Zaitoon does reach safety after experiencing terrible physical privation and rape. Even though she is rescued, she remains a marked woman who can never return home, for she has failed as “the bride.” Moreover, she has been raped and will always bear the stigma of this physical violation, for which she can hardly be held responsible.

Thus the simple title of this novel lies heavy with irony. To be “the bride” in a patriarchal society that demeans women translates into bondage—sometimes subtle, other times total.

There is no tradition of women’s literature in Pakistan; in fact, the country has no tradition of English-language literature. Sidhwa can only be considered a pioneer in both areas. Whether The Bride has had any dramatic impact on the treatment of women in Pakistan remains doubtful, for it is altogether possible that each bride represented in the novel still exists, whether in the zenanna, in the mountains, or in the drawing rooms of wealthy, Westernized Pakistanis. Perhaps, though, a woman—Western or Asian—reading the novel might realize at last that she need not acquiesce, that she need not accept her victimization.

Sidhwa’s work was somewhat slow to establish itself internationally. Once The Bride has been fully discovered abroad, however, it will certainly find a place in women’s literature. In the 1990’s, plans by the Ivory-Merchant company to film the novel seemed likely to win for it a wider readership.

Sidhwa based The Bride on an actual story she had heard about a Punjabi girl like Zaitoon who had entered into an arranged marriage with a Himalayan tribal man, attempted to escape, and after fourteen days of wandering in the mountains was found by her husband; he cut off her head and threw her body into the river. That Sidhwa allows her heroine to escape is significant. By altering the original story, Sidhwa sends the message to women that they must rebel no matter the consequences. Further, through the voice of the American bride she denies the male excuse expressed by Carol’s husband that women “ask for it”: “Women the world over, through the ages,” Carol thinks with sarcastic disgust, “asked to be murdered, raped, exploited, enslaved, to get importunately impregnated, beaten-up, bullied and disinherited. It was an immutable law of nature.”

Sidhwa herself exemplifies the rebellion against this false “immutable law.” After a sheltered childhood in a wealthy Pakistani home, she entered an arranged marriage at age nineteen, soon became the mother of three children, and succumbed to the demands of her role as wife of a successful businessman. Like Zaitoon, she escaped, in her case by writing fiction, secretly at first lest she be thought pretentious by her family and friends. After a long struggle to get published and recognized, her work—four novels in all—at last began to gain attention both in Asia and abroad. In 1991, Cracking India (1991) won the Liberatur Prize, a German award presented annually to a non-European woman writer. In 1994, she received one of nine Writers’ Awards of $105,000 given by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. Sidhwa became an American citizen in 1992.

Certainly Sidhwa’s stories, always about women who dare to go beyond the limits set for them, along with her own story, can only raise the awareness of women—and of men as well. Although the men in her novels may often be weak, unreasonable, and cruel, Sidhwa sees them caught in the webs of another so-called immutable law that needs to be reversed. They, too, must rebel against the role in which tradition has placed them. In Sidhwa’s view, only when this dual rebellion takes place will the story of “the bride” be a happy one.