Unmarriageable
Page 3
In the gymkhana library, Alys would choose a book from the bevelled-glass-fronted bookcase and curl up in the chintz sofas. Over the years, the dim chinoiserie lamps had been replaced with overhead lighting, all the better to read Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Thackeray, Hardy, Maugham, Elizabeth Gaskell, Tolstoy, Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Wilde, Woolf, Wodehouse, Shakespeare, more Shakespeare, even more Shakespeare.
Alys pressed her forehead against the van’s window as they left behind the imposing gymkhana and passed the exalted Burger Palace, Pizza Palace, and the Chinese restaurant, Lotus, all three eateries shut until dinnertime. Only the recently launched High Chai was open and, going by the number of cars outside, doing brisk business – in local parlance, ‘minting money’ – because Dilipabadis were entertainment-starved.
Alys gazed at the cafe’s sign: HIGH CHAI in gold cursive atop pink and yellow frosted cupcakes. It took her back to a time when their mother would dress her and Jena in frilly frocks, a time before their father and his elder brother, Uncle Goga, were estranged, a time when they’d been one big happy joint family living in the colossal ancestral house in the best part of Lahore: her paternal grandparents, her parents and sisters, Uncle Goga and Aunty Tinkle and their four children.
They’d play with their cousins for hours on end. Hide-and-seek. Baraf pani. Cops and robbers. Jump rope and hopscotch. They’d fight over turns and exchange insults before making up. However, Tinkle always took her children’s side during the quarrels.
‘Why is Aunty Tinkle so rude to us?’ Alys would ask her mother. ‘Why does she act as if they’re better than us?’
Pinkie Binat replied hesitantly, ‘Her children are not better than any of you. You have the same history.’
Pinkie Binat made sure her daughters knew where they came from. The British, during their reign over an undivided subcontinent, doled out small plots to day labourers as incentive to turn them into farmers, who, later, would be called agriculturists and feudal lords, which is what the Binat forefathers ultimately became. These men then turned their attentions to consolidating land and thereby power and influence through marriage, and even during the 1947 partition the Binats managed to retain hold over their land.
It was infighting that defeated some of the Binats. After the death of his wife, Goga’s and Bark’s ailing father had increasingly come to depend on Goga and his wife, first-cousin Tajwer ‘Tinkle’ Binat, a woman who spent too much time praying for a nice nose, thicker hair, a slender waist, and dainty feet. When Binat Sr. passed away, he left his sons ample pockets of land as well as factories, but it was clear Goga was in charge and not impressed by his much younger brother’s devotion to the Beatles, Elvis, and squash. He was even less impressed by Bark’s obsession with a girl he’d glimpsed at a beauty parlour when he went to pick up Tinkle.
‘Please, Tinkle,’ Bark had begged his cousin plus sister-in-law, ‘please find out who she is and take her my proposal. If I don’t marry her, I will die.’
Tinkle knew immediately which girl had smitten Bark. She herself had found it hard to not stare at the fawn-eyed beauty and, in a benevolent mood, she returned to the salon to make enquiries into her identity: Khushboo ‘Pinkie’ Gardenaar, seventeen years old, secondary school leaver. The girl’s mother was a housewife, overly fond of candy-coloured clothes. Her father was a bookkeeper in the railways. The girl’s elder brother was studying at King Edward Medical College. Her elder sister was a less attractive version of Bark’s crush.
The girl’s family claimed ancestry from royal Persian kitchens. Nobodies, Tinkle informed Goga; basically cooks and waiters. After the brothers fell out, Tinkle would discredit Pinkie’s family by stressing that there was zilch proof of any royal connection. At the time, however, the Binats accepted the family’s claims, and so it was with fanfare that Barkat ‘Bark’ Binat and Khushboo ‘Pinkie’ Gardenaar were wed.
On the day of the wedding, Tinkle lost control of her envy. Was it fair that this chit of a girl, this nobody, should make such a stunning bride?
‘She is no khushboo, good smell, but a badboo, bad smell,’ Tinkle railed at Goga as she mocked Khushboo’s name. ‘I’m the one who went to a Swiss finishing school. I’m the one who sits on the boards of charities. But always it’s her beauty everyone swoons over. She calls a phone “foon”, biscuit “biscoot”, year “ear”, measure “meyer”. She does not know salad fork from dinner fork. How could your brother have married that lower-middle-class twit? Doesn’t Bark care that they are not our kind of people?’
Tinkle’s jealousy grew as Bark and Pinkie delivered two peach-fresh daughters in quick succession. Tinkle’s own children barely qualified for even qabool shakal, acceptable-looking. Goga tried to ignore his wife’s complaints. He had bigger matters to trouble him, including the loss of the Binats’ factories after a wave of nationalisation. Goga was doubly displeased over Bark’s welcoming attitude towards the government takeover. Could his bleeding-heart brother not see that socialism meant less money for the Binats?
In order to diversify assets, Goga invested in a series of shops in Saudi Arabia to capitalise on the newly burgeoning mall culture. He informed Bark he was needed to supervise the investment, and Bark and Pinkie dutifully packed up and, with their daughters, Alys and Jena, headed off to Jeddah.
Even though Pinkie had been reluctant to leave her life in Lahore, once in Jeddah, frequent visits to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina were a great spiritual consolation. Alys and Jena were enrolled in an international school, where their classes looked like a mini-United Nations and the girls made friends from all over the world. Pinkie’s friends were other expatriate wives, with whom she spent afternoons shopping in the souks and malls for gold and fabrics. The Binats resided in an upscale expat residential compound, which had a swimming pool and a bowling alley, and Pinkie hired help.
