by Saba Imtiaz
Published by Random House India in 2014
Copyright © Saba Imtiaz 2014
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EPUB ISBN 9788184005615
For Rubina Imtiaz and Mansoor Saeed
‘I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture, have been traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices.’
—Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary
CHAPTER 1
Friday, December 31, 2011
Headline of the day: ‘Seoul protests North Korean bootlegging in Islamabad’
So I’m re-reading the review I’ve written of Love At First Bite, Karachi’s latest cupcake bakery, not checking it for typos so much as wondering if my boredom, disdain, and self-loathing shine through a little too much when Kamran pops his head out of his door and yells ‘GET IN HERE NOW, AYESHA!’ It’s 4 p.m. and I am itching to go home. I’m supposed to hear back about a fellowship in New York I applied for, a fantastic three-month stint at a think tank writing about religious parties in Pakistan. It’s all-expenses paid, I’ll get to finally explain developments in Pakistan in more than 600 words—our bloody word limit at the paper—and it’ll mean that more people will actually get to read my work, other than my father and my friends. I had a fantastic phone interview with one of the associates at the think tank—despite the loud argument going on outside my flat between two shopkeepers—and I have a really good feeling about this one. Surely I can leave the office even though it’s only 4 p.m. I must be the first reporter today to have filed their copy—there’s no one else about in the dungeon-like reporter’s room affectionately known as Anne Frank’s attic—what could I possibly have done now? Kamran’s office used to be upstairs where there are windows and natural light, and not down here in the basement with the wretched of the earth—me and my colleagues—till he decided he wanted to keep a closer eye on everyone so now he’s in a large glass-fronted room adjacent to the newsroom, and he keeps popping out of it like a particularly disturbing jack-in-the-box.
I walk in and he’s about to say something when the phone rings, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he says, answering, ‘Sana, sweetheart, I’ll call you in a bit. Yes, I know, Adil’s house tonight.’ Kamran’s wife Sana is possibly the only human being Kamran has ever shown any consideration towards, at least from what I’ve overheard in his office. Also, last month when he found out we’d been out-scooped by the Morning News on the legislators discovering surveillance equipment in their homes story, he swept everything off his desk in a fit of rage except for their wedding portrait. Looking at it, him in a sharp, dark suit with a boyish grin and JFK Junior hair—every inch the scion—smiling down at fragile, willowy Sana decked out in fat emeralds and a green, pink, and gold gharara that must have cost as much as a small flat, you’d not be able to tell my boss was basically a maniac.
‘Check these e-mails out,’ he says, tossing me his phone.
E-mail from sub-editor: Sick today. Won’t be able to come in.
E-mail from city pages head: Have to take my aunt to the doctor’s. Won’t be at work today.
E-mail from sub-editor: I have typhoid. Will be on leave till the 10th.
E-mail from page-maker: I have dengue fever. Please grant me leave till the 5th.
‘You can’t get dengue fever in winter,’ I point out in a futile effort to stave off the inevitable.
‘Whatever.’ Kamran says. ‘You’re staying late.’
‘It’s not my fault everyone has taken the day off to celebrate New Year’s. And I stayed late yesterday too.’
‘You did?’ Kamran asks suspiciously, clearly having forgotten that he spent all of the last evening loitering by my desk complaining bitterly about a big rival news network being taken more seriously than his paper. I didn’t want to say at the time but it struck me that it could have something to do with his industrialist father buying him a newspaper five years ago on his twenty-sixth birthday following a giant tantrum.
‘You’re staying till nine, and you need to edit whatever copy comes in today,’ Kamran counters, and begins glaring at the front page of the Morning News.
I check my e-mail.
‘Thank you for submitting your application for the position of independent researcher at USPak Associates. We thank you for your interest, however we regret to inform you that you have not been selected for the position.’
The rest of the e-mail is a blur of ‘many qualified candidates’ and ‘do apply next year’ bullshit. Again, that’s what comes from being an actual reporter, not some douchebag sitting in Islamabad gleaning all my insights from the newspapers. Why does the world hate me?
There’s no time to even cry over this. I have to edit. My inbox is full of copy that needed to be done an hour ago: Five tortured bodies found near the motorway, two people shot dead as they tried to escape muggers, nine people killed after a bus collided with a train.
I stick my head into Kamran’s office at ten to tell him I’ve had enough and he waves me away without looking up from his phone call—‘Sana, I’m telling you, wear the black Armani, not the red…’
Make it home at 10.45, longing for a shower and my pyjamas and in no mood to dress up and party, and head directly to my room without even saying hello to my father, whose TV I can hear through his bedroom door. I briefly consider taking a hotel room for the night and letting everyone think I’ve been kidnapped or something when Zara texts, ‘there in 5’. ‘No’, I respond, adding ‘Need 20 minutes’. I light a cigarette to try to relax a bit and open my cupboard in the hope that something chic I’ve overlooked will magically jump out at me. Nothing jumps out, but I do notice after a while that I’m seeing double.
