Four women in a room, on a chai break during the final assignment of a personal development course. One of them was describing a country the other three have never seen.

Mahnaz Rahman is 77. The Karachi of her girlhood is hard to place now. She remembers it as clean, various, unbothered. This was before Ayub, before the first martial law, before the sequence that every account of this country seems obliged to start with.

Then she told us about the police at her door.

Her husband, the journalist Ahfazur Rahman, was underground. She was a working journalist at a paper the regime would close. The officers came looking for him and she stood there and fought with them, and what she remembers about it, more than 40 years on, is that they were polite.

I have not stopped thinking about that.

This week marked Zia ul Haq’s 38th death anniversary. The other two women in that room turn 40 and 30 this year, which means one of them was two when he died. Both know exactly what he did, and both have spent their whole lives paying for it, in the particular way women pay.

What they inherited did not come to them as history. It came through their parents: the adjustments, the sentence left unfinished, the way a household learns to arrange itself around a state that has changed its mind about what women are for. None of it was handed over as politics. It arrived as manners.

He wrote the grammar. The sentences are ours. The alternative sentence was removed in 1990. He had been dead for two years. The court that did it was his.

- Muna Khan

That may be the only honest way to measure a legacy. Not by what a man built. By how many people are living inside it who never agreed to it and can no longer see the walls.

In May, seven organizers of the Aurat March were picked up near the Karachi Press Club. They had booked a room. The press conference was to ask why the city would not grant them a permit to march. Among them was Sheema Kirmani, who founded Tehrik-e-Niswan in 1979, the year of the Hudood Ordinances, and who kept dancing through the years when dancing was not allowed.

No law was named. The Human Rights Commission called it a systematic denial of public space, though the machinery was quieter than that sounds. A form had not been signed.

The government that did it was the Pakistan People’s Party.

That is not a party’s failing, or not only. It is an inheritance, and all of it was assembled in 11 years.

Start where Kirmani started. The ordinances of 1979 made a woman who reported a rape a candidate for prosecution herself. The evidence law of 1984 made her word worth half. In 1986 he inserted Section 295-C into the penal code, carrying death or imprisonment for life. The woman in that room who turns 40 this year was born into the year it was written.

The alternative sentence was removed in 1990. He had been dead for two years. The court that did it was his.

There is a case for him and it should not just be gestured at.

He kept the nuclear program alive through years when it could have been bargained away, and every government since has inherited the deterrent without having to defend the cost of acquiring it. He made Pakistan indispensable to Washington and Riyadh at the same moment.

The military relationship with Saudi Arabia deepened under him and is still load-bearing today. By the measure he would have chosen, the strength and standing of the state, he delivered.

Grant all of it. It does not settle anything, because the ledger is the wrong instrument.

One woman led two governments after he was gone, and neither of them dismantled what he had installed. Benazir Bhutto was killed in Rawalpindi in 2007, by the lineage of networks his Afghan policy had done more than anything else to seed. The achievement and the bill are the same object.

Achievements stop when the man stops. What was done to women was not an achievement in that sense. It was an installation, it kept running without him, and it is running now.

Nor does the line run only through him. The religiosity was not his invention. The descent Rahman describes was already underway before he took anything. Parts of the ordinances were rolled back in 2006. What has made a woman’s dissent expensive in our own time, the surveillance, the organized harassment, the newer speech laws, was built by elected people in this century who owed him nothing and could have chosen otherwise.

He wrote the grammar. The sentences are ours.

We talk about legacies as though they were bequests, received and then, in time, disposed of. Most are. A man dies, his arrangements loosen, the next set of people make their own. What he installed did not loosen. Thirty-eight years on it is still issuing judgments, still setting the terms on which a woman may object to anything, still deciding which accusation will end an argument. Whatever else it is, it is not the past.

Four women in a room. One who remembers a city before any of it. One who watched it arrive. Two who have only ever lived inside it and know it as the way things are.

Rahman said the officers at her door were polite. I keep returning to that, and to what it means that the courtesy was the part worth remembering. The state still felt watched then. It still thought it owed a woman a manner, even while it hunted her husband.

I do not know what the two youngest in that room would find worth remembering about now.

- The writer is a journalist and writing instructor. X: LedeingLady