Unmarriageable(61)

His first impulse had been to leave the Binats’ home for a hotel, but in remaining, he hoped to protect the family’s reputation from gossip. Pinkie was to rest assured that he did not hold her or Mr Binat responsible for their daughter’s behaviour. He was a father and knew how hard it was to control one’s children these days, although Alysba was no longer a child but a very aged woman. Alysba was lucky that he was not the sort of man who’d respond to her insult of a refusal by throwing acid on her. In fact, he was firmly against such retaliations.

Mrs Binat felt faint as Kaleen’s speech came to an end. Excusing herself, she fled to her bedroom and sobbed. Lady left the living room in order to give her sisters a rundown of Fart Bhai’s speech – not the type to resort to an acid attack! – and she glanced down at him with horror before flouncing out.

Kaleen scowled at Lady’s back and decided that this behooda – vulgar girl – not ending up his sister-in-law was a blessing in itself. And Alysba too, he decided, was no doubt pretending to be pure and pristine, for she was far too sexy to really be a good girl. As Sherry turned from the money plants, the mid morning sunshine bathed her in its golden glory and it suddenly occurred to Kaleen that Alysba’s friend looked like a spotless sturdy sapling of some spotless sturdy tree. For the rest of the day, he paid great attention to Sherry, partly in order to pointedly ignore the Binats and partly, he hoped, to annoy Alysba.

The next day, Sherry arrived yet again to aid the Binats by keeping Kaleen occupied. Alys thanked her best friend for doing so, but Sherry had an ulterior motive. If Alys did not want Farhat Kaleen, then he was fair game for her. That evening, the Binats and Kaleen dined at the Loocluses’, and Sherry was dismayed to hear Kaleen proclaim that his late wife believed women who smoked possessed loose morals.

‘My late wife,’ Kaleen said, ‘God grant her a place in heaven, agreed with me that cigarettes are different from the hookahs our foremothers used to smoke, for hookahs do not possess the indecent shape of a cigarette.’

‘Your late wife,’ Mrs Binat said spitefully, ‘seems to have missed the fact that tobacco is tobacco no matter the receptacle.’

Mrs Binat was most unhappy at Mr Binat forcing her to attend this dinner at the Loocluses’ when all she felt like doing was pining away in bed. She darted a poisonous eye at Alys, who seemed truly unaffected, and at Kaleen, who seemed to have recovered all too fast. Why was he praising Bobia Looclus’s decor? Pinkie cast a baleful glance over Bobia’s tiny drawing room, the discoloured cheap lace curtains behind a sagging plastic-covered sofa, the wobbly coffee table, the fraying artificial flowers atop an outdated TV, which, gallingly enough, reminded Mrs Binat of the fact that, growing up, her family had barely been able to afford such a one. The only redeeming feature of this entire evening, she granted, was the delicious dinner poor Sherry must have spent the entire day preparing.

At the dinner table Mrs Binat flinched when, after a few bites of the feast, Kaleen exclaimed that it was by far the best meal he’d eaten for days.

‘Compliments to your cook, Bobia jee,’ Kaleen said, raising an appreciative eyebrow at the perfectly round puffed chapatis in the bread basket.

‘Sherry is our cook, mashallah,’ Bobia Looclus said. She pressed upon Kaleen the mutton pulao and achaari chicken. ‘There is magic in her hands.’

‘Indeed! Magic!’ Kaleen liberally helped himself to these dishes as well as the chapli kebabs and shahi korma.

From across the table, Sherry refilled his glass with sweet lassi. The extravagance of the meal had cost them a good amount of her pay cheque, but she was determined to show off her cooking skills.

Alys was dismayed when her mother rudely interrupted Kaleen’s praise with the prayer that the Loocluses be able to hire a cook so that poor Sherry could see the last of the hot kitchen and stinky dishes.

‘Pinkie,’ Bobia Looclus replied in a pinched voice, ‘I hope we never see the day where we can afford a cook if it means our daughters forgetting how to cook. Girls who cannot cook are destined to be divorced.’

‘Then,’ Mrs Binat said, ‘all the upper-class women should be divorced.’

‘Trust me’ – Bobia Looclus glanced keenly at Kaleen – ‘if husbands had to choose between wife or cook, cook would win hands down.’

‘Bobia’ – Mrs Binat glanced archly at Kaleen – ‘cooks may be irreplaceable for you, but for me wives are.’

Kaleen was too busy eating to give either woman attention and, anyway, he wasn’t in the business of giving the bickering of elderly housewives much thought. Instead, he complimented Sherry on her cooking again, much to Bobia Looclus’s gratification and Pinkie Binat’s chagrin, as the desserts – a green jelly trifle and a red carrot gajar ka halwa – were brought out. By the evening’s end, Sherry was sure that if only Farhat Kaleen were to remain in Dilipabad long enough to eat her meals for a few days in a row, she might stand a chance.



The next morning, Sherry awakened for dawn prayers in the bedroom she shared with her younger sister. After praying, she stretched her arms in a yawn and, glancing out of her tiny window, she saw Farhat Kaleen shuffling up the lane. Sherry dressed as fast as she could and set out to meet him by accident.

Kaleen turned into Sherry’s narrow lane. Though stirred by Alysba’s spurning of him, he was not so shaken that he did not, the morning following Sherry’s divine dinner, decide, after his prayers, to slip out of Binat House and make his way towards Looclus Lodge Bismillah. Stepping on weeds growing out of the dirt road, he continued rehearsing the very speech he had laid at Alysba Binat’s feet. To his tremendous delight, Kaleen saw Sherry walking up the lane.