Duty Free (8 page)

You should have seen her when she first came here. Thin and starving and dressed in rags. A real down-and-out pheasant woman from some lost village God knows where. Muhammad Hussain, our driver, brought her and said, please give her a job because they are eating stones in her village. And now look at her. Plucked eyebrows, bleached face, dressed in all my last-season designer
joras
and fat as a hen. And those earrings I gave her, they alone cost me sixty thou. Wait and see what I’ll do to her when she comes back. Liar. User. Faker. Hippocrit. As Mummy says, we should never trust these people. They don’t have morals. Because they are uneducated. And not from our baggrounds.

Honestly the sich is so bad, so bad that don’t even ask. No water, no electricity, no security, no schools, and still no wife for Jonkers. Every day bombs bursting everywhere and people dying like flies. Just today the beardo-weirdos attacked that police-training centre inside Lahore. Not some faraway place in the Frontier like Peshawar or Swat, or even not so far away as Rawalpindi, but in
Lahore
. Okay, it was on the outer outer-skirts of Lahore in some God-fortaken place called Manawan or something, but still it was Lahore,
my
city. Apparently, they did the attack in broad daylight. Just came running in, shooting Kalashnikovs and bursting grenades and God knows what, what else. What cheeks, no?

As usuals the stuppid police-
wallah
s didn’t realize what was happening at first, and when they finally did, they ran away and hid but when they finally, finally realized they were going to get killed in any case, they at last started shooting back. The fighting went on for three full hours before they were all killed (the terrorists, not the police, thanks God; well one or two policemen were also killed, but mainly non-officer-types whose names even don’t come in papers). Just imagine! All this happening inside Lahore. Not fifteen miles from where we live.

I swear I feel frightened myself going to the bazaar in case some mad weirdo arrives and shoots me for buying western food like chips or for wearing western clothes like pop-socks. All the time I’m looking over my shoulder, all the time thinking someone standing behind me in a shop or parked besides me on a bicycle in a traffic jam might blow me up. It’s been two full months since I went to Avari Hotel on the Mall to get my facial (the spa there’s the best at giving facial, na). Ever since the Marriott was bombed last year in Isloo—Islamabad,
yaar—
I’ve
tau
stopped hotelling. The only thing I used to still go for was my facial. Now I get a girl to come to the house but she’s not a thatch on the Avari one. And also she has b.o. Honestly, what the Talibans have put us through! So when people say Americans are behind all this killing-shilling, I say I
tau
use Estee Louder products for my facial. And Estee Louder, as everyone knows, is American. So why would Americans put axe in their own foot by causing all the killing in Pakistan so no one could even leave their houses any more to get Estee Louder facials,
haan
? In any case, who is against facials? Is it Americans? No. Is it Indians? No. Is it Talibans? Yes. Yes. Yes. No one but the Talibans.

At least Lahore isn’t as bad as Isloo. There
tau
everyone’s under house arrest. So many important foreign types keep coming there,
na
, that guvmunt’s shut down everything to protect them. First came Senator Carry, remember the one who lost that election to Bush? Then came the Turkish PM, what’s his name, Astrakhan or Ardogan or something (such strange, strange names people have) and then Hilary Clinton
came. The guvmunt, as you can imagine, is scared sniff about where Talibans will strike next and fearing a repeat of the Sri Lankan cricket team
-wallah
scene, they’ve closed down whole of Isloo to protect these important types. I swear you can’t take three steps without getting stopped by a police
-wallah
at a check post and being searched in places you didn’t even know you had.

Everyone in Isloo is
tau
fed up. I was talking to my friend Sammy who lives in Isloo and runs the art gallery, Sammy’s Selections, and she said you can’t believe how bore life has become. Hardly any parties-sharties or balls are happening. People are frightened of even leaving their houses. And those few brave ones who do go out to a dinner or GT (Get Togethers, of course) have to leave two hours before they’re invited because of all the stoppages along the way at police check posts. Honestly!

God knows what will happen when the wedding season starts properly. And this year
tau
, the whole of it is going to be jam-packed into just November and half of December because after that is Muharram,
na
, when nobody can have a ball, let alone throw a proper seven-event wedding. I think so this is going to be a very bore winter. Sunny and Akbar are going off to Dubai for New Year’s Eve and winters holidays because they say Pakistan’s going to be so bore. I just mentioned to Janoo that maybe we should also go to Dubai for New Year’s and he blew up like a rocket launcher.

“Your country is in flames and all you can think of is partying! Are you off your head?”

I wanted to say I will be if I stay here a moment longer but then I thought, would he listen? Never in a thousand years.

On top of that we have no electricity. Oho, I
know
the whole country has no electricity but I mean
we, us
. Our generator has gone
thup
again. I think so the servants must be doing something to it (it’s kept by their quarters only, because it is too noisy near the house). It’s the second time it’s broken down in six months. Other people’s keep going and going like Queen Elizabeth of England but not ours. Sunny says she hasn’t had to change hers even once since all this “electricity conservation” started two years ago. Who does she think she is? Using words like “electricity conservation” as if electricity was a rare animal like the tiger or the
shahtoosh
goat or something. But come to think of it, electricity is becoming rarer and rarer in Pakistan. But still. She can call it “load shedding” like everyone else does. “Electricity conservation” my shoe!

