by Saba Imtiaz
‘What the hell is jasmine vodka?’ I ask, as Zara shakes her head frantically. ‘It’s great, it’s not from Russia though,’ he says.
‘I don’t care,’ I say. ‘I’m not drinking something called jasmine vodka.’
‘Whatever,’ he sniffs. ‘You know, all the high-class people are drinking it.’
I confer with Zara and tell him to bring whatever Scotch he has, and maybe throw in a couple of bottles of Murree beer.
‘What about your liver thing?’ I ask Zara, who’s growing paler and paler as the evening progresses. ‘Oh, I’ll stop drinking tomorrow. If I try to get through tonight sober, my liver will be the least of my problems.’
Our guests Omar and his wife, Aliya, walk in. ‘Hi darlings, so sorry we’re late, crisis at work,’ Omar says, as Aliya sits down, reaches for a cigarette and sighs. ‘Whatever, at least you only had to do sales projections for Pampers,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘I’ve been on the phone all day trying to convince people not to offload all their shares because of the whole Supreme Court verdict thing.’ A gold watch glints on her wrist when she flicks her cigarette.
‘I love your dress, Aliya,’ Zara says, as she butters a bread roll, looks at it longingly and then drops it back into the basket. Aliya’s navy Massimo Dutti dress is the only Massimo Dutti dress I’ve ever considered buying because I saw it in a shop window while visiting Saad in Dubai and he insisted I try it on (only to tell me it made me look fat once I was in it). The price tag sent me into paroxysms of middle-class journalist guilt. ‘Saad, do you realize this dress costs as much as most people I interview make in a year? How am I supposed to justify owning a dress this expensive?’ Saad rolled his eyes and I walked out sans dress, which I now wish I owned instead of the boring black kurta I was currently wearing with the only pair of my jeans that weren’t in the wash.
‘Picked it up in New York last summer,’ Aliya tells us. Anyway, tell us what’s happening these days in the city! Things are so bad, na?’
Omar leans in. ‘Wasn’t there a bomb blast today? My squash buddy had to cancel our reservation because they’d cordoned off his route.’
An image of a bundle of sheets flashes through my mind and I try to shake it out of my head and tell Omar where the blast took place when Imad, Zara’s younger brother, strolls in, plonks himself in a chair and starts rolling a joint. ‘IMAD,’ Zara says in a warning tone. ‘What the fuck are you doing? We’re not at home.’
‘Chill,’ Imad drawls. ‘I know the owner.’
Aliya’s other banker friends are as impeccably groomed as herself, barring the ubiquitous circles under their eyes from waking up at 6 a.m. every day to get to work on time. The amount of hours they put into their jobs also explains why they have almost nothing to say to either Zara or I and after a very perfunctory exchange they end up discussing which Aman resorts they’ve been to. People keep dropping by to say hi to them while Zara and I drink our way through the beer. I tune in to overhear Aliya and Omar arguing bitterly about their kid’s music classes. Imad offers me the joint he was nursing. ‘Married people. Aren’t you glad you don’t have to deal with all of this?’
‘Right, it’s time to go,’ I say, trying to count out money for my share of the dinner. ‘Forget it, jaan, it’s taken care of,’ Aliya says, tapping her hand—with a blinding diamond solitaire—on the bill.
Aliya is scandalized when she sees me looking for a cab outside the restaurant and tries to insist that her driver drop us all but I jump into the first taxi I see and almost shout goodbye at them in my haste to get away. As we ride the potholed roads I’m hoping the experience won’t make me throw up. The cabbie starts off on a rant against cops who are only interested in collecting bribes from rich kids on Saturday nights. ‘They should all be stopped and searched! You know how much alcohol these spoilt kids have?’ I pray silently that the cops don’t stop us instead; I have a bottle of Murree beer in my handbag.
CHAPTER 2
Sunday, January 2, 2012
Headline of the day: ‘Deadly brain-eating amoeba resurfaces in Karachi’
8 a.m.: Wake up coughing manically. Must quit smoking, or at least must quit smoking joints of unknown provenance. Reach out for the Vicks. ‘MEOWWWW.’ I have reached out for the cat’s tail by mistake.
