Unmarriageable

by Soniah Kamal

  ‘Maybe Qitty can snag an eligible bachelor by sitting on him,’ Lady said.

  Qitty picked up her sketchbook and whacked Lady in the arm.

  ‘Jena, Alys,’ Mrs Binat said, ‘shame on both of you if this wedding ends and you remain unmarried. Cast your nets wide, reel it in, grab it, grab it. But do not come across as too fast or forward, for a girl with a loose reputation is one step away from being damaged goods and ending up a spinster. Keep your distance without keeping your distance. Let him caress you without coming anywhere near you. Coo sweet somethings into his ears without opening your mouth. Before he even realises there is a trap, he will have proposed. Do you understand?’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ten years ago, the evening Hillima declared the clean-up of Binat House complete, the Binats gathered in the study, wondering how to occupy their time. Jena began reading a pop-up Alice in Wonderland to her younger sisters. Mr and Mrs Binat quarrelled about finances. Mrs Binat segued into how she wished she’d got Jena and Alys married off before their banishment.

  Alys escaped her mother’s dire predictions regarding her prospects by fleeing to her new bedroom. She sat on her bed, made cheery with a yellow chenille bedspread and crewelwork pillowcases, and thought about what the hell she was going to do with her life in this small town.

  She stared at her bare walls, livened up with a Pisces poster and a photo of herself amid friends during a school trip to the Red Sea. She remembered treading the ocean bed with Tana, laughing as they looked out for sea urchins, snorkelling under the hot sun, returning to land and sand fights. The future had seemed so limitless and bright back then.

  Alys stepped out onto her small balcony. Evening had descended on Dilipabad, and the sun was setting in a sky pollution had turned milky. She wasn’t sure when she began to cry. She wiped her tears and told herself to stop. She was crying because ever since they’d returned to Pakistan two years ago, all she’d heard was how, if she did not conform to certain beauty standards and demure etiquette, she was going to die alone. She was crying because she missed her friends in Jeddah and wondered if she’d ever see them again. When Alys had left Jeddah, she and Tana sent each other letters but, slowly, they petered out. In her last letter, Tana mentioned that her family was returning to Denmark, after which Alys’s letter was returned saying ‘no forwarding address’.

  In Lahore, Alys and Jena had met some friendly faces at university. But sitting in the canteen and sharing greasy naan kebabs with girls who’d known each other since nursery and accordingly cracked ancient jokes just made them feel lonelier. So it was that the two sisters had turned to each other: ‘Do you remember Radhika in the Brownie troop getting into trouble for demonstrating how to play spin the bottle?’ ‘Do you remember when we watched Madonna’s Virgin Tour at Sahara’s house?’ ‘Do you remember when Tana showed us a condom and we thought it was a balloon?’

  They’d been too young to say goodbye forever to friends, home, familiarity, and now they’d even left big-city Lahore and come to Dilipabad, where life seemed to revolve around marrying well and eating well. There wasn’t even a proper bookstore or library. Alys’s eyes filled up again. Any minute now, she was certain, her mother would come barging in to tell her that if she cried, then she’d ruin her eyesight, and if she started to wear spectacles, then no one would marry her.

  Across the road, at the graveyard’s entrance, a flower-cart vendor was putting away the marigold garlands and loose rose petals he sold to mourners to commemorate their dead. Alys blinked. The graveyard was the one place no one would follow her, because her family was terrified of ghosts, djinns, churails, and, thanks to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video, ghouls, zombies, and monsters.

  Alys tiptoed down the stairs and out of the front door and across the street to the graveyard’s entrance.

  ‘As-salaam-alaikum,’ the vendor said, looking up from his flowers. ‘You are the new people who’ve moved into the house?’

  ‘We moved two weeks ago,’ Alys managed to reply in her heavily English-accented, stilted Urdu.

  ‘Chunga – good,’ he said. ‘No place deserves to remain empty for too long. From Ingland or Amreeka?’

  ‘Jeddah.’

  ‘Mashallah. You must have gone to Mecca and Medina?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Mashallah. My cousin is working in construction there. Building malls. He doesn’t like it. He misses home. But the money he sends has already got two daughters married off with full dowry, alhamdulillah.’

  Alys sighed. Did anyone talk about anything except marriage in this country?

  ‘I want to go into the graveyard,’ Alys said. ‘There’s no closing time, is there?’

  ‘No. But most people are scared of the dead, and even more so at night-time.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Alys said, ‘it’s the living who people should be scared of.’

  The vendor laughed. He handed her a plastic bag full of rose petals. When Alys protested that she had no money, he smiled and said, ‘Today free, but next time buy double flowers.’

  Alys stepped into the cemetery and onto a paved path that wound through graves, some with plain tombstones and others with elaborately filigreed ones. Many headstones had epitaphs in both Urdu and English, the scripts of both languages shining like ebony jewels against the grey-veined white marble. She read random epitaphs, placing petals on strangers’ graves.

  A row of ashoka trees, vibrant and healthy, created a man-planted border, their roots feeding from blood and bones on both sides, and Alys slipped through the trunks and into, it seemed, another cemetery. Dirt paths wound through overgrown vegetation and eroded marble headstones with British names in faded lettering. She walked on, scared now that she was so deep inside the graveyard. Moonlight spread down her back like ice. All was quiet except for crickets and her footsteps, crunching twigs. She saw a form leaning against a wall, an unnatural fiery glow emanating from where a mouth should be.

  Alys screamed. The form screamed.

