Moni Mohsin - Duty Free

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?

And also her children were crying because it had started snowing again and Mahnoor said that she was already up to her waste in it and that in another ten minutes she’d get totally buried and her son said he couldn’t feel his toes, his ears, or his nose any more and that he felt as if someone had put a steel headband over his head which they were tightening slowly and why hadn’t they left him behind in Lahore to play cricket and do Nintendo and he hated them all, but most of all her, Baby. And Baby with the camera and hands and lips all stuck together was shouting at them to shut up and start moving back towards the hotel but the kids couldn’t make head or tale of what she was saying of course because she couldn’t really move her lips at all and all the time Baby was also thinking of her two-hundred-dollar pink suede boots buried in the snow.

Finally, one hour later when they got back to the hotel and Baby’s fingers and face had melted off the camera and her son had got back his ears and his nose and his toes and her daughter had stopped weeping, they all swore that they’d rather die than go out in the snow again. So for the rest of the month that they were in Toronto they stayed in their hotel room only and watched TV and ate burgers and chips and fought with each other and said how much they hated Canada and how much they loved Lahore and Baby wept over her pink suede boots that had become all hard and grey like a donkey’s ears. And inside she cursed the crooked lawyer for calling them there in the winters even though to his face she smiled at him and called him “bhaijan.” That’s why they are not going to Toronto for New Year’s. And, thanks God, nor am I. Imagine, yaar , what a place. The Canadians must be crack to live there, no?

Guess who came back today? Madam Jameela! Yes, her. That shameless, selfish, ungrateful, sex-mad liar. Strolled in cold as brass, wearing my three-season-old Kami jora with the pink embroidery on green bagground, which had cost me twenty thousand then. New shoes, pink heels if you please. And nail polish on her toes. Face all glowing, hair all shining. Not looking as if she’d been near a funeral.

“Assalam aleikum,” she said.

“Get out,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

I was dump-founded. What did she mean, “okay”?

“What do you mean ‘okay’? How dare you say okay?”

“I’m doing like you want. You said go so I said okay.”

“After all I’ve done for you — given you job, given you designer clothes worth I don’t know how much, given you earrings worth sixty thou, given you leave every time your mother died — you just come in here and say okay?”

“I don’t need your job any more. I’m going to Abu Dhabi.”

“ Abu Dhabi? Don’t be stuppid. Who do you know in Abu Dhabi?”

“I’m going to work for foreigners. They pay three, three, four, four times as much as you all.”

“Which foreigners? How do you know foreigners?”

Then she told me. Apparently, her husband’s older brother has worked in Abu Dhabi for six years as a driver for these foreigners. She doesn’t know where they are from but they don’t speak English among themselves and are tall with yellow hair. And they speak nicely, always saying please and if you don’t mind. And they are very happy with Jameela’s brother-in-law. They’ve given him TV, DVD, fridge, AC even, and fat pay on top. Now they’ve moved to a bigger house and they need a maid and a cook and they asked him if he knew anybody suitable and so he asked Jameela and her husband.

“So we’re going. Next week. Visas and everything is all done. Tickets also. Just came to pick up my clothes. And to tell you.”

That night when Janoo came back from Sharkpur, the minute he walked into the room, I told him it was all his fault. He was the one who was always going on about how smart Jameela was and how hard-working and how ambitious. He was the one who gave her so much of phook and now look what he’d done.

“Abu Dhabi, eh?” he chuckled. “Good for her. I always knew she’d go far.”

“Well, she has. All the way to air-conditioned Abu Dhabi where the electricity never goes and bombs never burst and servants speak English. And me? I’m stuck in dirty, filthy Lahore where electricity never comes and bombs burst ten, ten times a day and the one thing, the only thing, I had was a maid and now even she’s gone!”

“You’ll find another maid.”

“And who’s going to train her? Teach her to knock before she comes in? And not call you ‘bhaijan’ and me ‘baji’ as if we were her older brother and sister? And get her to use a toothbrush instead of a tree? And not to tell people I’m sitting on the toilet when they call? You? ”

“Look,” he said, switching on the TV and that also bore BBC news, “it’s not the end of the world. You should just wish her well and start looking for someone else.”

“She doesn’t need my wishes. That snake-in-the-grass. She’s going to be living it up with her white employers who say thank you thousand, thousand times and snatch our servants and spoil them forever with televisions and fridges. It’s not fair!”

“It’s hardly as if Jameela is going to Abu Dhabi to live it up in clubs and malls,” sighed Janoo. “She’s going to work as a domestic servant. And how do you know her white employers are going to shower her with goodies? From my experience, even bleeding-heart liberals revert pretty quick to colonial sahibs and memsahibs when they find themselves in places where help is cheap and has no rights. So if I were you I wouldn’t begrudge her Abu Dhabi. Believe me you wouldn’t want to change places with her.”