Duty Free (18 page)

I reached across to Mulloo, put my arms around her, and held her close.

If I am frank, I have to admit that sometimes I wonder why I’m still married to Janoo. I mean, between you, me, and the four walls, he’s a bit of a kill-joy, no? Doesn’t hang up with the cool crowd. Doesn’t do GTs unless I drag him. Hates balls. Never knows any gossip. Won’t make friends with important types. Totally bore, antisocialist person he is. When he’s in Lahore all he does is stay at home reading the papers, watching the news, playing tennis and swimming with Kulchoo, and meeting with just four or five bore types. There’s that dinosoar he plays chess with. Then he knows a couple of NGO types in
chappals
and hand-woven
kurtas
and then there are some bore journalists with whom he talks of bore, bore things like geopoltics and Offpak or Afpack or whatever it is. And that’s it. Total loser, no?

But then something happens and I know why I’m still married to him. Like yesterday, for instant. When I got home after dropping Mulloo, he was getting ready to leave for Sharkpur. In fact, he was already sitting in his Prado jeep. He got out to say goodbye but when he saw my face he told the driver to take the luggage out. He wasn’t leaving that day.

And then he took me inside and held me in his arms while
I shaked and shaked and in between shaking told him what had happened. He asked me only two questions: did I take the number of the motorbike? No? Never mind. He’d check with Muhammad Hussain. Was it a
jihadi
-type terrorist or just a common criminal? I told him he had a beard and turban and that he called me a whore and he touched Mulloo and that he snatched her pearls and wanted my diamonds and I don’t know if he robbed us to fund the
jihad
or to just buy himself a motorbike but
why does it matter
? Janoo held me close and stroked my hair and said, “Shhh, shhh, I know, I know, I’m sorry,” and then he gave me a Lexxo (he normally disproves of trankillizers because he says I should do yoga instead but I guess so he thought what had happened to me wasn’t normal) and he tucked me into bed and sat holding my hand till I fell asleep. He was still there when I woke up two hours later. While I was asleep he called up everyone he knew in the police and guvmunt and God knows where-all to trace that motorbike. But as usuals, of course, no luck. The only times terrorists get caught in this country is when they attack generals or other army officers. Otherwise when they attack ordinary people like us or even not-so-ordinary people like Benazir and Murtaza Bhutto, they get off spot-free.

And he also said I was very brave and that he was proud of me and from where I had got the courage to stand up to that bastard but if, God forbid, anything like this ever happened again, I must never do such a thing again because it could be dangerous. Things like money and jewellery, he said, didn’t matter, these things come and go. But I mattered. I mattered
a lot. When I told him that I didn’t want to live here any more and could we please move to a place where we could be safe, he fell silent and looked at the floor. Later he said to me that if we were to move, I would always miss this place. It was our home and without it we’d be homeless. I said I damn care. And he said, “But you
would
care, believe me you would.”

Later Mummy came to see me and she did so much nice fussing of me and Aunty Pussy came with pastries from Punjab Club and Jonkers brought a huge, expensive buffet of foreign lilies and he did total ignore of Aunty Pussy when her lips became thin at the sight of the foreign lilies.

Even through my upsetness I noticed that Jonkers looked different. His old General-Zia-type glasses had gone. And without those heavy black frames and thick glass you could see his eyes properly. They were like a camel’s, all big and dark, with lashes as long as my curtain fringes. I asked him if he’d had his eyes lasered and he gave me a sheepy smile and nodded. “I took your advice,” he said.

“Eighty thousand it cost,” sniffed Aunty Pussy.

And one more thing: he was wearing jeans and an apple-green polo shirt. I wanted to tell him how cool he looked but didn’t in case Aunty Pussy commented about the cost of his clothes as well.

Baby also came to see me and Nina came and Sunny came and Faiza came and they all came with money for charity to take off the evil eye that someone had put on me. And they all said how lucky me and Mulloo were that the beardo didn’t do anything worst to us. No one said it then, but we were all
thinking of how sometimes they rape and shoot women just for wearing sleeveless or not handing over their money quickly enough.
Hai
, and even my shweetoo Kulchoo who never gives me any praise, said I was a cool mum. And I overheard him boasting to his friends how I had fought off a terrorist.

Me and Mummy decided to visit the local mosque afterwards. It is four streets behind our house. That’s where all the servants go to pray on Fridays before lunch. Or they say they are going, but God alone knows what they do when they leave the house. I think so that they pretend they are going but actually they sneak back to their quarters to have a rest. They are like that. Sneaky.
Haan
so where was I?

Yes, the mosque. Me and Mummy actually wanted to slaughter a sheep as a thank-you to Allah for my safe escape and also to take away the evil eye that had been put on me. But because it is harder to hide a sheep in the house (we couldn’t let Janoo find out, na, otherwise he’d go up in bloom of smoke and call me illitred and uneducated and supercilious and God knows what all) so we thought we’d give some money for charity instead. But again we couldn’t tell Janoo we were going to give it to the mullah in the mosque because he is also anti them, na. He says they run
madrassahs
where they take poor boys who have no choice and make them into suicide bombers while they send their own sons to nice schools and get them jobs in multinationalists. I think so Janoo is a bit polaroid, between you, me, and the four walls. The money in the mosque just feeds the children of poors who come to learn the Koran there.

