Unmarriageable(31)
‘It’s not your duty and you’re not a failure.’ Alys planted a kiss on Sherry’s cheek. ‘You and I will live together in our old age, on a beach, eat samosas and scones, and feast on the sunsets. We won’t need anyone to support us or feel sorry for us. Your brothers and everyone else will instead envy our forever friendship.’
‘Outstanding fantasy.’ Sherry inhaled the last of her cigarette. ‘You won’t believe what my mother did after the potbellied pervert telephoned. Instead of thanking God that I’d escaped a fate of being reader and massager in chief, she starts berating me for not massaging him properly and so losing another proposal. I swear, I wish my mother would just disappear for a while.’
‘Better yet, I know how to make you disappear.’ Alys put her arm around Sherry. ‘We’re going to Lahore for the NadirFiede walima, and you’re coming with us.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mrs Binat would have been utterly displeased about Sherry’s inclusion in the Suzuki for the two-hour trip to her elder brother’s home in Lahore, but she was so excited about Jena and Bungles’s future nuptials that she did not complain too much. Before they knew it, they were parking in the driveway of the six-bedroom house located in Jamshed Colony – unfortunately no longer a fashionable part of town, much to Mrs Binat’s chagrin, but thankfully not one of the truly cringeworthy areas either.
When they heard the Binat car honking at their gate, Nisar and Nona Gardenaar came rushing out to the driveway with their four young children – a daughter, Indus, and sons, Buraaq, Miraage, and Khyber.
‘Now, this family,’ Alys said to her mother, ‘is what liking your spouse and compatibility look like.’
‘It was love at first sight, is what it was,’ Mrs Binat said.
Years ago, Nona’s older brother, Samir, had been cohorts with Nisar during their medical residencies. Nona had been studying at the National College of Arts, and one day Samir’s motorbike broke down and he borrowed Nisar’s to pick her up from university. As thanks for lending his bike, Nisar was invited to their house for dinner. The sombre boy with a shy smile found Nona’s family – her parents, her brother, and Nona herself, with her freckles and sugar smile – a very pleasing contrast to his younger sisters, Falak and Pinkie, who seemed obsessed with fashion, celebrity gossip, and who’s who.
Under one pretext or another, Nisar began to frequent Nona’s home. He wanted to be a doctor. She wanted to be an artist. Her father worked at a travel agency, and her mother was an art teacher in a government school, and Nona wanted to teach art too. Her goals were to earn enough for art supplies and, once in a while, to go out for a nice meal. Nisar warned his sisters that they may not be impressed by Nona, but, to his pleasant surprise, Falak and Pinkie fell in love with Nona and her total disinterest in where they came from and who they were now.
By then Falak was struggling to find some happiness with the bad-tempered underachiever she’d married, who was very proud at having no ambition other than playing cards and carrom and smoking charas and who knew what else with his equally feckless friends, and finally she’d been forced to look for a job. Through a friend’s recommendation, she joined a bank as a teller and felt forever guilty at not being a stay-at-home mother to her only child, Babur.
In turn, Pinkie died a million deaths whenever Tinkle and her friends openly mocked her name, Khushboo, by calling her ‘Badboo’ and laughed at her mispronunciation of words or brands – ‘Not paaanda, darling, pan-da.’ ‘Not Luv-is, dear, Lee-vize.’ ‘Goga, you must hear Pinkie’s latest gaffe. Pinkie, say “Tetley” again. What did I tell you, Goga, “Tut-lee!”’ How utterly lost and stupid Pinkie would feel as Tinkle and clique conversed about Sotheby’s and Ascot and the Royal Family and ‘oh, how very mundane it all was at the end of the day.’ Pinkie derisively referred to her in-laws as Angrez ki aulad – Children of the English – even as she envied them their furfur fluency in English and swore to herself that her children would also master the language and customs and never be mocked on that score.
‘Both my poor sister and my rich sister are unhappy in their own ways,’ Nisar had told Nona one evening as they sat on the metal swing in her parents’ garden. ‘After our parents passed away, as their brother, I vowed to take care of them whenever needed, and, Nona, I want to continue with that vow once married.’
That had been the beginning of Nisar’s proposal to Nona, and she said yes. Nona’s parents cautioned her that marrying out of one’s religion could be extra-challenging, but having had their say they welcomed the Muslim Nisar. Falak and Pinkie did not care that Nona was Christian. They did care that she adored their brother and was kind to them.
It was Nona who babysat Falak’s son until she was promoted to bank assistant manager and was able to hire a reliable woman to look after Babur during the day. It was Nona who dropped the high-end fashion magazines into Pinkie’s lap and told her to study them, until Pinkie, with her killer figure, could confidently out-style anyone – especially Tinkle, who Nona had disliked on sight, what with her ample art collection but scant knowledge of who she’d had the disposable income to collect.
Over the years, Nona would get annoyed over Falak’s lack of pride in being a working woman and her rants against her husband but refusal to subject Babur to a ‘broken home’, as well as over Pinkie’s obsession with marrying her daughters into great wealth, but overall she loved her sisters-in-law and all their children.