by Saba Imtiaz
The audience has stopped looking at the clothes. Everyone is talking excitedly. ‘Tsk, you know Kamran should really spend less time at the office. Think of his poor wife sitting at home all evening. Clearly she felt like she had to get his attention,’ the woman behind me says. ‘Oh please,’ responds her companion, who I recognize from a long-forgotten 1990s scandal involving her husband and kickbacks in a shipping company deal. ‘If you can’t handle it, don’t drink. These new money types I tell you.’
I can’t help but feel sorry for Kamran. He adores his wife.
The emcee announces that this is the last show of the evening. The lobby is buzzing with post-Sana analyses. One woman in hipster glasses sniffs that it was an ‘inspired satire on modelling’—which would be a plausible explanation if Sana had a sense of humour. Sana herself is nowhere to be seen. Farrah bounds out and squeals, ‘DIDN’T I TELL YOU!’ I smile and offer her a cigarette. ‘The woman was drunk out of her mind. I think the poor thing actually had a case of nerves and thought a drink would make it better. And now because of her, we aren’t even allowed to have any water backstage! We’re going to die of thirst tomorrow. The event managers think we’re sneaking in booze in plastic water bottles!’
‘Aren’t you?’ I counter. ‘Well, yes, but how else is one supposed to survive fashion week?’
Monday, April 4, 2012
Headline of the day: ‘10 million Pakistanis drink alcohol’
Wake up to my phone beeping incessantly. Scroll through messages. Most of them are from friends who have read last night’s fashion week dispatch and want to know if it ‘really happened!?’ This is far more enthusiasm than I get from covering press conferences and drive-by shootings. You can barely get Karachiites to raise an eyebrow at disaster any longer. I once went on a date with a guy who had been mugged a dozen times and was still nonchalant about having lost nearly a hundred thousand rupees worth of cell phones. A cat on a model’s shoulder on a runway still gets them though. I reply ‘YES’ to each one of the messages, and promise to tell them the whole story if I ever leave the newsroom.
I log on to Twitter. Some quotes from my piece appear to have gone viral. Normally this would mean a phone call from Kamran as a sign of his appreciation, but I assume he has other things to worry about: such as Sana’s presumably epic hangover and how he’s going to explain her turn on the runway to his mother.
I check to see if Jamie has retweeted my piece. He hasn’t.
I check every other app on my phone: Jamie hasn’t gotten in touch with me on WhatsApp or e-mail. There’s no post or message on Facebook. I scroll through the texts again to see if I’ve missed one from him. Nothing.
I rethink the amazing dinner at Casbah again. I was witty and charming and looked if not great then much better than I’ve looked around him before. What did I do wrong? Was I too forward? Does that even exist? I have never once heard a guy complain about a girl being too forward. Did I say something terrible? Murree Beer has a lot to answer for.
But seriously, how difficult is it to get in touch?
Manage to find a way to untangle myself from the comforter and make a cup of coffee in the microwave, which was something that hugely irritated the ex-boyfriend Hasan, who was a coffee snob and couldn’t understand how I could deign to drink instant. ‘It would take twenty minutes for me to grind coffee, boil water, put it through a French press, and then savour each sip. I never have twenty minutes,’ I snapped at him one day after he had pointed out my coffee drinking habits to his friends at dinner. ‘I have ten minutes to shower and change clothes. The last time I thought I had enough time to condition my hair, the MQM decided to call a strike and I barely made it to party headquarters before washing the shampoo out. So yeah, I drink Nescafe that’s made in the microwave.’ Looking back at my relationship with him, I can’t imagine how I conjured up the patience to date him. I vow for the umpteenth time not to engage with fuckwits for fear of ending up alone.
My phone beeps again.
Jamie: ‘Are you going to be around at fashion week today? I’m heading into town. Let’s do dinner after?’
HE TEXTED! I AM GOOD AT FLIRTING AFTER ALL! HURRAH!
Panic sets in. This is an emergency situation. I need to get waxed, threaded, and find something fabulous to wear. Unfortunately, Kamran will not understand why I can’t come in to work just because I’ll be working all night, and so I go in deciding to sneak out later to try and get the last available appointment at the salon.
