was genuine, how much of it was a facade, and how much of it was a strategy.

In my case, I believe that it was almost entirely strategy.

Let’s get this straight, the sex itself with the existence of his other partners was not the source of the injury. I came of age in a culture so thoroughly seeped in the assumption that men will be men that monogamy had long ago stopped functioning in my mind, as a realistic baseline for adult relationships. This is not meant as an exoneration of cheating; I will get to why that phrase does corrosive work later on here. By the time I met him I had concluded that monogamy is one possible arrangement among several, and that polyamory and polygamy are not inverted or pathological orientations but legitimate expressions of how some people feel most at ease in intimacy, and that the only thing actually distinguishes a healthy to a destructive non monogamous arrangement is open communication and honesty about what is happening.

If I was approached at any point and it was spoken: I want to sleep with other people, here is who, here is when, here is how I want us to handle it, I would have been receptive to it and could have negotiated something where we would have arrived at terms. What he did instead was lie, sustainedly, for four years. The negotiation I described was impossible inside the structure he had built, because it would have given me leverage and dignity and the arrangement he wanted depended on me having neither.

The cut in my guts was the deceit that surrounded the other bodies.

Him being bisexual, was never the issue. At a certain point in my life, I was bisexual too. For me the questionable act was the use to which he put it. To him, sexuality was a passport. It granted him access to people, lessons, education, polish which were things that would have been much harder to obtain as it would have required actual work, which he was never really up for. With a feral intelligence, he had figured out that men and women who wanted him would also pay, in different forms of currencies, to keep him close. I guess I was just another one of his investors.

A Cracked Lens

In a place like ours, social mobility is largely a fantasy and dowry still buys husbands. Sexuality is one of the few unregulated currencies left, and some pay handsomely for it. He and I both came from struggling families, but I had spent the years between then and now building a kind of cultural inheritance he had not had access to. I gave him what I had which included education in the broadest sense of the word: books, movies, music, ideas, conversation, a way of moving through the world that he could not have learned at home. He was a sponge. He absorbed everything.

Retrospectively, I think I was used to sand him down into someone who could pass in the rooms he wanted to enter next.

The romantic literature on affairs rarely accounts for people for whom the relationship is a ticket without a destination. Who they sleep with at any given time is determined by what they need at that stage of their ascent. The grand passion and “love” is just set dressing for them.

The Ace of Spades

There is a received wisdom about age-gap relationships, specifically gay ones, in which the older man is the figure of power and the younger man the figure to be protected from him. The whole long shadow of pederasty hangs over the conversation. The older partner is presumed to be the predator; the younger is presumed to be, at best, the prey, and at worst the seducible innocent.

In the urban gay markets of Pakistan, this is almost exactly backwards.

The younger man here has a meaningful edge, and the more performatively masculine he is, the wider that edge gets. The fuckboys of Lahore and Karachi and Islamabad operate on terms that are remarkably explicit: they want money, they want gifts, they want access to social spaces and material goods that their backgrounds do not give them, and they extract these goods from the older men who want them. There are, of course, older men who derive a kind of pleasure from this exchange, who enjoy being called Sugar Papa, who experience the transaction as flattering, who participate willingly in their own fleecing. That participation is real and it complicates any reading of the older man as a simple victim.

But what it forces a serious observer to confront is that the power dynamic in these relationships is not what the cultural script says it is. The older man has no leverage. The younger man does. He decides when there will be contact, where it will happen, on what terms, in exchange for what. The sexual roles may run one way but the operational power runs the other. The condition that the romantic narrative of pederasty does not see is that in a market where youth and beauty are scarcer than money, the holder of youth and beauty is the one with the leverage.

This matters for my story because it is the precise mechanism that allowed what was done to me to be done. The cultural assumption that I, as the older man, was the one in control gave him cover. It made his cruelty legible to outside observers, when they noticed it at all, as my fault, as if it was something that I must have provoked, deserved, or invited.

Predatory younger men in our context move through the world with this assumption protecting them from above, the way patriarchy protects masculine men from below. The two layers of cover, working together, made him almost invisible to anyone who did not look directly.

Gutter Cover

There is a particular form of impunity available to men in Pakistani society who present as sufficiently “manly,” and it is one of the great open secrets of the culture. Until you have been on its receiving end, it is easy to miss how comprehensively it works.

A “manly” man here can lie with confidence and be believed. He can be unfaithful and be excused: mard hai, aise hi hote hain — men are like that, what did you expect.

He can be cruel in his marriage, dismissive of the women in his life, predatory toward the people around him, and the culture will hand him excuse after excuse, often through the very mouths of the people he is harming.

Patriarchy in our context is not only about who has power. It is about who gets the presumption of innocence and that presumption is granted, almost automatically, to men whose performance of masculinity is loud enough.

