Duty Free (2 page)

Today is 28 September. That means Jonkers has two and half months to get married in. Because I think so Muharram begins in middle of December and nobody gets married in Pakistan then, not even Christians, it being Islamic month of mourning and all. So Auntie Pussy has two months to find a bride for Jonkers. She’d better start looking, no?

And me? I’m off to Mulloo’s coffee party. All the girls are coming. Bubble, Sunny, Baby, Faiza, Nina. I’m wearing my new cream Prada shoes I got from Dubai, so everyone can see and my new cream outfit I’ve had made to match. I put on green contacts (blue is so past it) and my new Tom Ford red
lipstick and now I’m looking just like Angelina Jolly. But like her healthier, just slightly older sister. I know I shouldn’t do my own praises but facts are facts, no? Pity Janoo is not Brad Pitts. But you can’t have everything in life, as Mother Rosario used to say at my convent school.

Hai
, you won’t believe what happened yesterday. I don’t think so I can believe even now. I was sitting in Mulloo’s drawing room sipping coffee and gently swinging my Prada
-wallah
foot under Sunny’s nose so she shouldn’t miss that it’s from the new collection and not from old, chatting to her about importance of baggrounds, when suddenly my mobile started playing
“Tum Paas Aaye.”
That’s my ringing tone
na
, from
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
, my most best Bollywood film. The call was from Kulchoo’s school. His stuppid housemaster calling to say that my poor baby had been hit on the head with a cricket ball and that his head had got cracked and he had fainted but now he’d come around and not to worry he seemed okay but would I like to come and pick him up? Head cracked, fainted, not to worry.
Not to worry?
For a few moments, I
tau
passed away myself. When I came too, the girls were all gathered round me saying “
Hai
, what happened?” I told them what happened and Sunny said, “My son had
three
fatal accidents while playing polo and
mashallah
he’s still fine, touch wood.”

Just look at her, she does so much of competition. Not cricket but polo. And not one fatal accident but three.

Got Muhammad Hussain—my driver, who else?—to drive
me to Kulchoo’s school at top speed. From the car only I called Psycho, Janoo’s younger sister. Okay, okay her name is Saiqa but I’ve always called her Psycho because it suits her personality nicer than Saiqa. Her husband’s brother is a doctor,
na
, at Omar Hospital and I screamed down the phone at Psycho and said to her, I said, “Psycho if you want to inherit those twelve gold bangles of your mother’s that you have your eye on, get your brother-in-law to be standing in the porch when I arrive at the hospital.”
Aik tau
she’s also so stuppid. Asked lot of stuppid, stuppid-type questions like “What happened, Bhaabi?” and “Which gold bangles?” Such a time-waster.

Poor darling Kulchoo was sitting in his school looking dazed like he’d just jumped off a merry-go-around. He had a towel with ice in it, pressed to his forehead. I threw the filthy towel on the ground (God knows which, which boys from what, what homes had used it before him), threw the housemaster filthy looks, and took Kulchoo straight forward to Omar Hospital where I marched up to the counter and shouted that Psycho’s brother-in-law was my sister-in-law’s brother-in-law and that I demand to see him there and then.

Thanks God, Kulchoo didn’t argue with me and get all embarrassed like he always does when I jump cues and demand to see the top man. I think so my poor shweetoo was too out off it. Finally Psycho’s brother-in-law came and did a city-scan and an X-ray and an MRI of my baby’s head and said he had a mild-type crack. “Con-cushion,” he called it. I called Janoo when we got home and said Kulchoo had had an accident and had got a con-cushion in his head and that he should come
back. “Why? How? When?” Janoo barked down the phone.
Uff Allah! Aik tau
he’s also so inquisitive. Anyways, I think so, he’s coming back tonight, thanks God.

Then I called Mummy and told her what had happened. She was silent for a long time and then she said, “You’d better start looking for a wife for Jonkers.” And I swear my heart turned to ice. Just like that.

Janoo says I talk like an uneducated and that I’m very supercilious and that what happened to Kulchoo was just an accident and had nothing to do with Aunty Pussy’s promise or Jonkers’ wife or anyone. But I damn care. Janoo can go on speaking like the bore from Oxford that he is (I think so, they are called Oxens
na
—people with passes from Oxford). But I have very good sick-sense like that. Just like I knew Benazir was going to be killed the day before she was killed, just like that I know deep inside my heart that Aunty Pussy is responsible for Kulchoo’s con-cushion. And that if I don’t get Jonkers married by the end of the year, God knows what will happen to my baby.

Kulchoo is resting upstairs. I’ve told him “no reading-sheading, okay?” So he’s watching a film on his DVD. Something called
Black Hawk Down
. I think so it’s a nature documentary. So serious my baby is. Between you, me, and the four walls, he’s becoming a little bit bore like his father, always watching documentaries about global warning and energy crisis and other bore, bore things like that. But thanks God, he’s at home.

