Kamila Shamsie - Salt and Saffron

Older Starch clicked her tongue. ‘Bring him also. Where’s the problem? Don’t answer, I’ll tell you. The problem is here. I have out-of-town guests coming for tea with their children who are your age. First, Raunaq and Rusty were coming to keep them company but now Raunaq has piles, poor baby. Have you ever had piles, Aliya?’

I put her on speaker phone. ‘Piles? No. I didn’t think Dard-e-Dils suffered from piles.’

‘Arré, what a thing to say! Although, no, actually, you’re right. Usman is the only one among us who’s had them and that must be from his father’s side. He’s got Pathan blood, you know. But anyway, I said to Raunaq that last week there was an ad in the paper for a doctor who has a herbal cure for piles. No operation and also no need to show the doctor any part of your lower body. What’s that noise?’

It was Sameer choking on his tea. I promised we’d drop in, and hung up. Afterwards, I wondered if Older Starch was wilier than I gave her credit for. Because if I hadn’t been so amused by her comments I would never have agreed to entertain her guests. But with my head full of images of Older Starch, boasting that she comes from a royal family which once owned vast tracts of land and never suffered from haemorrhoids, I walked right into her trap. And walked into it alone, because Sameer took off for a game of squash at the Club, declaring that he’d have to see more than enough of the Starched Aunts once festivities for Kishwar’s wedding to the Ali Shah son got under way.

‘Well, I’m avoiding the wedding,’ I said. ‘Kishwar said some things about Mariam Apa—’

‘Everyone said some things about Mariam Apa.’

‘Okay, more to the point, I’m not getting involved in the Aunts’ ploys to get me married off.’

‘Weddings breed weddings,’ Sameer laughed, and twirled his racket in farewell.

‘Aliya!’ The Starcheds rose to greet me, minutes later, as I entered Older’s drawing room. ‘Have you met the Ali Shahs?’

Starched Aunts-1. Aliya-0.

Mind you, the four-wheel drives parked outside with their tinted windows and armed bodyguards should have tipped me off.

My aunts introduced me to the Ali Shah parents and daughters, then turned in triumph to the two boys. ‘This is Khurrum, Kishoo’s fiancé. You know Kishoo, Aliya. She couldn’t be here, unfortunately.’

Younger Starch whispered, ‘Stays at home when the sun’s out. Wants to look fair on her wedding night.’

‘And this is Murtaza. Just graduated from an Ivy League. Aliya was also in America, Murti. You two have a lot to talk about.’ And with that, both the Starched Aunts pushed me down on the sofa beside Murtaza.

Murtaza and Khurrum’s sisters caught my eye and turned away, giggling. Their father, engaged in a discussion with Older Starch’s husband about the dangers of allowing the masses to have access to Internet porn, gestured to his wife in a manner clearly meant to indicate that she was responsible for seeing to it that her daughters behave themselves. Younger Starch pulled a little bottle out of her handbag and, after instructing the Ali Shah boys to admire the painting on the wall, hastily rubbed concealer over the pimple just above my eyebrow.

Oh, please Scotty, beam me up. I’d rather face Klingons than this.

‘So what did you major in at college?’ Murtaza said.

‘English,’ I replied, quite confident that he would be unable to follow up on that.

‘Really?’ Khurrum leant forward. ‘That was my minor.’

Older Starch distracted him with a plate of sandwiches, and Younger Starch said, ‘Murtaza studied World Politics.’

‘Whirled Polly Ticks.’ Khurrum made a spiralling motion with his finger.

‘The revolving parrot is really a bomb!’ I laughed back.

‘Khurrum, please go and call Kishwar. I need to know who will be at dinner tonight.’ Now Mother Ali Shah was getting in on the act. Attack from all quarters.

Khurrum raised his shoulders helplessly and disappeared from the room with a mobile phone.

‘Always Murtaza was standing up to his professors. Always!’ His mother beamed at me and nodded.

‘Really?’ said a Starch. ‘American professors?’

Murtaza nodded. ‘They’re all idiots there. When they talk about Pakistan, which they almost never do, they say such stupid things. One of them said our biggest problem is feudalism. Other than the usual rubbish about paying taxes, he said we treat the peasants badly. I made him look like such an idiot in front of the whole class.’

‘What did you say? Aliya, did you hear? He took on his professor.’

I smiled benignly at my aunt and hid behind a samosa.

‘I told him he should come to Pakistan. See how my family looks after the people on our lands. We’ve built medical facilities; every year we bring in someone from the cities to talk to the women about birth control; if anyone has a dispute they come to us and we resolve the situation without bribery or favouritism. And they are so grateful they want to kiss our feet. But we tell them they don’t have to do that. Then I said, “Professor, sir, has anyone ever tried to kiss your feet?” That really shut him up.’

‘Tell them what you said about cities,’ his mother urged.

‘Hanh. I also said the poor people on our lands are much better off than poor people in the city, who have to rely on the government for justice and medical care and things like that’

This was too much for me. ‘But you are the government! The National Assembly is teeming with landowners. Both on the government and the opposition benches. And incidentally, in all your talk of the largesse you provide to these benighted souls, you never mentioned education.’ Masood so often said he wanted to learn to read and write English, and I never even offered to teach him. Worse, the few scraps of English I threw in his direction were worthless words such as ‘thyme’.

Murtaza shook his head at me. ‘You citywallahs. You don’t understand. I thought at least you, because of your family background … For centuries your family ruled over its people with the same attitude as we have. What happened to you?’

‘Evolution.’

I would have won that point except that, just as I spoke, one of the Ali Shah girls whispered, quite audibly, to her sister, ‘Her cousin married the cook.’

How can I justify the shame I felt at that moment?

‘I should be going,’ I said, putting down my teacup quite calmly. ‘Only stopped in for a few minutes on my way to see Dadi. She’ll start worrying if I’m late. Nice to meet you all. No, no, no need to see me out.’

Khurrum was laughing on the phone, near the front door. ‘Going?’ he said. ‘No, not you, Kishwar. Hang on.’ He lowered the phone away from his ear. ‘But we haven’t even discussed Othello and cultural relativism.’

I put a hand on his arm. ‘Nice to know we’ve got people like you in the National Assembly.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, your vote’s frighteningly easy to come by. Are there more like you? Can you all register to vote in my district?’

‘Only if you treat me like any other voter and bribe me.’

‘I promise you a goat for a vote. See you at the wedding?’

I made some non-committal motion with my hand and opened the door. A hawk-nosed man was striding up the driveway and we nodded to each other as I exited and he entered.

‘Jahangir Bhai!’ I heard Khurrum say.

The Underpants Man? I turned round but the door had closed.

I got into my car and rested my head against the steering wheel.

What did he think of the whole Mariam-Masood affair? In four years we’d heard, either directly or second-hand, innuendoes and gossip and vicious conjecture aimed at Mariam, but none of it originated from Jahangir and, consequently, he’d acquired the status of a demi-god in our house.