I dump my bag on the desk and check the headlines. Five people have been shot dead so far today. The prime minister is making a speech on the CNG crisis. I rifle through my handbag for cigarettes. Can’t find them. Upend handbag.
Contents:
•
ATM receipt. Bank balance: Rs 200. Fuck.
•
Polo wrapper
•
One empty box of cigarettes
•
Matches that have escaped the box
•
Matchbox
•
Red lipstick
•
Five Moleskine notebooks
•
Press release from Hizb ut-Tahrir warning Pakistan’s army to end their crackdown on the group
•
Press release from the Jamaat-e-Islami railing against Turkish soap operas. Scribbled note on the back of the press release: ‘Call Ali tomorrow.’ Who is Ali? I have about fifty Alis in my phone book. Did I ever call him? When was tomorrow?
•
Receipt from Espresso
•
Jar of Vicks
•
Body spray
•
Press badge from Jamaat-ud-Dawa rally. ‘REPORTER – GO AMERICA GO’
•
Crumpled fifty-rupee note
I walk to the stall around the corner, trying to calculate how many loose cigarettes one can buy with fifty rupees…
There is an epic traffic jam outside. There are donkey carts, SUVs, a police van, and every kind of rickshaw ever imported to Pakistan, stretching out for miles. Vendors weave through the vehicles, hawking coconut slices and packs of ‘scented tissue paper’, which is mostly waxed paper sprinkled with rose water. A passenger in a bus casually leans out of the tinsel festooned window and spits paan on the vendor, who hauls himself into the bus and begins to fight with the guy.
‘This much traffic?’ I ask the surly stall owner, who is busy rolling a joint. ‘CNG,’ he replies, without looking up.
The CNG crisis is one of the banes of Karachi’s existence. It is a war. The only thing missing is a character from 300 announcing ‘THIS IS SPARTAAAA’ in booming tones. Or THIS IS CNGPOCALYPSE. It is the only way I can describe the madness surrounding the CNG crisis, which has been fuelled—every pun intended—by years of the government encouraging people to open up gas stations and convert their cars to run on gas. There is nothing more hilarious than seeing a fifty-million rupee car queuing up with rickshaws for cheap gas. Now that the government has finally figured out that Pakistan doesn’t have enough gas resources to keep up with the demand, they’ve mandated that gas stations be shut down three days a week. I suppose the idea was that people would see the light and start walking or convert their cars back to running on petrol. Instead, people just began queuing up at 4 a.m.—this in a city where a 9 a.m. meeting is too early—waiting for the gas stations to reopen, resulting in insane traffic jams by mid-morning. Fights break out every day. People have been mugged repeatedly in the queues. There have been multiple riots and expletive-filled screaming matches that television channels have gleefully covered live. I’m quite convinced in five years I’ll meet a kid who was either conceived in one of those queues or whose parents first set eyes on each other while sitting in adjoining cars at a gas station. One of the marketing heads—an abominable man who would gladly drop every bit of reporters’ copy for the sake of an ad for a housing scheme in the boonies and once asked ‘what exactly is it t
hat all of you do here?’—is also stuck in traffic. It is moments like these that reaffirm my faith in god.
I head back to the office and browse the headlines of the paper.
The opening sentence of a story on the front page makes me want to die. ‘The ELL—the Extreme Liberal Left—protested the Supreme Court’s rape verdict.’
‘Who wrote this?!’ I ask. ‘And what is the ELL?’
‘Ah, I see you finally managed to read the newspaper you work for,’ Kamran’s voice booms behind me. ‘So glad you made the time!’
‘Umm, what’s the ELL?’ I ask.
‘You know… liberal lefty types. They all studied under that Marxist professor whom everyone adores, and want to change the world or something,’ Kamran replies. ‘Anyway,’ he says, shoving his BlackBerry towards me. ‘Did you see we’re trending on Twitter?’
Kamran is obsessed with Facebook likes and tweets, to the point where reporters have taken to begging their friends to please, for the love of god, tweet their story so Kamran might notice them. One reporter on the sports desk told her editor in her resignation letter that she couldn’t make men’s hockey sexy, and if that’s what the paper wanted it should just brand itself as a tabloid. Every time Kamran goes out of town, we gather around and do a dramatic re-enactment of the letter.
