Moni Mohsin - Duty Free

I got all excited thinking maybe I can buy a new double-coloured shahtoosh to make Sunny jay with. Ever since shahtooshes got band in India they’ve become harder to find here also. Apparently they’re made from the chin hairs of some rare mountain goat which is getting succinct in India and that’s why they’ve put the ban. Trust the Indians to spoil everyone’s fun. Honestly. Anyways, thinking it was my old shawl- wallah , Akhtar, I paused the film and told the bearer to put him in the drawing room.

When I walked in, it wasn’t Akhtar at all but a thinnish, youngish man who I’d never seen before, in a shulloo kurta and wispy beard and a white cap on his head. But even worst, he was wearing a puffy-type leather jacket. And most worst, he had this suitcase lying beside him. I swear I heard it ticking. My colour immediately flew out of my face. He said his name was Imtiaz and that he was from Islamabad and he’d heard from the shawl -wallahs’ grape-wine that I was a collector of shawls. And then he reached inside his pocket, took something out, and bent towards his suitcase.

Then I lost it. I told him, I said that I didn’t have any money and I hated shawls anyway and I’d never bought a shawl in my life and didn’t he know there was an economic slum on and we were defaulters and the banks were after us and he mustn’t please for Allah’s sake open the suitcase and who’d given him my address and I was a God-fearing Muslim and I had a young son and what would become of him and please have some pity. He looked at me as if I was completely crack. But I didn’t care and by this time I think so he was more afraid of me than I was of him because suddenly he picked up his suitcase and ran.

When he was gone I called all the servants — bearer, cook, drivers, maid, sweeper, guards-shards, everyone — and shouted at them for letting people into the house that they didn’t know when the sich was so bad and why were they such stuppids and just now only I’d soiled a suicide bomber all by myself. So they also looked at me as if I was a crack but I damn care. Stuppids!

Later that evening Sunny called and said, “Guess what? I’ve just bought the most gorge double-coloured six-yarder shahtoosh from this darling little shawl- wallah called Imtiaz. And such a good price he gave me! Two times less than that thief Akhtar. Said he’d heard all about me from other shawl -wallahs . Apparently, I am known as Lahore’s greatest shawl collector. Wait till you see my new six-yarder. You tau will just die!”

Look at Jameela! Just look at her! She’s already a whole day late coming back. And not one word, one excuse, one sorry. Just total silence. I’ve called her mobile twenty, twenty times. Ring goes, but will she pick up? Never. I think so the minute she sees it’s my number she presses busy button. Her village is a thousand miles away at the edge of the world, otherwise I’d send someone to drag her back.

I was complaining to Mummy about her and she said, “I bet you, her mother is fat and well. I bet you she’s gone for something else.”

“Ever since she’s got married—”

“When did she get married?” asked Mummy.

“I think so, three months ago. I gave her fifty thou and gold earrings for her wedding. Since then this has been her third holiday.”

“That’s it. That’s why she’s gone. To be with her husband. You know, na , darling, these people can’t live without You Know What. That’s what she’s gone for. They’re not like us. We know there’s a time and place for everything. But they don’t. Because they are uneducated and they are villagers.”

I thought for a second that Janoo was also from a village but then I remembered that he was not uneducated because he was an Oxen and that’s why he knows there is a time and a place for everything. Even for You Know What.

But Mummy’s right. I’m sure Jameela’s mother is in better health than me even. She’s gone for You Know What. Just wait till the madam comes back. The minute she walks in I’m going to throw her out there and then. No questions, no answers. Just “go!” And no matter how she weeps, how much she howls, how much she kisses my feet and begs to stay, I’m going to say, “Leave!” Befooling me like that, after I’ve done so much for her.

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.