Every day threats are coming to his school from beardoweirdos saying they will bomb it. Girls schools’ headteachers
are being threated night and day that they’ll burn down their buildings and throw acid in the girls’ faces because their uniform is unIslamic. Just look at them! What can be more Islamic than a shirt that comes down to your ankles and a
shulloo
that has more cloth in it than a three-seater sofa? Cracks. Everyone is saying it’s only a matter of time before the beardo-weirdos make schools shut down forever like they did in Swat and Kabul. Sunny was saying at the coffee party that they
tau
are thinking of sending their youngest son to a boarding school in England. Her youngest is one year senior to Kulchoo at school and a real stuppid. He has two, two tuitions in every subject, and even then just manages to scrap through. Sunny was boasting about some top school called Eaten just on the outer-skirts of London whose fees are more than Pakistan’s GDB. Show-offer.

Before I could go see Aunty Pussy, guess who came calling? Jonkers. I was lounging in my lounge, flickering through my fave magazine,
Good Times
—there was a photo of Sunny taken at Lucky Rice
-wallahs’
anniversary party but luckily her eyes were shut and her mouth open as if she was asleep talking—when the bearer came in and said that my cousin Jonkers was here.

Last thing I wanted to see was Jonkers. Don’t think I’m not family-minded. Or that I don’t like Jonkers. We grew up together, after all. He was always small and skinny and had asthma and used to wheeze like a broken accordion. Auntie Pussy wouldn’t let him play with the boys because she said he was too weak. So instead he played with me. Ludo and bedminton and dolls and house-house also. In house-house I was always the
begum sahiba
and he was the driver. “Drive straight to beauty parlour, driver,” I’d say to him. “Yes,
Begum Sahiba
,” he’d say. So cute he was then with his long white socks, his ironed shorts, and his hair combed nicely to one side.

But when we became teenagers we grew apart. I got more into my friends and he got more bore. Became all studious
and all and then went away to become a countant in England—I think so in a place called Hull or Dull or something. Meanwhiles I got married. I’d already had Kulchoo by the time he came back with his a countancy. Jonkers started helping his father, Uncle Kaukab. Uncle Kaukab has a small business exporting bed-sheets and towels-showels and, just between you, me, and the four walls, a bigger business managing all the property that he’d collected when he was chief of central board of revenew back in the ’80s. God was very kind to them then. He put a lot in their way. And as Aunty Pussy’s always said, “God helps those who help themselves.” So Aunty Pussy and Uncle Kaukab helped themselves nicely to whatever came their way—houses, plots, cars, and so on and so fourth.

They lost some when Musharraf’s guvmunt did its little a countability drama in the begining. Uncle Kaukab panicked and sold some of his houses quickly and lost money on them. Then Aunty Pussy investigated whatever money he got from the sale in her cousin’s (from her father’s side) motel in Ontario and the cousin sold the motel and ran off with everything. So they’re not as well off as before but still not poor, God forbid.

Aunty Pussy wanted Jonkers to make a big marriage,
na
, to nice, rich, fair, beautiful type from an old family. At first,
tau
, she didn’t like any girl. Whoever she saw wasn’t rich enough or beautiful enough or fair enough or old family enough. So it was a real shock to her when she discovered that Jonkers was secretly dating low-class, hungry-naked types.

There was that receptionist we called Typhoon (she used to say phoon instead of phone) whom Aunty Pussy had to pay
off. Then there was another polyester number with underarm sweat stains and chipped nail polish, who worked in a furniture showroom, but who thanks God Jonkers himself caught in the muscular embrace of the security
-wallah
. In between also there was a cheap-type hairdresser. Actually not even proper hairdresser, she was just a blow-dryer. Her name was Akeela and Mummy and I called her Akela the loan wolf—from
Jungle Book
, which was my best film until
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
. And then last year Jonkers arrived home with Miss Shumaila, his secretary, with whom he’d already done secret marriage in a mosque.

And if we thought Akela was bad, Shumaila was ten times worst. So pushy and hungry and low-class. Wore tight polyester shirts and frosted maroon lipstick and had big busts and wobbly hips that juggled as she walked. And even more worst she had a meaty, furry smell about her as if a wild animal, like a female monkey or fox or something, had entered the room. Jonkers, of course, was like her lapdog, following in her meaty trail with his tongue hanging out. Honestly, all men are cracked. She stayed with him for four months, lying about in her unmade double bed in her air-conditioned room all day, eating nine, nine meals in one sitting, ordering the servants like they were her own and doing twenty-four-hour arguing with Aunty Pussy. Of course, after she’d had her little holiday, she ran off. Took a good clunk of Aunty Pussy’s jewellery and Jonkers’ brand-new Toyota Corolla and ran off in the dead of night with some low-class cheapster man like herself. Good radiance, I thought. Last month, thanks God, die-vorce came through.

Of course, Aunty Pussy
tau
can’t stop crowing about how she knew from first second that Shumaila was bad news. Day and night she is telling Jonkers, “See! See! Bring two
-paisa
, thieving sluts into an honest, decent home and this is what happens!”

After Shumaila left, Jonkers became so quiet and sad that I don’t know what to say to him any more. Sometimes I wonder if he is same Jonkers who used to play bedminton with me and let me win all the points. Maybe he also wonders if I’m still the same me?