I’m about to give up and mourn for the lost fellowship when Zara bursts into my room. She’s had her hair cut in that Natalie Imbruglia circa Torn crop and looks drop dead gorgeous. I tried that cut a few years ago and looked like a sad street urchin. Though her job is even more stressful than mine, Zara always looks like she just stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine and would be so easy to hate if she wasn’t so, well, fantastic. ‘Are you still not dressed?’ Zara perches on the edge of my bed and pulls a couple of beers out of her handbag. ‘Chug this, and get ready.’
I take a long sip, and as the cold beer hits my stomach I realize I forgot to have lunch and dinner and I’m running on a stale packet of chili chips I found in my desk drawer. ‘Kamran made me call every single photographer to tell them he’d fire them if they filed photos of 2011’s last sunset. It was not fun,’ I say, pulling a black jumpsuit out of my cupboard. It’s slightly faded but it’ll be dark and everyone will be drunk soon enough.
Zara comes over to inspect it, tripping over an extension wire and then a spiral notepad lying on the carpet. My room looks like an installation piece titled ‘Where Journalism Goes to Die’. There are notebooks, piles of old newspapers, and shawls seemingly growing from every surface, and I spilled some Diet Cok
e on the bed sheets last night. I wish I could crawl under the bed sheets, stains and all.
‘So can’t we just stay in and watch The Hangover or something?’ I say, so tired she has to tell me I’m trying to stick my foot through an armhole.
‘Absolutely not,’ Zara says, ‘It’s New Year’s, for the love of god.’
Sometimes I wonder how Zara managed to graduate from business school and become a kick-ass investigative reporter. Zara parties like her life depends on it and knows absolutely everyone, and if she doesn’t, she’ll find a way to get their entire biodata; how many As they got on their O-Levels and a list of their last five exes.
I met her two years ago at the PPP office waiting for a press conference to start forty-five minutes after the time it was due to kick off. Zara emerged from nowhere just as I headed out for a smoke—though she swears we’d met at a party three years before that that I don’t even remember attending—and exclaimed, ‘Thank god there’s another woman smoking!’ Three hours, five boring speeches that I forgot the minute the speaker stepped off the dais, and half a pack of cigarettes later, Zara and I were exchanging numbers and making plans to meet up for coffee. Three months later, she was headhunted to Morning News TV after she produced an expose on the public hospital’s procurement department and how it was injecting children with water instead of the polio vaccine. I, on the other hand, am still stuck at my low-paying job at the Daily News where I report on everything from cupcake bakeries to clashes between warring gangs.
‘Hurry up,’ Zara says. ‘We have a lot of places to get to.’
‘How you can care about New Year’s is beyond me,’ I say, memories of horrible New Year’s Past, Present, and Future flashing in front of me. Last year I was drinking ORS till the 3rd of January after getting through a bottle of local vodka at a party where they ran out of the good stuff early on.
I say goodnight and happy New Year to my father who’s standing over a chopping board slicing chicken for the cat’s dinner. ‘Stay safe,’ he calls out.
As we get into Zara’s car, I realize I have no idea where we’re going.
‘So this is the plan for tonight,’ Zara says, after she’s explained what sounds like a very complicated address to her driver. ‘I’ve made a list of every single house party we’ve been invited to and ranked them in order of boring, will serve crappy booze or expect us to bring our own, to those where they may actually play music we recognize. I’ve also looked up all of the addresses on Google Maps and figured out how we can avoid those stupid road blocks.’
‘Or not,’ I say, pointing ahead. There’s a cop frantically waving at us to turn back.
‘Oh seriously, what the hell,’ Zara says. ‘Clearly the cops have run out of containers. They’ve closed off this road with concrete blocks.’
Zara rolls down her window to ask the cop where we can pass through from, but a guy jumps out of the Land Cruiser behind Zara’s car and starts screaming. ‘This is my fucking house!’ He’s pointing to a massive three-storey mansion just behind the roadblock that looks like a copy of an ancient Greek temple. There are towering columns, more white marble than in the Taj Mahal, and the boundary walls are layered with barbed wire. The guy, who couldn’t be much older than Zara and I, is raving at the cop to ‘move those motherfucking blocks’ or he’s out of a job.
The cop looks terrified and starts trying to lift one. Zara groans. ‘Let’s just take another route,’ her driver suggests. We pass by similar mansions, each one’s walls higher than the next. ‘Hey look,’ Zara nudges me. ‘Isn’t that Saad’s house?’ She points to the only house in the neighbourhood that still has a low gate. It was built in the 1950s, when one could potentially talk a thief out of robbing the house by reminding him that he could do better things with his life, when instead of barbed wire, people put broken glass on the walls so they’d hear someone trying to jump over. I cut my foot on that glass when I was seventeen, trying to win a bet with Saad that I could jump over even in a dress.
‘Yeah,’ I say, craning my neck to see if there are any lights on. ‘Hey, did you tell him where we’re going? You do remember he’s joining us, right?’
‘Yes, yes, I told him. Just tell him not to hit on me tonight, ok? I know he’s your friend but I hardly know him and he keeps giving me the glad eye. I really want to meet someone NEW. Like, someone I don’t feel ashamed about fucking.’