He understood this presumption and used it like a key. The bluster, the swagger, the easy laugh, the swatting away of consequence, all of it was social currency, and he had been minting it since he was a teenager. It allowed him to do almost anything in plain sight, because a sufficiently masculine man in Pakistan is presumed to be acting in his own healthy interest even when he is quietly gutting the people around him.

That is the cultural backdrop against which my four years with him took place. He was not unusual. He was, in many ways, perfectly typical: a representative of a category of man this country produces in industrial quantities and forgives endlessly.

The Third Kind

There three kinds of affairs: the replacement affair, where someone is looking for the exit, the experiential affair, where someone is looking for stimulation and then there is the third, because it is the one I lived through: the predatory affair.

A predatory affair is about extraction. The cheater is harvesting resources which could be emotional, financial, social, or educational, and they continue the deceit for as long as those resources keep flowing. The replacement affair is a strategy for an exit. The experiential affair is a fantasy. The predatory affair is a business.

On every supposed “work” trip, on every visit back to his hometown I had telltales that I could easily triangulate what was happening in the background.

The Khatmal

I witnessed a small masterclass in how the patriarchal advantage actually functions on the ground. He sucked up to the boss with the easy masculine charm that older men in Pakistani offices reliably mistake for competence. He sucked up to the field coordinators so that he could finagle his way onto the more interesting field trips. He half-assed his way through the actual work and let other people pick up the labor that needed doing. Throughout, he was admired for his ease, his confidence, his apparent capability.

This is what the alpha-male discount looks like in operation. The man who performs masculinity well does less and is rewarded more. The one who quietly does the work is taken for granted. And the women in the room, of course, do not need to be mentioned in this calculation: they are doing it everywhere, all the time, mostly invisibly. He had figured out the rules of the room long before he walked in.

Punch-Drunk Amour

I was mocked for my age, laughed at as I was called an “old man,” I was told I was “decaying.” He said these things while carrying insecurities of his own that he was deeply self-conscious about, had I weaponized them in return, would have devastated him. I never did. He counted on that asymmetry.

Demeaning me kept the underlying power dynamic intact. The moment I started feeling like an equal, the arrangement would collapse. So he made sure I never quite did.

Sometimes the affair is about the self the cheater is trying to escape, and the lover is just the ladder.

You’re Hot and then You’re Cold

What kept me in the relationship for four years is harder to write about than what he did to me, because the honest answer implicates me as well as him.

He was a virtuoso of intermittent reinforcement. The hot takes of affection, the apparent tenderness, and the small intimacies were calibrated almost perfectly to arrive whenever I was about to break away. The cold moments of the cruelty, the disappearance, the weeks of wounding silence would come exactly when I had let myself believe in him again.

I became an addict who liked to gamble where the unpredictable reward became far more compulsive than the predictable one.

The game worked because I wanted to keep believing.

I told myself, repeatedly, that a man is like that, and he is a man, and he will do what he does, and I just need to fix him, and adapt myself accordingly. That was the cleaner version of what was happening inside me. The uglier version, which I can only now name, is this: I hated my existence enough at that point in my life that I had decided it was acceptable to be treated like a piece of trash. There is no kinder way to put it.

The patriarchal script I described earlier did not just protect him; it gave me the language by which I excused him to myself. Mard, Mard hay. It was a sentence that absolved him and, in absolving him, also relieved me of the obligation to demand more for myself.

This is, I think, the deepest reason that predatory partners go uncaught for as long as they do. They do not need to convince the world. They only need to find someone whose self-regard has already done most of their work for them.

The Dirty Cup

Some of what he did to me was sexual, and the worst of it was not the infidelity. It was something that crept under the skin and began to live there, it took me years to recognize it for what it was.

For four years, every time he had sex with me, he whispered the same kinds of things into my ear. You are mine. If you had not become mine I would have had you kidnapped and raped every night. You will give me babies. You might consider this to be the playful provocation of an intense lover, but I believe the dirty talk is the male patriarchal pornographic gaze and action with the absence of negotiation and consent of a shared erotic language. This was a slow drip of ownership and threat, repeated until it became the soundtrack of my intimacy.

Like all sustained psychological work, it changed the inside of me without my noticing. Something shifted at some point, and I realized that my pleasure stopped mattering. I had been reduced to a receptacle. His pleasure was the event; mine was an irrelevance. I was there to be filled. I was there, in the strange logic of the fantasy he kept whispering, to give him babies. The biological impossibility of that was beside the point. The point was the position he had moved me into in his head and, eventually, in mine.

It is hard to describe the violence of this without sounding as if one is exaggerating. It was not violence in the way the law recognizes. He was not beating me. He was, in the most precise sense of the word, colonizing me by installing his framework where mine used to be, until the colonized self-understanding felt natural. By the end I no longer expected to be a person in bed with him. I expected to be an object he used. And I had, somewhere along the way, agreed.

