Moni Mohsin - Duty Free

“Look at the bright sides. At least you saved on the tickets.”

He took out his handkerchief and wiped his glasses. Then he asked me such a stuppid-type question.

“Apa, are you happy? Happily married, I mean?”

“ Haw , crack,” I laughed. “What cracked things you ask!”

“I’m serious, Apa. Are you happily married?”

“Don’t call me Apa.”

“Sorry. Are you?”

“Honestly, Jonkers!” I said. I mean what stuppid question, no? Am I happily married? What does he mean? Can’t he see? Is he blind or something? By grace of Allah, I have a husband, a child, a big house, servants, social life, status, cars, cupboards full of designer joras and jewellery, and so on and so fourth. Everyone is always saying what a nice life I have. What else is happiness, haan ? Stuppid.

So I waved my arms around my nice cluttered-type lounge, at the walls full of paintings and vases full of flowers and Janoo’s bursting bookcases and Kulchoo’s tittering stacks of DVDs and my piles of Good Times and Vogue and the huge colour photo taken by Lahore’s best photographer, Zaidi, of me and Janoo and Kulchoo when he was a baby and before that of me and Janoo as new weds and I said, “Look at all this. See? It’s a full house. With family and servants and comings and goings and phones ringing and droppings in of guests and everyone lively and busy and everything. I have a full house, Jonkers, a full house.”

Jonkers stared at the carpet and nodded and went on nodding as if the carpet was asking him questions. Then he coughed, put his glasses on and said, “So you recommend an arranged marriage?”

“What else?”

“But what about love?”

“ Haw , who says you can’t have both together? Take me only. I didn’t know Janoo at all before we got engaged but I fell in love as soon as my engagement was announced. Maybe you’re not knowing all this, Jonkers, because you were in Dull then—”

“Hull,” he said, “not Dull.”

“What? Oh yes. Du—, I mean, Hull. But Janoo was in love with an English girl, a real little memsaab with blue eyes and yellow hair, who’d been with him in Oxford. He wanted to marry her. Stuppid, he thought she’d come and settle in Sharkpur with him and go ooh and aah over the sunset and the fields and do bore NGO-type things with him like building clinics and toilets and things for his precious villagers. But when she came and visited and saw Sharkpur with its mud houses and big black cows and little black people and the Old Bag, I mean, his mother and all, she told him then and there only that if he wanted to marry her, he’d have to move to London, because no way was she going to live in that holehell. She even turned up her nose at Lahore. Imagine! Her ears and graces! So, anyways after she left, for a year or two Janoo went mooning about the place. Very depressed and all he was. But then Janoo’s older sister, Cobra—”

“You mean Kubra, Apa?”

“Cobra is my little pet name for her. Because she speaks with split tongue. Anyways, Cobra then suggested me because I was one of the most illegible girls of my year at Kinnaird College, na . And so it was done. And the minute our engagement was announced, I fell in love. Didn’t think I should fall in love before because what if engagement didn’t take place? Then I would become a laughing stop. One has to think of oneself also, na. But you wait and see. It will be exact same for you.”

“For a thirty-seven-year-old heap of soiled goods like me?”

“Men are never soiled, Jonkers, only women.”

He folded his hanky neatly and replaced it in his shirt pocket.

“But I’m not rich. I make a small living running my business and looking after my father’s property but I’m not, you know, stinking-rich. I’m also not a double for George Clooney and—”

“And also your clothes, they are not right.”

He looked down at his shirt that was buttoned all the way up to his chin.

“My clothes?”

“They are not, you know, fashiony.”

“They’re not?”

“They make you look like a countant.”

“But I am one.”

“Okay, okay, forget.”

“Thing is, I don’t know what to say to these society girls. They look snooty and bored. They find me dull and to them, I probably am dull. That was the thing with Shumi. Talking to her was so easy …”

“At least you can change your glasses. Best is, get your eyes lasered. It’s become very cheap. Even the poors, like teachers and all are doing laser nowdays.”

“She was chatty and friendly and genuinely interested in me.”

I’d forgotten he’s so stuppid. It’s total time-waste to tell him about make-outs like they do on TV where they take really ugly, old people and in one hour flat make them young and beautiful. Jonkers is so behind everything. And then he asked me if I would go along with Aunty Pussy when she went girl-hunting and made sure she didn’t go chasing the wrong types. He told me to stare her in the right direction. So I told him that she’s not a donkey and that I wasn’t sitting on her back with a stick to make her go this way and that way, like I wanted.

“I know, I know,” he said. “But she listens to you more than she does to me. She thinks I’m an idiot. And that my views don’t matter. After Shumaila left the way she did, she feels she can say whatever she wants to me. I can’t open my mouth without her jumping down my throat. Please go and see the girls with her.”

“And then?”

“Then just tell her the ones you think are unsuitable.”

“But what type of girl do you want, Jonkers? I don’t know that even.” Well I know he likes the cheapster Typhoon and Shumaila types but he’d better not say that to me. Or I’ll slap him.

“I don’t want a glamour puss. Nor a spoilt, rich doll. Just someone who is friendly and kind and speaks to people right and is normal, I guess.”

“So you want plain, quiet, mediocre-type.”

“I want someone who’s easy to live with.”

“ Uff Allah! It’s not like girls are exams, Jonkers. Hard or easy. Girls are girls. Some are nice and some are not so nice because they are not from good baggrounds. That’s all.”

He asked me what a good bagground was and I said it was when they had same-to-same money as you and knew the same people and went to same places. Stuppid. Doesn’t even know that much. God knows what they taught him in Dull. But then I reminded myself that he may look like a loser but one thing Jonkers has never done is bitch about that bitch Shumaila. Even after she made him into a joke in front of all of Lahore by running off with her tandoor-wallah , he never said one word against her. It would have been so easy. Everyone would believe him because he’s one of us and she isn’t. And here tau men say such dirty, filthy things about girls who haven’t even done anything to them and they ruin their reputations just like that and Jonkers didn’t even say a word. Not a single thing. Not even to me. His Apa.

“Okay, okay,” I sighed, “I’ll go and see your prospectus brides. But one thing you tell your mother. She’s not to make any wishes inside her head without telling me first, okay? Otherwise I’m not coming.”

“What wishes? I don’t follow.”

“Just tell her like I said. She’ll follow.”

So Aunty Pussy came round with Mummy in toe and brought lemon tarts from Punjab Club and a big buffet of roses for me and a get-well present for Kulchoo who’d already got well and gone to school. I think so she was trying to do make up with me. I wanted to tell her what she’d done was mean, mean, mean and how could she think such bad things for her own cousin’s daughter’s son like that but then I caught Mummy’s eye and she gave a small shake of her head and so I let buygones be buygones. Because I’m like that only.