Unmarriageable(106)
‘Not to worry, Wick,’ Lady said, ‘we’ll be rich and famous yet – this time our business idea is foolproof. Touch wood.’ And she touched the granite counter in the kitchen.
They were going to open up a lingerie boutique, Pakeezah Passions. Pure Passions. Their logo would be peacock feathers rising majestically out of what anyone with half a brain would be able to see was cleavage. Their tagline was ‘No more Mr Lonely Pants. No more Ms Lonely Panty’. Pakeezah Passions would be the hottest lingerie ever, with a Pakistani twist. So Sindhi ajrak teddies and Baluchi mirror-work baby dolls and Punjabi leather bra sets and Pathan pom-pom underwear. Also, on a separate note, Lady had insisted on a line devoted to brassieres of cotton and lace for those blessed with big busts. Wick was terribly excited. He was sure this business was the one to turn them from Wannabes to VIPs, and he grabbed his wife and she grabbed him back.
Mr and Mrs Binat lounged in bed, enjoying chai and samosas prepared on this Dilipabad evening by Hillima, who was still elated at having received generous amounts of cash and gold earrings from both Alys’s and Jena’s bridegrooms, unlike Lady’s useless husband – looks, ka aachar dalna hai, was one supposed to pickle and preserve his good looks! – who had asked her what wedding present she was giving him.
‘I still can’t believe it,’ Mrs Binat said to Mr Binat, her eyes perpetually shining. ‘Three daughters married in one year, and so well, duniya dekhti reh gayi – the whole world watched in envy. Barkat, did I not always tell you I would only give birth to marriageable material?’
Mr Binat looked up from his book on Mullah Nasruddin’s sagely antics. The miracle was Alys and Jena finding the rarest of husbands: supportive, decent, rich, smart, caring, faithful, uncontrolling, kind, good-looking, healthy, funny, generous, polite, affectionate, respectful. Such men simply did not exist except in novels. Pinkie had her eye on Cornell-Babur for Qitty or Mari, whichever he preferred, but she was not as bothered as she would have been a year ago, because she had more pressing issues to keep herself busy-busy.
Pinkie Heirlooms had taken off, thanks to demand from gymkhana patrons, and she was adding a bridal line called Binat Bridals, and she had dreams of a vast empire under the umbrella House of Binat. Mr Binat threw samosa crumbs to Dog and Kutta, new additions to the family. The puppies leapt off the rug, barking madly, happy to receive scraps.
Mari sat on the bed by her parents’ feet. She’d been beaming so hard for the last year, her teeth ached. She was convinced each day anew that her sisters’ outrageously good fortunes were the result of her piety and prayers. In giving thanks to the Almighty, Mari had taken to wearing a burqa, and whether Lady called her Ninja, or her mother called her Nut Case, or that brother in High Chai hissed, ‘Move it, Crow,’ she couldn’t care less. The entire world was losing its way.
Mari flipped through brochures of the advanced Quran courses offered at the Red Mosque in Islamabad as well as of Harvard’s comparative-religion courses. She’d apply to both. Though, really, going to Harvard would mean returning with prestige enough to set up her own Islamic school to rival all Islamic schools – Al-Hira, she would call it, after the cave in which the Prophet Muhammad had hidden from the baddies who wanted to kill him. She would come back and she would rule and she would make people like Fazool and Moolee give up their New Year’s parties – God willing, of course.
Qitty glanced at Mari browsing through the brochures. She returned to the drawing she was shading. She’d met a guy at Alys’s and Jena’s weddings, and it had been a perfect courtship. Then he’d said, ‘Jumbo, I’ll marry you if you lose fifty pounds and promise to maintain the weight loss forever.’ When people would ask Qitty what it was about that particular moment, all she knew to say was that, suddenly, she was fed up. She’d yelled at him with all her might: ‘Daffa ho, get lost. If I’m happy loving myself just the way I am, then who are you to put conditions on accepting and loving me?’
That day, a lifetime of rage was unleashed at Lady, her mother, people who compared her to globular fruit, people who used ‘health’ as an excuse to mock her; her anger poured out of her and onto paper. She’d sent her words to a national newspaper: she was not just fat; she was fat and intelligent, fat and funny, fat and kind, fat and fun, fat and beautiful, fat and a good friend, fat and creative, fat plus every lovely attribute in the world. She was fat and happy and did not care about being thin – imagine that.
Next Qitty knew, she’d been offered a weekly column on self-acceptance and talks all over the place. How she’d revelled in Lady’s stunned shriek: ‘What! You’ve become famous for being fat. A fashion and beauty blogger.’ How she’d relished showing a silent Lady the thank-you letters she was continuously receiving for talking about living large and celebrating all of oneself. Never in her dreams had Qitty thought that she’d be called a role model or an inspiration. (‘Never in my dreams either,’ Lady had said in a pinched voice as she’d wondered if Pakeezah Passions should design lingerie for fatties.) But it had been a dream of Qitty’s to pen a graphic novel about a fat sister surrounded by four not-fat sisters and how the fat sister was the one who triumphed. And dreams came true, Qitty knew, as she inked in the final panel for Unmarriageable.
In Lahore, Jena was wrapping up a meeting with potential financiers to discuss funding for her dream organisation – TWS, Together We Stand – which would provide educational scholarships to underprivileged girls in Pakistan. On the way home, she had the driver stop at Nona’s Nices, Nona’s flagship bakery, recently opened in Lahore, where she purchased her daily cravings, cream rolls. Bungles would monitor her gestational diabetes and they’d enjoy the dessert together in front of their wood fire as they debated girls’ names.