Unmarriageable(6)

Qitty drew two horns atop Lady’s caricature.

‘Lady!’ Alys said, avoiding the torn vinyl as she settled into the seat beside her best friend, Sherry Looclus, who taught Urdu at BSD. ‘Apologise to Qitty. Why do you two sit together if you’re going to fight?’

The van driver was, as usual, enjoying the skirmish. The rest of the teachers ignored it.

‘I pray your dreams come true,’ Jena said to Lady, ‘but that doesn’t mean you can be mean to Qitty or to anyone. We are all God’s creatures and all beautiful.’

‘Those who can afford plastic surgery are even more beautiful,’ Lady said. ‘Qitty, you fatso, stop snivelling. You know I call you fat for your own good.’

‘I eat far less than you, Jena, Alys, and Mari all put together,’ Qitty said. Lady was willowy and seemingly able to eat whatever she wanted all day long without expanding an inch. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘It’s not fair,’ Alys agreed. ‘But, then, who said life is fair? Remember, though, that looks are immaterial.’

‘Alys, you are such an aunty,’ Lady said, taking out a lip gloss and applying it with her pinkie.

‘You can call me an aunty all you want,’ Alys said, ‘but that doesn’t change the fact that looks are not the be-all and end-all, no matter what our mother says. Qitty is a straight-A student, and I suggest, Lady, you pull up your grades and realise the importance of books over looks.’

Lady stuck her tongue out at Alys, who shook her head in exasperation. Once all the teachers had climbed in, the van drove out of the gates and past young men on motorbikes ogling the departing schoolgirls. These lower-middle-class youths didn’t have a prayer of romancing a BSD girl, Alys knew, despite the fantasies that films tried to sell them about wrong-side-of-the-tracks love stories ending in marriage, because there were few fates more petrifying to a Pakistani girl than downward mobility.

Alys watched Lady’s reflection in the window. She was running her fingers through her wavy hair in a dramatic fashion. Lady was a bit boy crazy, but Alys also knew that her sisters were well aware that they couldn’t afford a single misstep, since their aunt’s slander had already resulted in the family’s damaged reputation. She tapped her sister’s shoulder, and Lady looked away as the van turned the corner.

Dilipabad glittered after the rainfall, its potholed roads and telephone wires overhead freshly washed and its dust settled. The manufacturing town claimed its beginnings as a sixteenth-century watering hole for horses and, after a national craze to discard British names for homegrown ones, Gorana was renamed Dilipabad after the actor Dilip Kumar. In more recent times, Dilipabad had grown into a spiderweb of neighbourhoods, its outskirts boasting the prestigious residences as well as the British School, the gymkhana, and upscale restaurants, while homes and eateries got shabbier closer to the town centre. In the town centre was a white elephant of a bazaar that was famous for bargains, a main petrol pump, and a small public park with a men-only outdoor gym. The elite, however, stuck to the gymkhana, with its spacious lawns, tennis and squash courts, golf course, boating on the lake, swimming pool, and indoor co-ed gym with ladies-only hours.

Mrs Binat had insisted they apply for the Dilipabad Gymkhana membership despite the steep annual dues, and since the gymkhana functioned under an old amendment that once a member, always a member, the Binats were in for life. The amendment had been added on the demand of a nawab who, after gaining entry to the gymkhana once the British relaxed their strict rule of no-natives-allowed, had been terrified of expulsion.

Though Mr Binat was seldom in the mood to attend the bridge and bingo evenings, Mrs Binat made sure she and the girls put in an appearance every now and then. Once Alys had discovered the gymkhana library, she’d spent as much time there as she had in the school library in Jeddah, where she’d first fallen in love with books: Enid Blyton. Judy Blume. Shirley Jackson. Daphne du Maurier. Dorothy Parker. L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and S. E. Hinton’s class-based novels, which mirrored Indian films and Pakistani dramas.

In the gymkhana library, Alys would choose a book from the bevelled-glass-fronted bookcase and curl up in the chintz sofas. Over the years, the dim chinoiserie lamps had been replaced with overhead lighting, all the better to read Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Austen, the Bront?s, Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Thackeray, Hardy, Maugham, Elizabeth Gaskell, Tolstoy, Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Wilde, Woolf, Wodehouse, Shakespeare, more Shakespeare, even more Shakespeare.

Alys pressed her forehead against the van’s window as they left behind the imposing gymkhana and passed the exalted Burger Palace, Pizza Palace, and the Chinese restaurant, Lotus, all three eateries shut until dinnertime. Only the recently launched High Chai was open and, going by the number of cars outside, doing brisk business – in local parlance, ‘minting money’ – because Dilipabadis were entertainment-starved.

Alys gazed at the cafe’s sign: HIGH CHAI in gold cursive atop pink and yellow frosted cupcakes. It took her back to a time when their mother would dress her and Jena in frilly frocks, a time before their father and his elder brother, Uncle Goga, were estranged, a time when they’d been one big happy joint family living in the colossal ancestral house in the best part of Lahore: her paternal grandparents, her parents and sisters, Uncle Goga and Aunty Tinkle and their four children.

They’d play with their cousins for hours on end. Hide-and-seek. Baraf pani. Cops and robbers. Jump rope and hopscotch. They’d fight over turns and exchange insults before making up. However, Tinkle always took her children’s side during the quarrels.