At 1 p.m., Shahrukh and the business reporters who spend their days tracking the stock market troop off to have plates of greasy biryani in the cafeteria.
I leave my dupatta on my chair and a half-empty bottle of Diet Coke next to my computer and sidle out of the office to go to the salon where I beg them to let me run a tab. At my old job, my boss would not show up on the days she had salon appointments. ‘I’m getting a facial,’ she would croon over the phone if I timidly asked who would proofread five pages that needed to go to press in the next thirty minutes. ‘You can do it, you’re so good at this.’
The woman waxing me tries to hold my arm down as I use my other hand to check my e-mails. ‘You should really moisturize more,’ she says, clicking her tongue in disapproval. ‘Your skin is going to look like a 50-year-old’s in five years.’
I resist the urge to tell her that I doubt I’ll survive the next five years. Waxing done, I dash to the clothing store next door. If I actually like something, maybe I can ask my father for some money to pay for it. The salesperson looks supremely bored. I try on a jumpsuit that looks exactly like a pair of overalls I owned when I was five. The other outfit looks like something from an eighties Pakistani film: black-and-white polka dot kameez with an appliquéd flower that rests on top of my boob. Is this supposed to be some sort of statement on breastfeeding? The last outfit is a dress made from eight yards of fabric. I’m not sure whether it makes me look like I’m carrying twins or could serve as a parachute. I contemplate whether a career designing clothes for women who don’t want to wear a tent could pan out.
I go back to the newsroom to find Kamran standing next to my chair. ‘We need to talk,’ he says.
I follow him into his office, where he’s spread out the day’s papers on his desk. I sit down, and we stare uncomfortably at each other. ‘You didn’t mention what happened last night in your copy,’ he finally says.
There are a thousand things I want to say, but an image of Sana traipsing down the runway pops into my head.
‘Look, I don’t want to get into this. The cat thing was the story in any case, and I’d rather avoid your family, honestly,’ I say, ignoring the fact that Kamran has made every reporter cover everything associated with his family—a profile of his family’s interior decorator, the opening of his father’s barber’s new shop, his mother’s best friend’s NGO who’s only claim to fame is hosting a fashion show every year. Kamran narrows his eyes and sighs. ‘Well, thank you. I’m glad I didn’t have to spell it out for you. You’ve always been smarter than the rest of the morons out there and that’s why I sent you.’
This counts as actual praise from Kamran. I could totally put ‘NOT A MORON’ on my resume.
‘You can leave now,’ he says, and turns away to examine the front page of Morning.
I go back to my computer and check my e-mail. A source has sent over a copy of a sexual harassment investigation that was buried because the government official involved was pals with the prime minister. The report makes me sick. There are direct quotes about the way the officer would refer to his colleague, including him asking her ‘why are you getting so upset? I’m just being friendly’ and forcing her to accompany him on official trips that she wasn’t required to take. I e-mail an excerpt to Kamran who replies with: ‘Sick. Good work. File tomorrow. 1,000 words.’
Later that evening, I sit in front of my closet, wondering what to wear. Jamie has posted on Twitter that he’s in Karachi, and he did text that he wanted to hang out. I read a study once that women spend sixteen minutes on average every day deciding what to wear. Cannot understand why there are phone apps that can measure one’s heart rate and calorie intake but none that can provide advice in this area.
I am oddly nervous about seeing Jamie. And I am getting perilously close to breaking my own rule: Never make the first move for sex. Perhaps this is a result of weeks of watching Humsafar. All that coyness has reminded me that I really, really need to have sex, to feel someone’s body pressing against me other than the cat’s. Make a mental note to procure morning after pills at hotel pharmacy. Cannot run the risk of buying them from the convenience store and having the guy tell my father what I’ve been purchasing.