My father comes running in, picks up the cat and hugs her. ‘Is Ayesha bothering you? Why are you bothering her, Ayesha?’
‘Do you want some kheer?’
I’ve been awake for about two seconds and I’m already exhausted. My throat hurts and my eyes are sore. Kheer for breakfast is exactly the sort of treat I could do with. Am about to ask for a bowl when I realize the question wasn’t meant for me after all. My dad is talking to the cat. I hate my life.
10 a.m.: What is it about a hangover that makes everything seem so gloomy? Even the social pages aren’t helping. They are my absolute favourite section of the Sunday papers: where else can one find out which politicians’ daughters are decked out in diamonds and carrying Bottega Venetta clutches with no good explanation as to how they can afford them?
Instead of cheering me up, the photos of gleaming socialites make me sad. I have no parties to attend, no mehndi dances to choreograph, no one to brunch with. I remind myself how much I love being single and not having to account for every second of my life to someone, which was the case with my ex, Hasan. It would be nice to share Eggs Benedict with someone though. At least Hasan loved going out for Sunday brunch.
I’d met him one night at dinner with Zara and her brother. I’d reached dinner soaking wet, not because it was raining, but because a group of 20-something boys were throwing water balloons at every girl walking on the road from their car. ‘Of course, the fucking icing on the cake was that they had a police escort,’ I said, trying to dry myself off with a napkin. ‘And everyone on the street was laughing at these poor girls being soaked from head to toe. As if we’ve committed some sort of crime because we’re walking instead of rolling around in an SUV.’
‘You’re dripping on the menu,’ Zara pointed out handing me a hair-tie.
Two very large whiskey drinks and a plate of prawn tempura later, Imad suddenly, all too nonchalantly said, ‘Oh, my friend Hasan is joining us for dessert.’
Zara gave me a look. ‘You might want to brush your hair.’
‘Why?’
Zara shrugged, but it wasn’t convincingly nonchalant.
‘Wait, what is this?’ This smelled like a set-up.
Imad sighed. ‘Don’t be mad. Hasan’s a friend of mine, he’s single and we thought you might like to meet him. Seriously, when was the last time you went on a date?’
‘Last month, actually,’ I said.
‘And how did that go?’ Zara asked.
I groaned at the memory. I’d tried to engage the guy in conversation but he only responded in monosyllables, then he asked me if I wanted to do a line of coke in the restaurant bathroom.
‘Ok, fine. Let me have another drink then.’
Hasan walked in and he was actually kind of… great. He was smart, had a sense of humour, a good job and actually knew that brown shoes didn’t go with black pants. He had more than a passing resemblance to Shahid Kapoor, which didn’t hurt.
And unlike most guys who think sarcasm is off-putting, he laughed at my bitchy remarks about life in the newsroom. ‘You’re hilarious,’ he said, as he refilled my glass, while Imad and Zara beamed like proud parents. As soon as we were done with dinner, Zara and Imad suddenly ‘had to leave’, making Hasan promise to see me home safe. ‘So, coffee?’ he asked.
We ended up at Espresso, my favourite cafe in the city. The server greeted me by name and had my latte ready and placed on the table along with an ashtray, a lighter, and a blueberry muffin before Hasan had even scanned the menu.
‘Wow, they really know you here,’ Hasan said. ‘I’ll have… Err, the flat white, I suppose, if you can make a decent one,’ he said gruffly to the waiter.
The server looked at me askance. ‘O
f course they will,’ I said, feeling defensive of the shoebox-sized cafe I had spent so many hours in. ‘They’re really quite good.’
That should have been my first clue.
‘Isn’t this place amazing?’ I said, as I put my feet up on the comfy armchair and stirred my latte.
‘It’s alright, I suppose,’ Hasan sniffed. ‘I’m not really a fan of small cramped places that play seventies music. Seriously, I was just in Paris, and the cafés there… this place looks like a dhaba in comparison!’
Hasan got up to go to the bathroom, and I texted Zara.
‘He hates Espresso. What kind of person hates Espresso!?’
