Unmarriageable(10)

She extracted the cards from the invitation. ‘We have been invited to the mehndi and nikah ceremonies at the Dilipabad Gymkhana and to the walima ceremony in Lahore. Jena, Alys, Qitty, Lady, you’ll have to take days off from school.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Alys said to her mother. ‘Mrs Naheed has been invited too.’

Mrs Binat’s nostrils fluttered. ‘That means those scaly daughters of hers, Gin and Rum, will also be fishing. No doubt they will be wearing the latest designer outfits and carrying brand-name bags. Everyone will. Alys, what is the budget for new clothes?’

‘None,’ Alys said. ‘Anyway, tailor Shawkat overcharges us.’

‘How many times must I tell you that girls are only as good as their tailor, and Shawkat is worth every paisa he charges.’ Mrs Binat glared, Alys’s hair suddenly annoying her more than usual. ‘Honestly, if you wanted short hair, couldn’t you have got a nice bob like a good girl?’

Alys ran her a hand over her cropped curls and exposed nape. ‘I like this. It saves me hours in the morning.’

‘I like it too,’ Mr Binat said.

Alys smiled at her father. She’d grown up with her mother constantly telling her father what a jhali – a frump – she was, and over time Alys had realised that she was her father’s favourite for that very reason. He loved that she’d always squat beside him in the garden and dig in the soil without a second thought to broken nails, dirty palms, or a deep tan.

‘Barkat, you like everything this brainless girl does,’ Mrs Binat said. ‘Thankfully Alys has a nice neck.’

Mrs Binat’s ambitions for her daughters were fairly typical: groom them into marriageable material and wed them off to no less than princes and presidents. Before their fall, her husband had always assured her that, no matter what a mess Alys or any of the girls became, they would fare well because they were Binat girls. Indeed, stellar proposals for Jena and Alys had started to pour in as soon as they’d turned sixteen – scions of families with industrialist, business, and feudal backgrounds – but Mrs Binat, herself married at seventeen, hadn’t wanted to get her daughters married off so young, and also Alys refused to be a teenage bride. However, once their world turned upside down and they’d been banished to Dilipabad, the quality of proposals had shifted to Absurdities and Abroads.

Absurdities: men from humble middle-class backgrounds – restaurant managers, X-ray technicians, struggling professors and journalists, engineers and doctors posted in godforsaken locales, bumbling bureaucrats who didn’t know how to work the system. Absurdities could hardly offer a comfortable living, let alone a lavish one, and Mrs Binat had seen too many women, including her sister, melt from financial stress.

Abroads: middle-class men from foreign countries like America, England, Australia, Canada, et cetera, where the wife was no better than an unpaid multitasking menial, cooking, cleaning, driving, looking after children, and providing sex on demand with no salary or a single day off. An unpaid maid with benefits. Mrs Binat had seen enough of the vagaries of life to know that getting married to a middle-class Western Abroad could mean exhaustion and homesickness, and she would not allow her daughters a life of premature ageing and loneliness. As such, she was unwilling to marry them off to frogs and toads, because she was too good a mother to plunge her girls into marriage simply for the sake of marriage. For that, she would wait until Jena and Alys turned thirty-five. There was also the small complication of the girls’ reluctance to move abroad, since, for better or worse, they loved Pakistan. But, most important of all, if she sent her daughters abroad, she would miss them.

The plan was to remain in Pakistan and wed a Rich Man. Of course, Mrs Binat knew through her own sad experience that even rich men could turn into poor nightmares, for had she not married a Rich Man? And now where were her holidays, designer brands, and financial security? In her milieu, sons had been coveted for their income and thereby the security blanket they afforded retired parents, but, having married into wealth, she’d never cared to even pray for a son. Mr Binat too had stopped hoping for a boy after their fifth child was a girl. How she wished now she’d prayed for sons, and kept trying in order to spare herself the worry of a destitute old age. Being financially savvy and ambitious was a vital component of a successful man, and often Mrs Binat wondered whether she was to blame for not having had the upbringing to distinguish, in Barkat ‘Bark’ Binat, the real from the impostor.

She would not allow her daughters to make this mistake. She clutched the NadirFiede invitation. This was a real Rich Man fishing ground she was not going to waste.

‘We must give a marriage present that rivals everyone else’s. We must give thirty thousand rupees.’

‘Thirty thousand!’ Mr Binat glanced in alarm at Alys and Jena. ‘We are neither family nor close friends!’

‘Thirty thou is petty cash for Fiede Fecker.’ Alys laughed. ‘Five thousand from us should suffice.’

‘We don’t want to look like skinflints,’ Mrs Binat said. ‘They are sure to tell the whole town who gave them what.’

‘Mummy,’ Jena said gently, ‘five thousand rupees is stretching it for us as it is.’

Mrs Binat sighed. ‘Okay. Gifit is done.’

‘Gift,’ Lady said. ‘Gift.’

‘That’s what I’m saying. Gifit. Gifit.’ Mrs Binat shook her head. ‘Oof, I’m so sick of the tyranny of English and accent in this country. Alys, Jena, go get the trunk.’