The patriarchal frame applies here too, and applies brutally. The reduction of a partner to a vessel for male desire and male reproduction is one of the oldest moves in the patriarchal repertoire. It has been done to women for millennia. The fact that I am a man did not protect me from it. It only made the experience harder to name afterward to others.

A Hole is a Whole

There is a queer Pakistani aphorism, attributed recently to the activist Hina Baloch, that eighty percent of Pakistani men are gay. It gets repeated as a kind of dark joke and as an act of self-recognition by men who have grown up watching their straight-identified peers disappear into bathrooms with each other.

It is also wrong.

Most Pakistani men are not gay. Most Pakistani men will, given the opportunity and the cover, have sex with whatever is in front of them that has a hole. The operative criterion is access. This is not the same as bisexuality, which is an actual orientation involving actual attraction. It is something closer to omnivorous opportunism: a sexual culture in which the act of penetration is the goal and the recipient of penetration is interchangeable.

The popularity of femboys in this market is the clearest evidence. Femboys are desired by strong straightees because they offer the closest available approximation to a woman: and women, in our culture, are forbidden, expensive, surveilled, or simply not present in the rooms where these encounters happen. The femboy is the second-best option for a market that wants women and cannot easily have them.

I dwell on this because the “thing” I was with operated entirely inside this logic, and I had not understood it clearly enough at the time to protect myself from it. To him I was not a partner. I was a hole, and one whose owner happened to also be useful for the other extractive purposes already described.

Mach’i Bazaar

There is a market for relationships in the gay world the way there is in any other, and at every stage of life it is asymmetric.

In the gay context the asymmetry runs differently but is no less brutal. Younger men often have the upper hand precisely because the older men pursuing them have more to give and less time to give it. The older men know this and pay accordingly. The younger men know this and charge accordingly. It is rarely named, but it structures everything.

He understood this market intimately. By the time he met me he had already worked it.

Have a Piece and The Entire Cake

He eventually married the heiress and moved into a house with stolen Alsatian dogs and a nineteen-year-old wife. He was twenty-seven. The asymmetry of that pairing alone tells you everything about how he viewed marriage: as a transaction, with a girl too young and too sheltered to recognize that she was being acquired.

When he married, I told him plainly that as far as I was concerned, exclusivity between us was now impossible: the moral architecture had collapsed entirely. I would not be the secret in his closet while he played house with a child bride and the dowry land. He did not want to hear it. He wanted to keep me available on his terms, for the occasional visit when he passed through.

He wanted commitment without intimacy from his wife, intimacy without commitment from me, and stimulation without consequence from his various other partners. He wanted everything. And the structure of that arrangement, like all such arrangements, depended on every party agreeing to be diminished.

The Well of Love

And I do not know how to swim

When someone has spent their entire life learning to extract what they need from the people who want them, you will not be the exception. There is no version of you and no matter how generous, patient, and however much in love you are in, is going to convert a predatory affair into a real one. The role you were cast in was decided long before you knew there was a play.

He took everything I had to give. He left behind a version of me that had been adjusted, over four years, to fit the cup he had been drinking from.

Leaving him was easy by the end; he was already gone. The harder part is the eviction of the tenant he installed inside me.

The one who believed mard aise hi hote.

The one who believed it was acceptable to be a receptacle, acceptable to be addressed without consent, acceptable to be the second-best option in a sexual economy that wanted women and would settle for whatever had a hole.

The one who had agreed, somewhere along the way, that his pleasure was the event and mine was an irrelevance. That tenant takes longer to remove than the man who put him there and some days I think it is going to take me the rest of my life.

This is what the Mard Ra’aj does to those who live under it. It installs itself inside you, through the mouths and bodies of the men it has already shaped, until you are administering its rules to yourself on its behalf. That is the part the law cannot reach, and the part the conversation about masculinity in this country still refuses to name.

We have a vocabulary for what men do to women. We are beginning to have a vocabulary for what men do to other men.

We do not yet have a vocabulary for what the Mard Ra’aj does to the inside of a person: the colonization that continues to govern long after the colonizer has gone home to his stolen dogs and his child bride.

Affairs, hollow out a relationship while preserving its shell. Predatory affairs go further. They hollow out a person, and leave them standing inside the shell, holding it up from within, mistaking it for themselves.

The work after, the only real work, is to refuse to live inside that shell.

To insist, slowly and against the grain of everything you were taught to accept, that you were always more than what he reduced you to.

To find the language for what was done to you, even when the culture you live in does not yet have one.

To name the Mard Ra’aj as a paradigm rather than a fact of nature, so that what feels like the air you breathe begins to feel like something you could, eventually, refuse.

That insistence is brutal. It is also the beginning of being a person again.

I have been writing this from the bottom of the well of love. I have written it because I do not know how to swim, and because I am beginning, finally, to suspect that the well is not deep and only that I had been told, my entire life, that drowning was the natural condition of being in it.

It turns out that there is a surface. The light has been there all along. I am learning, late, what it would take to reach it.

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