She replied instantly.
‘Listen, sit through this coffee and make a bloody effort. You need to stop spending your evenings eating crisps and watching talk shows.’
The next evening Hasan invited me out for dinner. Having monopolized the conversation the previous evening, I decided not to talk about myself at all. This was easy, since it turned out Hasan loved talking about his job—an analyst for a brokerage house. ‘Look,’ he whispered as I picked at my crab salad. ‘That’s Jahangir Ali, one of the richest men in the city.’
The next night I was about to text him to ask if he’d like to go out for coffee when Zara called. ‘So I just got done with dinner with Aliya and Omar, and can we come over to your place? We’ll bring drinks!’
‘Sure,’ I said.
Five hours later, my house had turned into the venue for an impromptu dance party. Zara was smashed and insisted on playing 1990s Bollywood hits on repeat. Hasan helped me sequester the cat away to spare it second-hand smoke. I popped in to ask my father if we were being too loud only to have him answer the question by glaring at me while turning the volume of the television all the way up.
Hasan had just asked me if I’d like to go for brunch the next morning when Imad, taking a break from making out with some girl who he had brought along, sniffed at the air and asked if something was burning. It was a floor cushion that Imad had placed a cigarette on. I doused it with a glass of water, snatched away Imad’s drink and told everyone it was time to go home. Hasan was the last to leave, and as I stood by the door wondering how I was going to wash what seemed like five hundred glasses and get a few hours of sleep, he leaned down and kissed me. ‘I really like you,’ he said. And that was it.
We were a couple. Zara ecstatically bragged about how she’d set us up to all of our friends, and for a while, it seemed fairly glorious.
But Hasan’s life was kind of like an Excel sheet, where everything neatly added up. Except me.
I had to end conversations because a political party spokesperson was on call waiting, spend dinners filing copy from my BlackBerry while Hasan pushed food around on his plate, and cancelled dates because rallies ran too long. And he never understood why a 6 p.m. event ended at 8, or why I couldn’t wait to file a press release or why I couldn’t drink a second beer because I had to be up to catch the 7 a.m. bus to Hyderabad. When he wasn’t perplexed by my career, he would annoy me to no end by texting to ask if I was ‘safe’, if I ‘really had to be’ in a village on the outskirts of Faisalabad.
I think the relationship pretty much died when I had to roll away from him while we were making out on his bed and talk Kamran through the local government bill so he could write an editorial.
But Hasan and I still kept seeing each other. We were a ‘couple’ and it was just easier to be together. It meant that I always had a dance partner for the countless dholkis and dance practices and mehndis that were part of every friend’s, cousin’s, and acquaintance’s wedding festivities. We were always able to get a table for dinner and could easily leave parties when the conversation got too boring or the booze procured from the bootlegger ran out, both of which usually coincided.
About five months had passed since we’d first met, but there was nothing holding us together other than social obligations. And then came Hasan’s birthday dinner, for which I had planned to look stunning—a dress from my favourite boutique, high heels, blow-dried hair.
I was sitting at my desk, looking up the number of a salon to book a hair appointment when my phone began buzzing with texts from Kamran and every emergency service in the city. From what I could piece together, there’d been a dispute between two gangs and one of the leaders had been killed in a gunfight. The neighbourhood had been besieged by his supporters shooting at anyone they could find out on the street. Kamran sent me off to the hospital to interview the families of the victims. ‘Find me a story. I want to be able to smell the blood in the paper.’
So I trooped off to the emergency ward at the city’s largest hospital in Saddar. As I walked in, I couldn’t help but think about what Hasan would say if he knew where I was: for him, and all of my other friends, public hospitals were where the ‘public’ went. They conjured images of cholera and dysentery, of people being given injections via steel syringes by doctors who should have been disbarred for malpractice.
Instead, I found public hospitals to be far more humane than the sterile private hospitals with their brusque staff, who thought they were doing you a favour by pointing you in the direction of a doctor who routinely misdiagnosed your ailment. The last time I went to the ER at a private hospital with severe stomach cramps, the doctor took one look at me and said, ‘Oh, it must be PMS.’
