Unmarriageable(14)

‘Mashallah. You must have gone to Mecca and Medina?’

‘All the time.’

‘Mashallah. My cousin is working in construction there. Building malls. He doesn’t like it. He misses home. But the money he sends has already got two daughters married off with full dowry, alhamdulillah.’

Alys sighed. Did anyone talk about anything except marriage in this country?

‘I want to go into the graveyard,’ Alys said. ‘There’s no closing time, is there?’

‘No. But most people are scared of the dead, and even more so at night-time.’

‘If you ask me,’ Alys said, ‘it’s the living who people should be scared of.’

The vendor laughed. He handed her a plastic bag full of rose petals. When Alys protested that she had no money, he smiled and said, ‘Today free, but next time buy double flowers.’

Alys stepped into the cemetery and onto a paved path that wound through graves, some with plain tombstones and others with elaborately filigreed ones. Many headstones had epitaphs in both Urdu and English, the scripts of both languages shining like ebony jewels against the grey-veined white marble. She read random epitaphs, placing petals on strangers’ graves.

A row of ashoka trees, vibrant and healthy, created a man-planted border, their roots feeding from blood and bones on both sides, and Alys slipped through the trunks and into, it seemed, another cemetery. Dirt paths wound through overgrown vegetation and eroded marble headstones with British names in faded lettering. She walked on, scared now that she was so deep inside the graveyard. Moonlight spread down her back like ice. All was quiet except for crickets and her footsteps, crunching twigs. She saw a form leaning against a wall, an unnatural fiery glow emanating from where a mouth should be.

Alys screamed. The form screamed.

A girl stepped out of the shadows, a lit cigarette dangling from bony fingers, a scrawny braid curling down one shoulder to her waist. She was wearing red sandals and a purple-and-green shalwar kurta topped with a red cardigan with white plastic buttons. Not someone, Alys instinctively knew, her mother was going to think very highly of, for, as was the case with too many people who’d jumped class, Mrs Binat was often the harshest critic of the class she believed she’d left behind.

‘You scared me.’ Alys put a hand on her beating heart. ‘I thought you were a ghost.’

‘Hel-lo. You scared me.’ The girl spoke in Urdu. ‘I thought you were a rabid dog. What are you doing here? Are you from the family that has moved into the ruins in front of the graveyard?’

Alys nodded. ‘Not ruins any more. It’s cleaned up quite well.’

‘Aren’t you Pakistani?’ the girl said. ‘Your Urdu is very poor, even for a Burger.’

Alys rolled her eyes at the derogatory term used to describe Pakistanis who predominantly went about their lives in fluent English by Pakistanis who predominantly went about their lives in fluent Urdu or a regional dialect. In local parlance, Alys was an English-speaking Burger and this girl an Urdu-speaking Chapati. Usually the two groups did not reside in the same neighbourhoods, but that seemed to be the case here.

‘Do you know any local languages?’ the girl asked.

‘English is a local language,’ Alys said, switching to English completely.

The girl replied in a stilted English, ‘Did you people buy the ruins?’

‘We own it,’ Alys said.

‘You are a Binat?’ The girl switched back to Urdu.

‘Yes.’

The girl’s eyes widened. ‘And what has brought the Binats to live in Dilipabad?’

Mrs Binat had forbidden any mention of the family feud, but Alys felt they had nothing to be ashamed about. Also, who cared if people talked? People were going to talk anyway. So she told the girl the truth.

‘They took everything?’ The girl’s face softened.

‘Pretty much.’

‘Kismet, wheel of fortune, luck, destiny, what can one do? By the way, my good name is Syeda Shireen Looclus, but everyone calls me Sherry. What is your good name?’

‘Alysba. Everyone calls me Alys.’

Sherry held out her hand. Alys shook it.

‘Married?’ Sherry asked.

‘I would be if my mother had her way. You?’

‘Still unmarried, much to my mother’s distress,’ Sherry said. ‘I am an Urdu lang-lit teacher at the British School of Dilipabad.’

‘A career woman.’ Alys beamed. ‘Do you know if your school is looking for English teachers?’

‘You want to teach?’

‘It just occurred to me.’

‘BSD is the best school here, and Mrs Naheed is very picky. Education level?’

‘Second year of undergrad in English literature.’

‘How old you are?’ Sherry asked.

‘Twenty.’

‘You look much younger,’ Sherry said wistfully. ‘How old are you really?’

‘Twenty.’ Alys frowned.

‘Chal yaar – whatever, friend. No need to lie to me, I won’t tell a soul.’

‘I’m not lying. In March, I’ll turn twenty-one.’

‘Really? Hasn’t your mother ever told you that you need to pretend to be at least four years younger than your real age? That way you’ll age much slower publicly and can stretch out your marriageable years.’