Tunnel Vision (13 page)

‘
Patty eaters murdabad!
'

‘
Pate eaters murdabad!
'

‘
What do you mean “be with?”
'
I asked casually, though my fingers were drumming on my thigh under the table.

‘
You know, spend time with,
'
his answer was also a study in casualness, and his grip on his spoon was firm.

I dropped it. We talked about silly women who believed in urban legends like cotton wool in the haleem, and fundos with HIV infected needles lurking in shopping malls.

We were happy just being together. Why did I listen to my mother that morning? Why did I let her push me over the line he had drawn right at the beginning?

ALLAH KA KARAM HAI, BIRYANI GARAM HAI

SIGN ON BIRYANI VENDOR
'
S CART IN SADDAR

~

T
hat marriage wasn
'
t all it was cut out to be, that it was certainly not deserving of the mass hysteria it seemed to provoke in Pakistani women seemed fairly evident to me quite early in life. My parents were married, and look what it did to the love they
'
d once presumably had for each other.

Some women said marriage was a good idea because of the financial and emotional security guaranteed through the
‘
protector and provider
'
. That didn
'
t make sense for a woman like me who had provided her own financial and emotional security pretty much as soon as she was able to. And it didn
'
t make sense for others like me. Oh I knew there were others. It was a big city. A big, expensive city. One income was no longer enough. And it seemed to me the balance was fundamentally off because a lot of men expected their wives to go on working after marriage but also cease and desist from showing other signs of the independence that a long time in the work place would inculcate in anyone.

Then there were men who didn
'
t work at all but let their wives and daughters work and lived off their earnings, quashing any objections with a raised hand and the very convenient
‘
but I
'
m the MAN
'
.

Then again, Amna Mumani and Chotay Mamu seemed to do okay. The thing was, who knew how things really were in a relationship but the two people in a relationship? Marriage saved my Mamu from a lifetime spent under the domination of his sister, but it might have translated into a lifetime spent under the domination of his wife. He seemed happy though. Maybe he just liked being dominated.

Still, I thought it was tragic the way so many of the girls I
'
d known in college had seen marriage as their ticket out of the dictatorial presence of conservative parents and into the (presumably) liberal benevolence of partners who would give them more room to be themselves. Individualism, my generations
'
favourite western import, had grown increasingly popular in recent years. Nowadays everyone wanted to
‘
be who I am, you know? Why can
'
t they just let me be myself?
'
That was the beauty of individualism; one size fits all. Unleash yourself on the unsuspecting world even if your self isn
'
t worth the paper it
'
s registered on. But if all those girls really wanted to be strong, independent individuals, why did they want to diminish themselves by getting married?

That
'
s what marriage meant. Being diminished. The woman being diminished while the man loomed ever larger. Two good years and then major shrinkage on the part of the female psyche once the kids popped out. Hadn
'
t that been the case in our family? I thought they had been happy in the early years; she had looked radiant on her wedding day, exuberant on her honeymoon, content in Shangri-La, happy at mushairas. But by the time I was old enough to notice, she frowned more than she smiled. Always tense, irritable, curt with everyone but Adil and her husband. After Abba
'
s departure she had turned our house into a mausoleum for her husband, but I had seen nothing during their last few years together to justify such an effort. The tears, the fruitless quest, the perennial envelope of widow white, was she just going through the motions because that
'
s what she thought she should do?

And sure Mumani and Mamu seemed to have achieved a harmonious balance of give and take; he gave, she took, but other people just wouldn
'
t let them be.Why did you move out? Why are you living separately? Why don
'
t you have children? Why are you so bossy to my brother? Why are you so tolerant of her nagging? Marriage hadn
'
t provided a protective umbrella against family intrusiveness for them, it had ushered them into a larger tent where it was open season on anyone who had been married less time than you had.

And then there was the story of Kulsoom and Amir. Kulsoom and I had been friends at KU. Her whole life seemed to have been spent planning her wedding. Her vivacity, intellect, energy was recycled through endless list making: wedding guests, possible menus, mehndi songs, portrait photographers, designers, etc. A suitable boy was duly produced – Amir – seven years older, good job in Saudia – a date set – deed done. The happy couple departed for shifting sands. Excited farewells. She wrote once. She didn
'
t write back. No news. A year later a short note. Amir with the good job was also Amir with the short fuse. She had given up a privileged, maid-fuelled existence for hell in a country where she couldn
'
t even drive. She wanted to leave him but her parents said she belonged in her husband
'
s house now. She would write more but she didn
'
t really have anything left to say to anybody except
‘
help
'
and she didn
'
t want to be tiresome. Mithai from her parents
'
house announcing the birth of a baby girl. Ammi making pointed comments about my turn next.

Kulsoom killed herself when her daughter was a year old.The family tried to keep it quiet, but a story like that gets around. There was no soyem for her. I missed Kulsoom; for all the lectures she had given me, it had never really bothered her that I didn
'
t want the same things she did.

I stared out of the ambulance window at the next red light. A camel looked me in the eye and winked, then turned his head slightly as if to say
‘
at least you don
'
t have to drag sacks of horse feed across the city every day
'
. Go in peace friend camel, I thought. May you have the courage to bite the hand that beats you.