Of course, the power cuts out the moment I decide to do something to my hair. I think I’ve used my hair straightener about four times on those rare occasions when the impulse to have better hair coincided with the availability of electricity. Today shan’t be one of those days. Still, I remember a neat trick I saw on YouTube involving a sock—you tie your hair up and stuff the sock inside it—gives it a lift, very soignée, if you don’t mind a sock on your head, which I at this desperate stage, don’t.
8 p.m.: I stride into the hotel in a chiffon sari and high heels, sock in place and hidden within folds of hair pinned over it. I catch sight of my reflection in a mirror in the lobby. Not too bad, if I may say so myself. And not just because everyone else appears to be in a kaftan as per this season’s regulations. A designer kisses me hello and whispers, ‘So brave, darling, to wear a sari! And you look beautiful!’
Jamie isn’t anywhere to be seen in the hotel lobby, even though I spot a couple of the Islamabad types—the foreign correspondents, their faces permanently creased with the disappointment of having to be in Pakistan, with their hapless fixers trailing behind them. One of them, a potbellied court reporter, has the perpetual air of the deeply disinterested. ‘Yeh kya bakwaas hai,’ he mutters as he nods hello. ‘I took her to a court hearing,’ he says, gesturing to his charge, a light-haired 20-something woman talking to Farrah. ‘And then she drags me here,’ he says, looking around at the lobby that has been transformed for fashion week. There’s a fake Grecian column that the models are wrapping themselves around in a bizarre fashion, three grubby white sofas that the older socialites have plonked themselves on and a chocolate fountain that no one is touching because who, in their right mind, would drink chocolate when everyone is here for the sole purpose of checking the others out. ‘What am I supposed to help translate for her here? At least there’ll be hot girls to look at,’ he says hopefully.
I head into the hall and try not to trip as I squeeze my way through seats draped in white silk. The programme states that the first show is an ‘ode to patriotism’. This is usually a euphemism for a designer having run out of steam and putting together a series of green and white kurtas and Jinnah caps as a ‘collection’.
The lights dim amid pleading from ushers for people to take their handbags off empty seats and put out cigarettes. It’s a small miracle we’re not all on fire. There is a loud boom from the speakers, followed by what sounds like a shriek—but that could possibly be a model finding a cockroach backstage�
�and then the lights come back on.
A horde of male models, all dressed in fatigues and combat gear, marches out. No, I swear. They are actually marching, like they’re in an army parade. Wait, are there going to be missiles following them like they have during the Republic Day parade? The models’ boots clomp on the runway. It feels like I’m watching the 1999 coverage of Pervez Musharraf’s coup. One of the models stops at the head of the runway and—get this—salutes. The crowd goes wild. They’re clapping. Jeez, one guy is actually standing up on his chair. And then… Oh god, it’s getting worse.
The speakers blare an old Noor Jehan song. From 1965. From the WAR, for the love of all that is holy.
The next set of models have bulky jackets, blue backpacks that look exactly like the one sported by Ajmal Kasab in that CCTV shot and what looks like barbed wire wrapped around their legs. What is this supposed to be?
OHMYGOD, I AM WATCHING MODELS DRESSED AS SUICIDE BOMBERS.
This isn’t happening. This is worse than the clichés associated with fashion. It is actually—oh dear god, the suicide bomber models are now looking at me. Scary.
I’m about to finally exhale when the last set of models appears, wearing kurtas with Imran Khan’s image emblazoned on them in a poor imitation of Warhol pop art.
The designer walks out, and I’m sure no one will applaud him. Surely, in a roomful of women whose mothers and aunts were part of democracy movements in the 1980s, there is someone who thinks the Pakistan army isn’t a ‘look’ and that suicide bombers aren’t in the best taste.
I am mistaken. Everyone gets up on their feet and applauds. There are calls of ‘Bravo’ and ‘Pakistan Zindabad’. The lights dim again and everyone starts talking. ‘Oh my god, that was so moving. I cried!’ says a fashion journalist sitting to my left. She isn’t kidding, her mascara has actually run. Another points out that it was ‘the bravest thing in years’ and the show choreographer is hugging people. ‘So amazing, so apt! What a brilliant theme! He showed the great, hulking soldiers, those cowardly suicide bombers and then the man who is going to save us from these bloody corrupt jaahil politicians—Imran Khan!’