Moni Mohsin - Duty Free

We sat in the sitting room and made plans. Over samosas and lemon tarts Aunty Pussy said that she still gives thousand, thousand thanks to Allah that He saved her poor innocent Jonkers from that slutty secretary, that poisonous she-snake, Miss Shumaila. Inside my heart I thought it would have been nicer if He could have saved the diamond ring, hairloom earrings, one necklace, and a Toyota salon car also. But something’s better than nothing. And besides you can’t expect so much from Someone who’s so busy.

“I still can’t see what Jonkers saw in her,” said Mummy.

“Oh, Malika,” said Aunty Pussy, flinging down her napkin. “She was making sex appeals to him. Of the dirty kind. Girls like that have no pride, you know, no shame.”

We were all quiet after that. I think so we were all imagining what the sex appeals must have been like. I didn’t say, but I must say I was a bit shocked that Aunty Pussy and Mummy should be thinking such dirty thoughts. At their age. When they should be thinking of God and graves. Just look at them!

Mummy suggested that Aunty Pussy should make a shopping list of all the most illegible girls of Lahore and then do some window-shopping before making a shortlist and final purchase.

“If we have to go to each and every one’s house, Mummy, and see them one by one that will take till Doomday,” I said. “Remember Jonkers has to be married by New Year. Better is to go somewhere we can see five, six together. In bunches.”

“We could go and park outside Kinnaird College and have a good look at forty, fifty of them as they come out from the college gates,” said Aunty Pussy.

I said no. One, because after the threats from the beardoweirdos there is so much of barb-wire and security check posts outside Kinnaird that you can’t get to the gates and two, I remember from my time at Kinnaird how much fun we used to make of mothers who did like that. Desperate Aunties, we called them.

And Mummy said that if we did that we could also find ourselves parking up the wrong tree. Nowdays lot of girls were coming to Kinnaird whose fathers were shopkeepers from Brandeth Road selling toilets and taps and that Kinnaird was not like the Kinnaird of olden times when I was there and when only girls from good baggrounds came.

I told Mummy my time was not olden times, ji. Hers was.

“What about a wedding?” said Aunty Pussy. “Can’t we go to a wedding where we can see nice stacks of them together? There must be some big wedding coming?”

And then I remembered the card that I’d got from Shabnam Butt, wife of Retired General Khayam Butt, who has become Lahore’s biggest, richest property developer. Their girl is marrying Talwar Khan’s boy.

“Which Talwar Khan?” asked Mummy.

“Oh Malika, what’s happened to you?” said Aunty Pussy. “Talwar Khan the politician, bhai . Who was on Musharraf’s cabinet and also was on Nawaz Shareef’s before and is now the PM’s right-hand man.”

“Lots of good girls will come to that wedding,” said Mummy.

“All of Lahore will be there,” said Aunty Pussy happily.

“All except Janoo. He’s already told me flat that he’s not going,” I said. “He says he doesn’t like corrupt, crooked types like that. Anyways, you know how bore he is. Big, big weddings are not his scene. So you two can come with me. I think so, you should bring Jonkers, so he can also see.”

But the wedding was still many days away and Aunty Pussy said she couldn’t let even a day pass doing nothing for her poor, sad Jonky and so I must arrange some viewing in between. I said I’d see. But inside I wanted to tell her to arrange it herself for her poor sad Jonky if she was in so much of a hurry. I’m not some, God forbid, Madam from Diamond Market who can produce ten, ten girls at the slick of a finger. But I didn’t say because Aunty Pussy is a bit touchy-type, you know, and I didn’t want anything else to happen to my Kulchoo.

Yesterday was my kitty day. Kitty, by the way, is not a cat. Kitty is socialist way of saving money. We have a group of ten friends, very reclusive and all because we don’t just invite anyone to join our kitty, you know. They all have to be nice, rich girls from good baggrounds like ourselves. So we get together every month at one member’s house for lunch and each of us contributes ten thousand rupees to the kitty and every month we take turns for one person to take whole lot. And it goes on like this for ten months until everyone’s taken a lakh of rupees and then we start all over again.

Janoo says he doesn’t see the point, because if I was to stuff ten thousand into a piggy bank for ten months I’d still have a hundred thousand at the end. Why to go through all the rig-my-roll of taking turns and keeping count and meeting for lunch and things? I told him that he was a hippo-crit because he was all praise for my maid Jameela who, when she was saving to buy a TV, put money into a committee. (The poors call kittys committees, na , which they pronounce “cummaytee” in typical illitred non-English-speaking, desi way.) Janoo said that was because Jameela didn’t have a bank account nor any investment chances like all the rich begums in my group. Nor could she put the money in a jar at home because her no-good brothers would help themselves to her savings. What was a smart move for Jameela was a bloody stuppid waste of time for me. And instead of doing time-waste at kitty parties, I should be helping Jameela open a bank account or something useful like teaching English to the girls in his charity school in Sharkpur. I told him flat I’d rather die than go to shitty Sharkpur with its dirty cow smells and its filthy fields and in any case our kitty wasn’t about money. We were least bothered about money. It was just a chance to meet up and do gup-shup but I couldn’t expect an antisocialist like Janoo to understand importance of chit-chat in a thousand years.

Anyways, the kitty lunch was at Baby’s house this time. So me and Mulloo and Maha and Faiza and Sunny and the others, we all got there and sat around doing gup-shup from here and there and waiting for Nina when Baby’s bearer came in with a note that had been delivered by Nina’s driver saying that to please return her eighty thou right now, ten thou for every month that she’d contributed without getting anything in return so far, because she was no longer part of our group and that she’d joined Natasha’s kitty instead. And to please send the money right now with the driver. Natasha’s husband’s just landed a fat guvmunt contract na to rebuild schools in the Frontier that the Talibans burnt and we all know what that means and besides, and even more importantly, in Natasha’s kitty group is also the Army Chief’s best friend’s wife’s sister.

Look at Nina. What a money-minded, snake-in-the-grass, back-stabber. And asking for her money back. What cheeks. So all the girls got angry and said that why should they give and if Nina wanted her money back she should come back and do the two months remaining properly and wait her turn like everyone else. So they sent her a text saying all that and she texted back saying that she will tell to the Army Chief’s best friend’s wife’s sister and when that happens we shouldn’t say that she hadn’t said.

So then everyone got after Mulloo and said if anyone should give the money back it should be Mulloo because she introduced Nina to the group. And Mulloo started shouting that why should she and while all of this was going on, Baby took me aside and asked if my aunt was still looking for a girl and I said maybe and she said her niece, Tanya, was foreign-returned and very nice and all and that her sister Zeenat was looking for nice foreign-returned boy and that don’t worry money wasn’t a consideration and that I should tell to my aunt and let her, Baby, know the next day.