On TV the guvmunt says that it’s all the fault of Musharraf’s guvmunt that we have no electricity. They say Musharraf didn’t plan ahead. But now this guvmunt is saying they are putting in lots of electricity plants into the ground and that soon electricity is going to start coming non stop through the wires like it used to before all this load shedding started and look how much they are doing for us. But we still have four hours of load shedding in our area. Now we’ll have to buy a new generator and this on top of the three thou a day we pay for diesel for it and the electricity bill we get for the few hours we get from main line. I’ve heard they are also going to do load shedding on gas. Thanks God
guvmunt doesn’t control air otherwise they would also start doing load shedding on
that
.

And if that’s not enough Aunty Pussy called again to ask if I had done anything for her Jonky yet.

I told her, “Aunty Pussy I have other things to do also, okay.”

“Like what?”

“Like buying a new generator.”

“Kaukab’s cousin’s son has a dealership in generators. I’ll tell him to come to your house and I’ll make sure he gives you best price.”

So Uncle Kaukab’s nephew from Gentle Generators came in the afternoon and he told me which one I should get and then two hours later he sent two men around in a van and they brought the new generator and fixed it up and now we have electricity again. And he knocked up seven thou from the price also. That’s why family is so important. Because it keeps its promises. Unlike guvmunts.

And when Janoo came home that evening he asked me what I’d been doing all day and I started telling him about the generator and Aunty Pussy and he cut me off halfway and said I must find some real work to do. And then he switched on his computer and I told him if I hadn’t got the generator replaced neither he, nor Kulchoo, nor anyone in this house could have done any “real” work, okay?

I asked Baby where she and Jammy were going for New Year’s. They have Canadian passports, na, and can go any place any time. Not like us losers who have green passports and have to apply for visas three, four months from before and then wait in thousand-mile-long cues and answer millions of questions to get them.
If
we get them.

“We’re here only,” she replied.

“Why don’t you go to Toronto? To your flat?” I asked. “It’s going to be so bore here, with Muharram and no parties and everything.”

“Toronto?”
she shrieked. “Are you joking? Not even my dead body would go to Toronto for New Year’s.”

“Why?”

“
Haw
, it’s so cold, so cold that your blood freezes the minute you step out of the house. No, no, I’d much rather sit here and be warm and depressed rather than go there and be cold and depressed.”

And then she told me all about the trip they made to Toronto in winters when they went and got that crooked Indian lawyer to fix it for them so that they don’t have to spend the three years they’re supposed to spend there to get nationality.
Apparently you have to go only twice. Once to bribe a lawyer to quietly, quietly break Canadian law and then second time to go and swear some sort of oath to never break Canadian law and to pick up your Canadian passport. So anyways, they went in December. They had to go in their children’s holidays,
na
, because they wanted the kids to become Canadians also. They knew it was going to be cold so Baby says she packed lots of shawls and instead of taking pop-socks she bought some woolly-type socks from Al Fatah and took them also. First time since she stopped doing games in Class 9 at the convent that she bought socks. Anyways, they landed up in Toronto in the night and got taken straight from airport to hotel and weren’t outside for long enough to feel the cold or see the scenery.

So next morning when they woke up they saw that outside there was so much of snow, so much of snow that don’t even ask. The kids got really excited and said they wanted to make a snowman and also Baby, whose passion is Bollywood films, immediately saw herself as Kajol dancing in the snow in a chiffon sari but because she hadn’t packed any chiffon saris, she thought she’d be western instead and so she and the kids rushed into a shop in the hotel’s downstairs bit and the kids bought knitted hats with pomp-pomps and she bought herself a pair of high-heeled pink suede boots (pink is her favourite colour na; you should see her and Jamal’s bedroom, it’s in five different shades of pink) and a cute little sweater with pink furry bits and she wrapped her shawl around her and they all went out in the snow to take photos.

But the minute they stepped into the snow they couldn’t stop stepping. Baby says she went down and down and down until the snow was up to her knees. She swears she couldn’t see even the tops of her boots, so much they’d gone down into the snow. Her daughter, Mahnoor, who is a bit of a dwarf, poor thing, she
tau
was snowed in up to her hips. It took them full half hour to cross the road and get to the park they had seen from their hotel window. So anyways when they got there, Baby took the camera out of her pocket and said, “Smile!” and the kids said, “But how?” Their faces were frozen into ice sculptors. Promise by God.

And it gets more worst. Having taken the picture of her kids’ frozen faces, Baby tried to put the camera back in her pocket and guess what she found? The camera had got stuck up to her hand. You know like when you take old-fashioned tin ice-tray out of freezer and your fingers get stuck up to it? Just like that. Except that in Pakistan it only happens for two three seconds because usually your kitchen is so hot that ice melts in ten seconds flat but in Toronto if you are not wearing gloves outside in the winters and you touch some metal thing your hand stays there forever. Thanks God Baby had not touched a park railing or something fixed up like that, otherwise can you imagine what would have happened? She would have had to stay there like that till the summers. So Baby then tried to separate the camera and her fingers with her teeth and her lips got stuck up to the camera also. And you know,
na
, that Baby before she went to Canada had had cellulight injected into her lips because they were a bit on
the cruel-looking and thin side. And now she got so scared that if she pulled hard on her lips what if all the cellulight came gushing out and ruined her new cute jumper with the pink fur?