Unmarriageable(8)

Tinkle wanted them gone from the Binat ancestral home, and Bark shamefacedly accepted the property in Dilipabad that Tinkle didn’t want because of its ominous location in front of a graveyard. Bark told Pinkie that she could no longer afford to be superstitious and that they had to move as soon as possible, and so Jena and Alys were disenrolled from Kinnaird College and Mari, Qitty, and Lady from the Convent of Jesus and Mary school.

The Binats arrived in Dilipabad one ordinary afternoon, the moving truck unceremoniously dumping them outside their new house with its cracked sign proclaiming: BINAT HOUSE. Binat House was an abundance of rooms spread over two storeys, which looked out into a courtyard with ample lawn on all four sides, gone to jungle. The elderly caretaker was shocked to see the family. As he unlocked the front doors and led them into dust-ridden rooms with musty furniture covered by moth-eaten sheets, he grumbled about not having been informed of their coming. Had he known, of course the rooms would have been aired. Cobwebs removed from the ceiling. Rat droppings swept off the floors and a fumigator called. Electricity and boiler connections reinstalled. A hot meal.

The Binats stared at the caretaker. Finally, Hillima, the lone servant who had chosen to accompany the fallen Binats – despite bribes by Tinkle, Hillima was loyal to Pinkie, who’d taken her in after she’d left her physically abusive husband – told the caretaker to shut up. It was his job to have made sure the house remained in working order. Had he been receiving a salary all these years to sleep?

Hillima assembled an army of cleaners. A room was readied for Mr Binat. The study emerged cosy, with a gorgeous rug of tangerine vines and blue flowers, leather sofas, and relatively mildew-free walls. Once the bewildered Mr Binat was deposited inside, with a thermos full of chai and his three younger daughters, attention turned to the rest of the house.

Mrs Binat and Alys and Jena decided to pitch in; better that than sitting around glum and gloomy. They coughed through dust and scrubbed at grime and shrieked at lizards and frogs in corners, though Alys would bravely gather them up in newspaper and deposit them outdoors. Dirt was no match for determined fists, and Alys and Jena were amazed at their own industriousness and surprised at their mother’s. They’d only ever seen her in silks and stilettos, fussing if her hair was out of place or her make-up smudged. Grim-faced, Mrs Binat snapped that before their father married her, she’d not exactly been living like a queen. Soon floors sparkled, windows gleamed, and, once the water taps began running from brown to clear, Binat House seemed not so dreadful after all.

Hillima was pleased with the servants’ quarters behind the main house – four rooms with windows and attached toilet, all hers for now, since the caretaker had been fired for incompetence.

Bedrooms were chosen. Alys took the room overlooking the graveyard, for she was not scared of ghosts-djinns-churails, plus the room had a nice little balcony. In their large bedroom on the ground floor, Mrs Binat brought up to Mr Binat – as urgently as possible, without triggering another heart attack – the matter of expenses. Pedigree garnered respect but could not pay bills. There was the small shop in Lahore that Goga had missed in his usurpations, which they still owned and received rent on, but it wasn’t enough to live on luxuriously. Gas bills. Electricity bills. Water bills. The younger girls had to go to school. Mr Binat’s heart medicines. Food. Clothes. Shoes. Toiletries. Sanitary napkins – dear God, the cost of sanitary napkins. Gymkhana dues. Hillima’s salary, despite free housing, medical, and food. They also needed to hire the most basic of staff to help Hillima: a dhobi for clean, well-starched clothes, a gardener, a cook. How dare Mr Binat suggest she and the girls cook! Were Tinkle Binat and her daughters chopping vegetables, kneading dough, and washing pans? No. Then neither would Pinkie Binat and her daughters.

It was Alys’s decision to look for a teaching job. She and Jena had been in the midst of studying English literature, and their first stop was the British School of Dilipabad. Mrs Naheed pounced on them, particulary thrilled with their accents: the soft-spoken Jena would teach English to the middle years, and the bright-eyed Alys would teach the upper years. Alys and Jena were giddy with joy. Newly fallen from Olympus, they were inexperienced and nodded naively when Naheed told them their salary, too awestruck at being paid at all to consider they were being underpaid. What had they known about money? They’d only ever spent it.

Alys and Jena had returned home with the good news of their employment only to have Mrs Binat screech, ‘Teaching will ruin your eyesight! Your hair will fall out marking papers! Who will marry you then? Huh? Who will marry you?’

She’d turned to Mr Binat to make Alys and Jena quit, but instead he patted them on their heads. This was the first time he’d truly felt that daughters were as good as sons, he attested. In fact, their pay cheques were financial pressure off him, and he’d happily turned to tending the overgrown garden.

Alys was always proud that her actions had led their father to deem daughters equal to sons, for she had not realised, till then, that he’d discriminated. However, looking back, she wished he’d at least advised them to negotiate for a higher salary. She wished that her mother had asked them even once what they wanted to be when they grew up instead of insisting the entire focus of their lives be to make good marriages.

Consequently, Alys always asked her younger sisters what they wanted to be, especially now that there seemed a cornucopia of choices for their generation. Qitty wanted to be a journalist and a cartoonist and dreamt of writing a graphic novel, though she said she wouldn’t tell anyone the subject until done. Mari had wanted to be a doctor. Unfortunately, her grades had not been good enough to get into pre-med and she’d fallen into dejection. After copious pep talks from Alys, as well as bingeing on the sports channel, Mari decided she wanted to join the fledging national women’s cricket team. But this was a desire thwarted by Mrs Binat, who declared no one wanted to marry a mannish sportswoman. Also, Mari suffered from asthma and was prone to wheezing. Mari turned to God in despair, only to conclude that all failures and obstacles served a higher purpose and that God and good were her true calling. Lady dreamt of modelling after being discovered by a designer and offered an opportunity, but their father had absolutely forbidden it: modelling was not respectable for girls from good families, especially not for a Binat.