As we mull over this, the holy grail of casual sex in Karachi, in silence, the driver makes a turn, and we pass by the park where Saad and I did yoga for a full two days before we gave up and resumed our diet of kebab rolls and fries. It doesn’t feel like New Year’s. There are no street parties or fireworks. All I can see are a few cars on the road. When I was younger, everyone I knew would camp out on the public beach road. It was like an actual carnival: kids rode camels, guys in too-tight t-shirts and jeans blared hits from Indian films on their car stereos, and the cops would always try to make a quick buck by harassing couples. I remind Zara of this and she looks a bit wistful. ‘Yeah. It was nice, wasn’t it? Though you know—and I hate to say this, because it sounds like one of those tales our grandparents tell us—but sometimes I feel like that didn’t happen at all, like I’m trying to remember some sort of previous incarnation, like in a Bollywood film.’
The street lights go off while we wait at a traffic light and within a minute, the roar of generators kicks in. ‘Power cut on New Year’s,’ the driver mutters. Just as well. It goes with how gloomy I feel anyway, though I’m sure it’ll be better once I have a drink in hand and see Saad. I realize that I still have no idea where we’re going.
‘So whose party is this?’ I ask Zara.
‘Faryal’s,’ she says flippantly, checking her reflection in her compact.
‘I’m not going to Faryal’s. I ran into her at Agha’s the other day and she said she was impressed people could shop there on reporters’ salaries. It’s a different issue altogether that I can’t really and only went there because I was having an uncontrollable craving for Bonne Maman jam.’
‘Oh come on,’ Zara rolls her eyes. ‘She’s not that bad. And I think Zain—that really cute cousin of her husband’s who I danced with at their mehndi—might be there.’
Faryal’s house is a smaller version of the Greek temple-styled mansion and as we walk in I instantly hate my clothes. The women look like they belong on the pages of Vogue: I can spot someone wearing a floor-length dress that looks eerily like the one Angelina Jolie wore to last year’s Oscars. The bar runs the length of the garden and there are about a dozen bartenders whipping up drinks. People are already on the dance floor and a few guys have rolled up their jeans and are sitting on the edge of the pool. One of them throws a beer can in and it lands neatly in the middle of an arrangement of rose petals and candles. There’s a burst of laughter. I start looking around for Saad.
‘What does Faryal’s husband do?’ I ask. ‘This party is a little insane.’
‘Textiles, I think. But you know, he could just as easily be smuggling weapons or something. Who knows.’ Zara adjusts her top and plasters on a smile as she sees Faryal. ‘Zara, darling, you look gorgeous!’ Faryal is one of Zara’s friends from college, who—as the legend goes—met her husband on the day she graduated, and was having fittings for a 500, 000 rupee wedding outfit six months later. ‘And you, Ayesha, so interesting-looking in that jumpsuit!’
‘Thanks,’ I say, wishing I had a bitchy putdown. ‘Interesting-looking’ indeed, it’s Agha’s all over again.
‘And try the cupcakes! We brought them in from the Magnolia branch in Dubai!’
She turns away to meet some of the other guests. ‘Did you hear what she called me?’ I whisper to Zara, but she’s staring in the other direction, probably trying to see if she can spot Zain. I make my way to the bar and am toying between ordering a cosmopolitan or a mojito when someone taps me on the shoulder.
It’s Saad, looking very tanned and very, very pissed off.
‘You are so fucking late
. I’ve just spent the past thirty minutes listening to Faryal and her husband talk about their vacation in Bali.’
‘Saad, I walked in and she told me my clothes were “interesting looking”!’
‘No one could ever accuse her of looking interesting,’ says Saad and I curse fate for not having had him next to me to deliver this line to Faryal two minutes ago.
‘Well, you’re here now,’ he says, hugging me, ‘It’s so good to see you,’ he whispers in my ear. For some reason I feel like I’m going to cry. I haven’t seen him in months, and now that he’s here I just want to put my head on his shoulder and tell him how miserable I’ve been.
Saad and I have been friends since we met in the fifth grade where he was one of the few boys who enjoyed discussing the merits of the Famous Five series. We went to college together after which I enrolled in business school and Saad flew off to Cambridge. We Skyped every weekend for the four years he was away and have seen each other through death (his father, my mother), divorce (his sister), heartbreak (just me really, though I saw him through a stalker ex-girlfriend), and changing jobs. Saad eventually moved to Dubai, and now lives in a swanky apartment in Jumeirah where, by his own admission, he has dated far more women than he ever would have in a lifetime in Karachi.
‘So,’ I say, as I take my drink from the bartender and sit down on one of the silk banquettes nearby. ‘What’s new?’
‘Don’t ask,’ Saad says. ‘I’m so glad to be back, even if it’s just for a day. I couldn’t deal with New Year’s in Dubai, and things are a bit weird with this girl I met…’
‘You mean, the girl you slept with,’ I say.
‘It was awful, she was a starfish.’
‘A starfish?’ I light up a cigarette. ‘What the fuck is that?’
‘A starfish is a woman who just lies there. Makes you do all the work. Like a starfish.’ Saad lies back on the banquette and begins to demonstrate.
‘Ugh no, no please. I get it.’