Life was good; Jeddah was home. Bark grumbled occasionally about the hierarchy – Saudis first, then white people, no matter their level of education or lineage, then everyone else. Still, they might have remained in Jeddah forever were it not for a car accident in which a Saudi prince rear-ended Bark’s car. In Saudi Arabia, the law sided with Saudis no matter who was at fault, and so Bark counted his blessings for escaping with only a broken arm and, fearing that he might be sent to jail for the scratch on the prince’s forehead, packed up his wife and their now five daughters and moved back into their ancestral home in Lahore.
It took two years for Bark to unearth the rot. His elder brother had bilked him out of business and inheritance. Bark proceeded to have a heart attack, a mild one, but Tinkle made sure Goga remained unmoved by his younger brother’s plight.
Bark had nowhere to turn. His parents had passed away. Relatives commiserated but had no interest in siding with Bark or helping him money-wise. Alys, then nineteen, convinced her father to consult a lawyer. They were the talk of the town as it was, she said, and they needed to get back what was rightfully theirs. Too late, said the lawyer. They could appeal, but it would take forever and Goga had already transferred everything to himself. They would learn later that the lawyer had accepted a decent bribe from Goga to dissuade them from filing.
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.
Alys had fought for her sisters’ dreams. But wheezing notwithstanding, Mari was a mediocre cricket player, and, as for Lady, no matter how much Alys argued on her sister’s behalf, their father remained unmoved, for he hoped his estranged brother would reconcile with him and he dared not allow anything to interfere with that. Whatever the case, Alys was adamant that her sisters must end up earning well; now if only they’d listen to her and take their futures seriously.
The school van drove into a lower-middle-class ramshackle neighbourhood with narrow lanes and small homes, where some of the teachers disembarked. Unable to afford much help, they shed their teacher skins and slipped into their housewife skins once they’d entered their houses. They would begin dinner, aid their children with homework, and, when their husbands returned from work, provide them chai as they unwound. They would return to the kitchen and pack the children’s next-day school lunches, after which they would serve a hot dinner, clean up the kitchen, put the children to bed, and then finally shed their housewife skins and wriggle back into the authoritative teacher skins to mark papers well into the night.
Alys and Jena had heard the weariness in the staff room as teachers wondered how long they could keep up this superwoman act. Yet their jobs provided a necessary contribution to the family income – a fact their husbands and in-laws frequently chose to downplay, ignore, or simply not acknowledge – and afforded them a vital modicum of independence. The trick, the teachers sighed, was to marry a man who believed in sharing the housework, kids, and meal preparations without thinking he was doing a great and benevolent favour, but good luck with finding such a man, let alone in-laws who encouraged him to help.
The school van entered the Binats’ more affluent leafy district and stopped at the entrance to the graveyard. The Binat sisters had only to cross the road to enter their wrought-iron gate and walk up the front lawn lined with evergreen bushes to their front door. They’d barely stepped into the foyer when Mrs Binat flew out of the family room: ‘Guess what has happened?’
CHAPTER THREE
Mrs Binat was in the family room, praying the rosary for her daughters’ futures, when the mail was delivered and in it the opportunity. Hearing their voices in the foyer, she rushed to them, asking them to guess what had happened as she waved a pearly lavender envelope like a victory flag.
Alys immediately recognised the invite to the NadirFiede wedding. Lady whooped as Mrs Binat rattled off the names of all the old and new moneyed familie
s who would be attending: Farishta Bank, Rani Raja Steels, the British School Group, Sundiful Fertilisers, Pappu Chemicals, Nangaparbat Textiles.
Mrs Binat was still dropping names as her daughters followed her into the family room, where they settled around the electric fireplace. Alys climbed into the window seat that overlooked the back lawn. She tossed a throw over her legs, making sure to hide her feet before her mother noticed that she wasn’t wearing any nail polish. Qitty and Lady sat on the floor, beside the wall decorated with photos of holidays the Binats had taken once upon a time: Jena and Alys at Disneyland, Mr Binat holding toddler Mari’s hand next to the Acropolis, Qitty nibbling on corn on the cob in front of the Hagia Sophia, the whole family smiling into the camera in front of Harrods, a newborn Lady in a pram.
‘Alys, Jena.’ Mr Binat rose from his armchair. ‘Your mother has been eating my brains ever since that invite arrived. I’m going to the garden to—’
‘Sit down, Barkat,’ Mrs Binat said sharply. ‘We have to discuss the budget for the wedding.’
Alys sighed as her father sat back down. She’d been looking forward to finishing her grading and then reading the risqué religious short story, ‘A Vision of Heaven’ by Sajjad Zaheer from the collection Angaaray, which Sherry had translated for her from Urdu into English.
‘Discuss it with Alys,’ Mr Binat said. ‘She knows the costs of things better than I do.’
‘I’m sure Alys and everyone else knows everything better than you do,’ Mrs Binat said. ‘But you are their father, and instead of worrying whether the succulents are thriving and the ficus is blooming, I need you to take an active interest in your daughters’ futures.’
‘Futures?’ Mr Binat beamed as Hillima brought in chai and keema samosas.
‘I want,’ Mrs Binat announced, ‘the girls to fish for husbands at the NadirFiede wedding.’
Alys gritted her teeth. She could see before her eyes a large aquarium of eligible bachelors dodging hooks cast by every single girl in the country.