Unmarriageable(65)

‘If someone asks,’ Alys instructed, ‘just say you’re wearing them because of sentimental reasons and also: vintage.’

Other than conferring over wedding outfits and mehndi designs for her hands and feet, Sherry did not spend much time with Alys. Visiting the Binat household meant enduring Mrs Binat’s comments about friends who stole their friends’ paramours and, when Alys visited Sherry at her house, the chasm between them was palpable: where before they had discussed every topic freely, now they skirted around the one topic they knew was futile to discuss. Sherry missed Alys, but she was growing increasingly excited as her wedding day approached, and she was loath to let Alys’s silent reproach dampen her enthusiasm.

Then the wedding day was upon them. The guests proclaimed that Sherry was glowing in her pink gota-kinari gharara, and Farhat Kaleen, dressed in a white suit and green tie and looking like a Pakistani flag, was overjoyed at his lovely bride. They signed the wedding papers, and Sherry was married, and before she knew it an entourage was walking her to her husband’s tinsel-decorated car, with her parents holding the Quran aloft over her head, and her siblings and Alys walking behind her.

The car door opened, the real moment of impending rukhsati, of bridal departure, and everyone started to cry. Sherry clung to her parents and siblings for a long minute, and then she hugged Alys farewell. ‘I truly wish you happiness,’ Alys said. ‘I know,’ Sherry said, and she made Alys promise that she would visit her in Islamabad. In fact, her family was planning to come during the summer holidays and Alys was to accompany them. Alys, overcome by this moment of transition from home to home that most every Pakistani girl dreams of and dreads in equal measures, agreed to the visit, pukka promise.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN





The wedding was done, there was no undoing it; Sherry Looclus was Mrs Syeda Shireen Kaleen, and Pinkie Binat came undone, stitch by stitch, and she was determined to unravel her daughters too. Always critical, in her despair she turned cruel: no one would marry Jena, because she was a guileless nincompoop. Qitty was a moustached walrus. Mari was asthmatic and dim – that’s why she hadn’t got into medical school – and she had no sex appeal. No one would marry Lady, because who would marry the youngest sister at the tail end of four unmarried sisters. As for Alys, total loser.

‘You are alienating your daughters,’ Mr Binat said. ‘You are losing your mind.’

Trying to make sense of how Sherry had pulled off this victory under her watchful eyes had put Pinkie Binat’s very identity in a tailspin. She was a failed mother. She was a useless mother. How could Alys have been replaced by Sherry, of all people? Were her daughters not special after all?

The month of Ramadan at the Binat House was a subdued cycle of sehris and iftaris, with Mari leading her troubled family through mandatory prayers and plenty extra. The daily fasting and feasting were followed by a subdued Chaand Raat, the moon sighting leading into a quiet Eid lunch at which, to everyone’s dismay, Mrs Binat wanted to only lament Sherry’s festive Eid as a new bride as per Bobia Looclus’s boasts: Sherry’s brand-new designer clothes for a gala Eid lunch, gold bangles and earrings and necklace set to match, three goats and three sheep sacrificed and the meat distributed to relatives, friends, and the poor. At each lament, Mrs Binat eyed Alys with distraught rage. Alys’s birthday came. She turned thirty-one. Mrs Binat refused cake and wept. Jena turned thirty-three. Mrs Binat wept even more and berated her daughters with new ferocity.

After weeks of their mother’s haranguing, Alys grabbed Jena one afternoon and drove them to High Chai. They ordered cappuccinos. Jena was not hungry. Alys ordered baklava. The spring weather had turned warm and pleasant enough for High Chai to have opened their patio area, and the sisters sat outdoors. A vibrant fuchsia bougainvillea clambered over the red-brick boundary wall, and the scent of freshly mowed grass was in the air. Their mother was out of sight, though not out of mind.

‘Mummy wants you to apologise,’ Jena said, poking a hole in the cappuccino’s foam heart.

‘Mummy, Mrs Naheed, Rose-Nama’s mother – is there anyone who doesn’t want me to apologise?’ Alys said. ‘Maybe I should tattoo a scarlet “sorry” onto my forehead.’

‘Mummy just wants you to admit you made a mistake and that Sherry is a snake of a friend.’

‘I made no mistake and Sherry is no snake.’ Alys scraped a fork across the baklava’s honey-soaked pistachio topping. ‘It’s not as if I was about to walk down the aisle and she coiled herself around him. I had zero interest and Sherry knew that.’

‘I know,’ Jena said.

‘Which is why I am never apologising or accepting any of Mummy’s unreasonable demands. I’ve grown up hearing, “Who will marry you? Who will marry you?” Never once has she deigned to ask whom I will marry. She needs to apologise to me.’

‘You’re both too headstrong.’

‘I swear,’ Alys said, ‘our mother would sell us off to the first bidder if she could. Who in their right mind abandons their daughter at a polo match so that she can be proposed to?’

‘She’s desperate to see us married, that’s all,’ Jena said miserably. ‘It’s not her fault, Alys. She’s the product of her time and this system, and she can’t see beyond it.’