A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [116]
As Ann’s list of long-term goals suggested, she was not especially interested in staying put. In May 1986, less than two years after returning from Jakarta, she moved to Pakistan on a six-month contract to work as a development consultant on a rural-credit program in the Punjab. The following summer, she was in Illinois, presenting a scholarly paper at an academic meeting and visiting Barry in Chicago. Next, she was in New York visiting friends with Maya, who was looking at colleges. From there, Ann flew to London for three days en route to Pakistan. (“Any chance you could fly over and spend some time with me in London?” she had asked Suryakusuma in a letter. “. . . It would be great if we could do London together. . . . If you are still planning to go to India in September, could we meet in Delhi? I’d rather see you in Delhi than Bombay just because I like the city better, but Bombay might also be possible. . . . You could also come over to Pakistan. . . .”) Back in Pakistan, she spent three months completing the consulting contract she had begun a year earlier, then returned to Honolulu, stopping off in Jakarta. The dissertation would be worth the wait, Dewey believed. “Ann would run out of money and go take a job,” she recalled. “Not washing dishes. She was building up more data. So she would come and go constantly. We knew she was the kind of student who was going to end up knowing three times more than we did—in our specialties. So we just let her go.”
Ann took Maya with her when she could. In 1986, they traveled together to India en route to Pakistan, stopping in Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. In Pakistan, Maya stayed with Ann for three months, studied Mughal dancing, and accompanied her into the field. They took a six-day driving trip from Islamabad to the border of China along the Karakoram Highway, the highest paved international road in the world, following the Indus River gorge, passing through the tribal areas of the Pathans, Gilgitis, and Hunzas to the place where the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas, and the Karakoram Range converge. Pakistan was fraught with difficulties, said Michael Dove, an American anthropologist and friend of Ann’s from Java, who worked in Pakistan from 1985 to 1989 and saw her there during that period. Bombs fell in marketplaces and around the house in Islamabad where Dove and his wife were living. Dove said he and his wife were kidnapped by armed Pathans in the upper Indus River gorge. “It was the opposite of Indonesia,” he recalled. “It was a difficult culture, much more violent. Everyone had a gun.” In border areas, people kidnapped foreigners to raise cash. It was difficult to be a Western woman in Pakistan without a husband. Simply walking alone in public was problematic.
Ann wrote to Suryakusuma:
Pakistan is an interesting experience but I do not love it the way I love Indonesia. For one thing, the level of sexism is almost beyond belief. Even the most innocent acts, like getting on an elevator with a man, riding with a male driver, or talking with a male colleague in your office are subject to suspicion. Since almost all marriages are arranged, and all Pakistani men are sexist, many educated Pakistani women choose to remain single (in Pakistan that means virgins for life!). The people are also quite puritanical in general, although the intellectuals somewhat less so. I did make some good friends when I was there, however. One of them was my field assistant, a young woman who was active in a feminist organization in Lahore.
Ann had been hired to work on the design and initiation of the pilot phase of the first credit project for women and artisan-caste members carried out by the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan, the country’s largest development institution. In the Punjab, where she was working, Ann observed that village people fell into three