Moni Mohsin - Duty Free

The Land Cruiser had slowed down to a scrawl and was just twenty yards away. I saw in the mirror that Muhammad Hussain had finally understood what was happening (I told you na , that he was slow) and was running towards our car, the bags of fruit banging against his legs. Please God, I said inside my heart, please don’t let anything happen to him. There were two, three honks from the motorbike and an impatient vroom-vroom from its engine. The man looked at the motorbike, then at the Land Cruiser and then at me. His face became purple with anger. Snarling, he suddenly plunged past Mulloo so that half his body was in the car and tried to grab me by the throat but I flattened myself against my door so that his hands grabbed at empty space.

“Give me those earrings, gashti ,” he shouted.

My one earring was off and now I was really frightened so I held it out to him on my open palm. It lay there like a tiny ice chip. Janoo had given me the studs for our tenth wedding anniversary. Once again the beardo plunged towards me, but when it came to it, I couldn’t hand it to him. Just as his fingers reached mine, I closed my fist and quickly put it behind my back. No way was I going to give this bastard my anniversary present from Janoo.

He roared with rage. “I’ll kill you, you dirty whore.” And he pulled out of the car and tried to open Mulloo’s door but I leapt to her side and locked it and zipped up the window. He spun around to come to my side. My heart was beating inside my mouth. I quickly locked my door and got down on to the foot mat and sat there crouching with my arms over my head, praying. Then I heard three impatient blasts of a motorbike horn followed by more vrooming of the engine, but this time quite near to our car. Swearing loudly, the beardo thumped his fist hard on the roof of the car, kicked the tyre, and then, just as I expected him to start firing at my window, I heard his footsteps running away from the car. I put my head up and looked through my window. I saw him leap on to the back seat of the motorbike, with Mulloo’s bag under his arm, and roar off in a cloud of dust.

The Land Cruiser with the blacked-out windows, meanwhiles, drove quietly away. Muhammad Hussain pulled open the driver’s side door and panted, “Bibi, are you all right?”

I reached across to Mulloo, put my arms around her, and held her close.

If I am frank, I have to admit that sometimes I wonder why I’m still married to Janoo. I mean, between you, me, and the four walls, he’s a bit of a kill-joy, no? Doesn’t hang up with the cool crowd. Doesn’t do GTs unless I drag him. Hates balls. Never knows any gossip. Won’t make friends with important types. Totally bore, antisocialist person he is. When he’s in Lahore all he does is stay at home reading the papers, watching the news, playing tennis and swimming with Kulchoo, and meeting with just four or five bore types. There’s that dinosoar he plays chess with. Then he knows a couple of NGO types in chappals and hand-woven kurtas and then there are some bore journalists with whom he talks of bore, bore things like geopoltics and Offpak or Afpack or whatever it is. And that’s it. Total loser, no?

But then something happens and I know why I’m still married to him. Like yesterday, for instant. When I got home after dropping Mulloo, he was getting ready to leave for Sharkpur. In fact, he was already sitting in his Prado jeep. He got out to say goodbye but when he saw my face he told the driver to take the luggage out. He wasn’t leaving that day.

And then he took me inside and held me in his arms while I shaked and shaked and in between shaking told him what had happened. He asked me only two questions: did I take the number of the motorbike? No? Never mind. He’d check with Muhammad Hussain. Was it a jihadi -type terrorist or just a common criminal? I told him he had a beard and turban and that he called me a whore and he touched Mulloo and that he snatched her pearls and wanted my diamonds and I don’t know if he robbed us to fund the jihad or to just buy himself a motorbike but why does it matter ? Janoo held me close and stroked my hair and said, “Shhh, shhh, I know, I know, I’m sorry,” and then he gave me a Lexxo (he normally disproves of trankillizers because he says I should do yoga instead but I guess so he thought what had happened to me wasn’t normal) and he tucked me into bed and sat holding my hand till I fell asleep. He was still there when I woke up two hours later. While I was asleep he called up everyone he knew in the police and guvmunt and God knows where-all to trace that motorbike. But as usuals, of course, no luck. The only times terrorists get caught in this country is when they attack generals or other army officers. Otherwise when they attack ordinary people like us or even not-so-ordinary people like Benazir and Murtaza Bhutto, they get off spot-free.

And he also said I was very brave and that he was proud of me and from where I had got the courage to stand up to that bastard but if, God forbid, anything like this ever happened again, I must never do such a thing again because it could be dangerous. Things like money and jewellery, he said, didn’t matter, these things come and go. But I mattered. I mattered a lot. When I told him that I didn’t want to live here any more and could we please move to a place where we could be safe, he fell silent and looked at the floor. Later he said to me that if we were to move, I would always miss this place. It was our home and without it we’d be homeless. I said I damn care. And he said, “But you would care, believe me you would.”

Later Mummy came to see me and she did so much nice fussing of me and Aunty Pussy came with pastries from Punjab Club and Jonkers brought a huge, expensive buffet of foreign lilies and he did total ignore of Aunty Pussy when her lips became thin at the sight of the foreign lilies.

Even through my upsetness I noticed that Jonkers looked different. His old General-Zia-type glasses had gone. And without those heavy black frames and thick glass you could see his eyes properly. They were like a camel’s, all big and dark, with lashes as long as my curtain fringes. I asked him if he’d had his eyes lasered and he gave me a sheepy smile and nodded. “I took your advice,” he said.

“Eighty thousand it cost,” sniffed Aunty Pussy.

And one more thing: he was wearing jeans and an apple-green polo shirt. I wanted to tell him how cool he looked but didn’t in case Aunty Pussy commented about the cost of his clothes as well.

Baby also came to see me and Nina came and Sunny came and Faiza came and they all came with money for charity to take off the evil eye that someone had put on me. And they all said how lucky me and Mulloo were that the beardo didn’t do anything worst to us. No one said it then, but we were all thinking of how sometimes they rape and shoot women just for wearing sleeveless or not handing over their money quickly enough. Hai , and even my shweetoo Kulchoo who never gives me any praise, said I was a cool mum. And I overheard him boasting to his friends how I had fought off a terrorist.

Me and Mummy decided to visit the local mosque afterwards. It is four streets behind our house. That’s where all the servants go to pray on Fridays before lunch. Or they say they are going, but God alone knows what they do when they leave the house. I think so that they pretend they are going but actually they sneak back to their quarters to have a rest. They are like that. Sneaky. Haan so where was I?

Yes, the mosque. Me and Mummy actually wanted to slaughter a sheep as a thank-you to Allah for my safe escape and also to take away the evil eye that had been put on me. But because it is harder to hide a sheep in the house (we couldn’t let Janoo find out, na, otherwise he’d go up in bloom of smoke and call me illitred and uneducated and supercilious and God knows what all) so we thought we’d give some money for charity instead. But again we couldn’t tell Janoo we were going to give it to the mullah in the mosque because he is also anti them, na. He says they run madrassahs where they take poor boys who have no choice and make them into suicide bombers while they send their own sons to nice schools and get them jobs in multinationalists. I think so Janoo is a bit polaroid, between you, me, and the four walls. The money in the mosque just feeds the children of poors who come to learn the Koran there.