Moni Mohsin - Duty Free

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.