Word: purdah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shop to card games played by bored guards at gated homes like the one in which middle-class narrator Zaki Shirazi lives. Also in the house are three related women whose lives mirror the tottering arc of recent Pakistani history - from partition to the bruised Bhutto years, caught between purdah and leggy Jane Fonda workout tapes, Suzuki Swifts and donkey carts. They are Zaki's grasping grandmother Daadi; his widowed mom Zakia, editor of a progressive women's magazine that criticizes the government and runs interviews with acid-attack victims; and Zaki's teenage cousin Samar...
...tiny Cooch Behar in eastern India. In her autobiography, she recalled an idyllic childhood of English governesses, big-game hunting and finishing school in Switzerland. Her mother, a daring socialite in her own right, disapproved of Devi's joining the orthodox royal house of Jaipur, whose women lived in purdah--hidden from the gaze of men outside their families. But Devi had already fallen in love with the jet-setting, polo-playing maharaja, and she soon made Jaipur her own. She started an élite girls' school, correctly surmising that it would help end the practice of purdah, and entered...
...Friday night, two days before the polls close in Sunday's first round of balloting in the most significant presidential election in a generation, France entered political purdah. Suddenly, the candidate speeches and poll results that have been a febrile mainstay of French news over the last six months simply stopped, in accordance with the law. That left the millions of voters who declared themselves undecided in the final week of the campaign - an astounding 40% of the electorate, according to recent polls - facing a quiet weekend to make up their minds free of media influence. Still, their friends...