Mr Khairuddin had been married too! I bet he still was. I bet his wife was still blaming other women for her husband
'
s behaviour and terrorizing his female staff. I bet his children were misogynistic idiots. I bet Mrs K never even considered getting divorced. Marriage. Love. Marriage. I wished I were a camel dragging horse feed across the city.

*

‘Ashoo, we
'
re there.
'
Adil leaned over as the ambulance stopped.
‘
Before we go in I want to tell you something but you have to promise not to tell Ammi if you wake up … when you wake up,
'
he added politely.
‘
I
'
m getting married.
'

The siren was finally off, thank God, but who was screaming?

HANS GAYI TO PHUNS GAYI

COLLEGE BOY WISDOM

~

A
s the ambulance pulled into the sprawling Agha Khan University Hospital mothership and headed for the emergency entrance at the back, Adil began filling me in on his precious, including details I would actually have preferred not to take to the grave with me, in case they kept me up during my nights underground.

‘
Killer eyes Ayesha, killer eyes,
'
he
'
d practically moaned.
‘
I see lots of pretty girls every day, it
'
s part of my job, but she
'
s on a different level altogether. Remember the black and white films we always flick past when channel surfing, with like
Noor Jehan
or someone? The heroines always have perfect, flawless faces and huge eyes. Like a cow
'
s, only more beautiful. Of course she
'
s not fat like them, no, she
'
s more like Resham than Saima.
'

My brother
'
s knowledge of Pakistani cinema, what was left of it, had improved thousand-fold once he
'
d joined Globe. Like its (very recent) predecessors Discus, ARYAN, Prime and even Roz, AapKiTV filled the void created by the lack of production education and the subsequent mediocrity of most programming by promoting the hell out of pop culture. Films that no aspiring burger would be caught dead watching, pop stars with fans that numbered in the hundreds not the millions (like Alamgir had, what happened to him?), models and actresses who had reached a certain plateau in their careers, AapKiTV embraced them all. Was this creature with bovine sight one of them?

‘
We met on a shoot,
'
Adil had gushed. How else? I had thought. Would it be too much to hope she
'
d been a producer or even a writer and not the token eye-candy required to make the show marketable?

‘
She wasn
'
t the presenter,
'
he had continued as I heaved an internal sigh of relief,
‘
in fact she has one of the most difficult jobs of all. She
'
s the make-up artist.
'

Hysterical laughter welled within me but I dammed it. The least I could do was listen. Actually that was all I could do but hopefully my forced inertia was only temporary.

‘
She was doing Fariq
'
s make-up, you know the one who sang that song? What was it? Ah yes, “Oooh I love you janeman, janeman, Ooooh our love is so much fun janeman.”
'

For the first time I wished I were dead.

‘
Anyway, Fariq asked for her specifically. He
'
s very finnicky about his styling because he has very bad skin and he says a crucial ingredient in his album
'
s success is his look, so he likes to make sure he
'
s always looking good. Of course he
'
s short too, but you know many of them are and I fixed that problem with the eyes wide shut arms wide open shot you hate so much. So, this girl Farah, isn
'
t that a beautiful name? Have you ever heard a name so melodious?
'

Only about a million times. There were men called Farah too if I wasn
'
t mistaken. Or was that Kaukab? I looked at the orderly and realized I was thinking of Zarin.

‘
So this girl Farah shows up half an hour late. That
'
s okay because we weren
'
t ready anyway. Shoots always run a couple of hours late. She was very apologetic, explained she had a bride to do and couldn
'
t get away till she was completely ready because you can
'
t trust such an important job to a trainee. I had no problem, because it gave me some extra time to get the lighting right, but Fariq just lost it. He
'
d been getting irritable anyway because the chota hadn
'
t found the Diet Coke and Kitkat he wanted but brought him Pakola and Cadbury
'
s Twist instead. And he just totally started yelling at Farah. “you
'
re late, there
'
s no excuse, unprofessional, what do I pay you for?” He just got more and more rude with every sentence. She tried to cut in a couple of times, we heard her tell him they
'
d worked together for two years and this was the first time she
'
d been late, but he just wouldn
'
t listen. The rest of us were getting very uncomfortable, I mean yeah so some women are just eye candy but there
'
s no excuse for being so abusive to them verbally, is there? Especially not in a public place. I told him to calm down and he turned on me.

‘
Who the hell are you?
'
Adil did a very good impression of Fariq,
‘
Don
'
t you know who I am? One call from me, and you
'
ll be out of a job. And as for this randi …
'
but that was as far as he got because Farah stepped up and slapped him.
'
Adil chortled with glee.

‘
The best part is the camera was rolling and we have it on tape. Fariq went for her when she slapped him but the light boy caught his arm. Then I told him if he didn
'
t calm down, we would air that footage so his little girl fans could see what he was actually like. Of course the boss would never have agreed, but Fariq didn
'
t know that. He straightened out in no time. Apologized to me, he even let Farah do his make-up after all. He doesn
'
t know it, but she highlighted the shadows under his eyes.
'

‘
Fariq doesn
'
t wear make-up,
'
Zarin Khan blurted from the corner,
‘
his skin is just like that.
'