Unmarriageable(45)



Alys gave him the finger. ‘Jena, Wickaam has nothing to gain by lying to me about Darsee. And I trust him.’

‘How can you trust him? You just met him,’ Jena said, puzzled. ‘That’s very unlike you, Alys.’

‘Wait till you meet him,’ Alys said, blushing. ‘You’ll see.’



Alys invited Wickaam to Nona and Nisar’s Christmas party on the pretext that her father wanted to meet the man representing their Fraudia Acre case, but in her heart she wanted Jena to vet him. Wickaam accepted the invitation with an enthusiasm that surpassed mere lawyer–client relations, and Alys eagerly awaited his arrival.

On the morning of the party, the Gardenaars opened their Christmas gifts, attended church service, and returned to a festive house. A regal Christmas tree graced the drawing room, its boughs cheery with home-made baubles and shop-bought trinkets, its fresh pine fragrance competing with the scents of roast lamb, leg of mutton, chicken pulao, mixed-vegetable bhujia, aloo gosht, nargisi kofta, shepherd’s pie, and macaroni salad. Dessert was seviyan, vermicelli in sweet milk, and zarda, the saffron-yellow rice bursting with nuts, raisins, and orange peel, and, of course, Nona’s Christmas cake, with the three wise men on caramel camels bearing their gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and pointing to an edible silver star, which would take them to baby Isa and his mother, Maryam.

At the party, Alys kept an eye on the door even as she and the children belted out ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, followed by an improvised ‘The Twelve Days of Eid’. A petite man entered. He stood at the threshold, one hand behind his back like a picture of Napoleon Bonaparte in a textbook. The man’s dinner jacket hung off sloping shoulders, and his chequered tie lay lopsided over a satiny shirt. He scanned the room, his soft hooded eyes resting on teenage girls preparing a synchronised dance. He frowned before quickly composing his face into a benign smile and heading towards Nisar.

Nisar greeted the man, embraced the three children tagging behind him, and led them to his sisters for an introduction: Farhat Kaleen and his children – eighteen-year-old Fatima, fifteen-year-old Musa, and seven-year-old Isa.

Mrs Binat and Falak were seated in front of a coffee table, and they paused their merry munching on dry fruit in order to smile benevolently at the man and his children. Mrs Binat squinted. What in the world was he wearing? Polyester, if the patina on that shirt was anything to go by. The children were better dressed and greeted her and Falak politely.

‘Pinkie, Falak,’ Nisar said, ‘surely you remember Farhat Kaleen, our cousin nine times removed from the branch of the family that moved to England so many moons ago.’

Kaleen beamed brightly. Upon returning to Lahore, he’d made it a point to reconnect with relatives and so had begun the arduous process of winnowing out the worthy from the worthier. He was very pleased with Nisar Gardenaar’s worth, and because Nisar was worthy, Kaleen was willing to overlook Nisar’s sisters’ unworthiness for having married losers. Still, better to be safe rather than sorry, for fortunes could literally change overnight. Apparently Falak’s son, Babur, was intelligent and had applied to prestigious universities abroad, albeit to study agriculture. His plan was to get in as a farmer and then switch subjects.

Since Kaleen deemed it religiously inappropriate to shake hands with let alone hug women, even if they were his relatives, he proceeded to give Pinkie and Falak the most congenial of nods. He was, he told them, overjoyed to be reunited with them. He had a few memories from childhood, in particular visiting Lahore one summer when he was a young boy of ten and Pinkie sixteen and Falak seventeen. Did Pinkie and Falak remember being put in charge of babysitting him while his mother went to Ichhra Bazaar? Did they remember he found their lipstick-kissed posters of film stars and he’d threatened to tell their mother unless! ‘Unless what?’ both sisters had cried. Unless, he’d replied, they let him tear out the picture of the girl in the red bikini in the lewd Western fashion magazine he’d also found tucked away in the drawer.

‘That picture,’ Kaleen said, ‘allowed me an early window into the different types of women available in the world, and so I was able to see clearly at a young age which women were worthy of my time, attention, and earnings.’

Mrs Binat and Falak exchanged looks. So this is what had become of that snooping telltale! Mrs Binat vividly recalled his drawing-room preacher of a mother repeatedly proclaiming that if only Kaleen were a few years older than ten and Pinkie a few years younger than sixteen, then she would have got them engaged.

Kaleen, as if reading her mind, reminded Mrs Binat of the same, and she giggled in embarrassed horror at the thought of ending up the wife of this balding, sartorially dismal man. Catching Mr Binat’s eye, Mrs Binat shrugged coyly, for it was hardly her fault if admirers from the past popped up to remind her that she may very well have been their wife.

‘And your wife is where?’ Mr Binat said, taking a step closer to Mrs Binat even as he exchanged a bemused look with Alys. Alys and her sisters and Sherry had joined the circle around Kaleen, who seemed to be basking in the role of pistil to their petals. Mari, recognising a kindred spirit with his talk of lewd magazines, was, for perhaps the first time in her life, experiencing the urge to make you-you eyes.

‘Alas, my wife!’ Kaleen put a hand on his heart. ‘My pious wife, Roohi, the good mother of my three children, passed away last year. She and I had gone for our evening stroll and she stopped to smell the flowers, and we suspect some insect entered her nose and from there her brain. Three days sick and on the fourth, poof, gone.’

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