We waited in the car while Muhammad Hussain went inside to fetch the mullah. When he came out he was a youngish man wearing a beard and turban just like my attacker. (The mullah, not Muhammad Hussain.) As soon as I saw him, my heart came into my mouth again and a loud buzzing started up in my head. I didn’t want to give the money to him but Mummy said to me in a whisper, “Looks bad now.” So I handed over the money but I was careful not to let his fingers touch mine. Nor did I look at his face.

I went to see Mulloo today. I hadn’t seen her or even spoken to her on the phone since that day with the beardo. Sunny, Nina, Baby, and all, when they came to see me they said that they’d dropped in at Mulloo’s also but Tony had said she was resting and wouldn’t let them go in. And she hasn’t called anyone after that. Not even me. In fact, Mulloo has dropped out of the social scene altogether. No one’s seen her, no one’s heard of her, nothing.

So when I arrived at Mulloo’s place, Razia, her maid, told me that Mulloo Begum Saab was resting in her bedroom and I shouldn’t disturb her or she’d yell at her and maybe even throw her out of her job. I said doesn’t matter, I’ll make her keep you again. And I pushed past her into Mulloo’s room.

At first I couldn’t see anything because the curtains were drawn up but when my eyes became used to, I saw this lumptype thing in the bed under the sheets. I switched on the lights and the lump threw off the sheet and started screaming, “Razia, I
told
you not to bother me. Get out. Fool! Idiot!” It was Mulloo.

I said to Mulloo did I look like Razia to her and why wasn’t she getting up? She sat there on her bed with her hair all wild, wild and her eyes all crazy, crazy, looking at me as if she’d
never seen me before and I swear I thought she’d finally cracked. The room was also smelling as if no one had opened the windows in a month. So I pulled back the curtains and threw open the windows. She immediately pulled the sheets back over her head again and started moaning and rocking like a weepy rocking horse.

“Come on, Mulloo,
yaar
,” I said. “It’s not the end of the world, you know.”

“It’s fine for you,” she sobbed from under the sheets. “You didn’t lose ninety thousand and your pearls also. And you didn’t have him touching you. He
touched
me! I feel dirty.”

“I know, Mulloo, and I’m really sorry. But it’s over,
yaar
. And we are both alive and we haven’t been raped even.”

“Yes, it’s over. Everything’s over for me.”

“
Haw
, Mulloo. How you can say this? The pearls and money were just
things
and Janoo says it’s okay to lose things.”

At that she flung back the sheets and glared at me. “It may be okay for you and your darling Janoo but it’s
not
okay for me. Do you know how hard I work for my
things
? Do you have
any
idea?”

I went up to her. “Don’t be like that, Mulloo.”

“Go away,” she shouted, flapping her hands at me as if she was shooing away a crow. “Just go away and leave me alone.”

“Listen to me, Mulloo,” I said, sitting down on the side of her bed. “I know it was scary and I know that man touched you and took your pearls and money, and he didn’t take so much of my money, nor my diamonds, but he also threated
me
, you know, and he also called me dirty names and he was going to kill me
if the other one hadn’t taken him away just then. If I become depress and stop talking to my friends then I will let that man win. But if I keep living like before and I keep going out and being myself, then I win and he loses. No?”

“Everything for you is a game,” she laughed emptily. “Isn’t it? Winners and losers. Well, I don’t want to play.”

She pulled the sheets up and disappeared under them again. As if I wasn’t there.

“Mulloo?” I said.

“Go away. Leave me alone,” she shouted from under the sheets.

“Mulloo—”

“Get out!”

“Okay, Mulloo, then I’ll go.”

As I walked to the door she called out, “Listen, please don’t tell anybody what he did to me.”

“Of course I won’t, Mulloo.”

“Swear, swear on your child’s life.”

“I swear.”

Outside the door I met Razia.

“Where are Tony Saab and Irum Bibi?” I asked her.

“Out,” she shrugged.

“Tell them to stay with Mulloo Bibi. She needs them around.”

“Can you keep me yourself?” She tugged at my sleeve. “I don’t ask much. Only seven thousand. That’s all. Please? I can do waxing and threading also. Okay, six thousand five hundred for you.”

I shook her hand off my arm and walked straight away past her.

As if we didn’t have enough problems, now we’ve even got dengue fever. Honestly! And I thought that only poor countries like Africa got it. I’m so worried, so worried that my poor darling Kulchoo is going to get it. Yesterday when he came home from school I told him he’s not to eat street food from roadside stalls and he’s not to drink water in other people’s houses because God knows if they use bottled or drink from taps only and he’s not—