‘I think I know what PMS feels like,’ I told her, as I wondered how much money I was going to be charged for every minute I spent on the bed with its three hundred-thread count sheets. ‘This isn’t it.’
‘Maybe it’s gas then. I’m just going to get a nurse to give you a painkiller injection.’
Even though there was a virtual re-enactment of a Martin Scorsese mafia film going on just ten minutes away, the long walkway to the emergency room was full of children in brightly coloured frocks and corduroy shorts, playing. Ambulance drivers dozed in the garden where a group of Sindhi villagers had spread out a rilli on which to have a picnic. As I walked up the stairs, a teenaged nurse came rushing down with arms full of bandages and syringes. Cats weaved between the patients’ beds as I spent the afternoon sitting on bloodstained sheets watching women call their relatives to ask for money to pay for medicines, alternately crying and shouting at their children who were clinging to their legs.
At 9 p.m., I finally walked into Hasan’s house, a full two hours late for dinner. Hasan looked at me, then said, ‘Wow, so you really weren’t lying about having spent the day at work.’ My kurta was wrinkled beyond belief and I could swear the body spray I’d bought at the hospital pharmacy wasn’t masking the smell of antiseptic.
He guided me to the dining room, where the house staff was clearing up dinner plates. I said hello to Hasan’s friends, before he took me by the hand and introduced me to his mother: a stern looking woman in spite of her absurdly oversized bouffant that had been all the rage twenty years ago.
‘And you are?’ she asked, refusing to make eye contact with me.
‘This is Ayesha, I told you about her,’ Hasan said. ‘She’s…’
I turned to him to see how he would describe us.
‘…a good friend of mine, we’ve spent a lot of time together recently. She’s a journalist, which is why she’s so late…’
She eyed my kurta and jeans doubtfully. ‘Oh. I’ve never seen you on TV,’ she said.
‘No, aunty, I actually write for the Daily News,’ I responded, hoping my stomach wouldn’t grumble. I was absolutely starving and the leftovers on the table looked amazing. There was still a kebab left on a serving platter. I was thinking about reaching for it when one of the waitstaff swooped in and took it away.
‘So, Daily News. Is this that young Kamran’s paper?’ she said disdainfully. ‘We don’t subscribe. We’ve been reading Morning for sixty years, you know. It really is the newspaper of record.’
I smiled, unsure of how to respond without telling her that I found the Morning News stuffy and old fashioned and that I felt it had to stop using wor
ds like ‘flay’.
‘So Amna…’
‘Ayesha,’ I corrected her.
‘Tell me about yourself, Ayesha…your family?’
‘Well I have one sister…’ I said.
‘What do your parents do?’ she asked.
‘My father works in advertising. My mother died when I was quite young.’
We both looked at each other expectantly.
‘And my grandfather used to have a bit of land near Lahore but he lost that after being jailed for being a Communist Party activist and …’
‘What is Kamran’s paper like?’ she asked, cutting me off.
I was about to answer when my phone rang. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, and answered it. ‘Yes, Kamran?’
‘What’s the final death toll today?’ he barked. ‘A hundred injured, twenty-five dead,’ I replied. I could see Hasan’s mother looking at me with disgust, as if I’d caused the fatalities.
‘I need you to come back into the office,’ Kamran said. ‘Your story needs some work.’
I apologized to Hasan’s mother and then to him and told them I had to dash. Neither of them looked remotely sorry to hear this.
‘Oh, of course, work is important!’ his mother said, stirring a spoon in her tea. ‘Just ask the guards to help you find your car—they usually park them on the other end of the house.’
‘Actually, I took a rickshaw,’ I said, ‘I don’t have a car.’
She shot Hasan a look and turned to speak to another guest.
My kurta smelled of Dettol, my eyes ached and I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I could smell the Chanel No. 5 wafting over from Hasan’s mother and I didn’t want to be here anymore.
‘Yes, well,’ I said, more or less to myself.
I stalked out of the party, half-expecting Hasan to follow me out but not entirely surprised when he didn’t.
Hasan sent me a text message later that night: ‘I think we should take a break.’