  A girl stepped out of the shadows, a lit cigarette dangling from bony fingers, a scrawny braid curling down one shoulder to her waist. She was wearing red sandals and a purple-and-green shalwar kurta topped with a red cardigan with white plastic buttons. Not someone, Alys instinctively knew, her mother was going to think very highly of, for, as was the case with too many people who’d jumped class, Mrs Binat was often the harshest critic of the class she believed she’d left behind.

  ‘You scared me.’ Alys put a hand on her beating heart. ‘I thought you were a ghost.’

  ‘Hel-lo. You scared me.’ The girl spoke in Urdu. ‘I thought you were a rabid dog. What are you doing here? Are you from the family that has moved into the ruins in front of the graveyard?’

  Alys nodded. ‘Not ruins any more. It’s cleaned up quite well.’

  ‘Aren’t you Pakistani?’ the girl said. ‘Your Urdu is very poor, even for a Burger.’

  Alys rolled her eyes at the derogatory term used to describe Pakistanis who predominantly went about their lives in fluent English by Pakistanis who predominantly went about their lives in fluent Urdu or a regional dialect. In local parlance, Alys was an English-speaking Burger and this girl an Urdu-speaking Chapati. Usually the two groups did not reside in the same neighbourhoods, but that seemed to be the case here.

  ‘Do you know any local languages?’ the girl asked.

  ‘English is a local language,’ Alys said, switching to English completely.

  The girl replied in a stilted English, ‘Did you people buy the ruins?’

  ‘We own it,’ Alys said.

  ‘You are a Binat?’ The girl switched back to Urdu.

  ‘Yes.’

  The girl’s eyes widened. ‘And what has brought the Binats to live in Dilipabad?’

  Mrs Binat had forbidden any mention of the family feud, but Alys felt they had nothing to be ashamed about. Also, who cared if people talked? People were going to talk anyway. So she told the girl the truth.

&nb
sp; ‘They took everything?’ The girl’s face softened.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Kismet, wheel of fortune, luck, destiny, what can one do? By the way, my good name is Syeda Shireen Looclus, but everyone calls me Sherry. What is your good name?’

  ‘Alysba. Everyone calls me Alys.’

  Sherry held out her hand. Alys shook it.

  ‘Married?’ Sherry asked.

  ‘I would be if my mother had her way. You?’

  ‘Still unmarried, much to my mother’s distress,’ Sherry said. ‘I am an Urdu lang-lit teacher at the British School of Dilipabad.’

  ‘A career woman.’ Alys beamed. ‘Do you know if your school is looking for English teachers?’

  ‘You want to teach?’

  ‘It just occurred to me.’

  ‘BSD is the best school here, and Mrs Naheed is very picky. Education level?’

  ‘Second year of undergrad in English literature.’

  ‘How old you are?’ Sherry asked.

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘You look much younger,’ Sherry said wistfully. ‘How old are you really?’

  ‘Twenty.’ Alys frowned.

  ‘Chal yaar – whatever, friend. No need to lie to me, I won’t tell a soul.’

  ‘I’m not lying. In March, I’ll turn twenty-one.’

  ‘Really? Hasn’t your mother ever told you that you need to pretend to be at least four years younger than your real age? That way you’ll age much slower publicly and can stretch out your marriageable years.’

  ‘She has, but I think hiding one’s age is stupid, and the only way to defeat ageism is to not comply with it. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-eight,’ Sherry said. ‘Forever twenty-eight.’

  ‘And your real age?’ Alys asked wryly. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘I don’t know you to trust you. And you’d better not tell a soul you saw me smoking.’

  Alys signalled for Sherry to hand over the cigarette pack. A smile spread over Sherry’s face as Alys lit one and took a drag.

  ‘There,’ Alys said. ‘Now you saw me smoking too.’

  ‘Yeh hui na baat! That’s more like it!’

  ‘Can you finish it?’ Alys handed it back to Sherry. ‘I’m not really a smoker. Not fond of staining my teeth. Also, cancer.’

  ‘I’ll risk that for now,’ Sherry said as she put out Alys’s barely touched cigarette and returned it to the pack. ‘Do you want chewing gum?’

  Alys took some cinnamon gum to freshen her breath. ‘I had a couple of friends in Jeddah who smoked – secretly, of course, like you – and I’d join occasionally.’

  ‘Will you join me occasionally? I come here every evening after the Maghrib prayers. My mother thinks I’m feeding birds.’

  ‘You’re twenty-eight or something like that. You have a job. Your own income and therefore independence. Surely you can smoke if you want.’

  ‘Good girls don’t smoke.’ Sherry eyed Alys curiously. ‘Anyway, these mothers only stop dictating your life once you get married.’

  ‘True,’ Alys said. ‘And then your husband dictates it.’

  ‘I’d love to get married!’

  ‘You would?’

  ‘I’m tired of my parents worrying about me,’ Sherry said, ‘not to mention that everywhere I go, the first question I’m asked is: “When are you getting married?” Everyone promises to pray for me. So far no one’s prayers have come true, so I’m wondering if they really are praying.’

  Sherry smiled. Alys smiled.

  ‘Anyway,’ Sherry said, ‘I don’t want to die without ever having had a husband. I want that phase of my life to begin, but it might never happen. You see, proper proposals for me have dried up.’ She squatted behind a wide headstone. Alys sat crossed-legged beside her.

  ‘I was engaged twice before,’ Sherry said, relighting the cigarette Alys had barely puffed. ‘First to a cousin. I liked him. He liked me. Then he went to Germany on an engineering scholarship and married a German lady for citizenship after convincing his parents that she was a good career move. They have five children now. Boys. They visit off and on. I avoid them completely.’

  ‘You’re better off without such a person,’ Alys said, and feeling the intensity of Sherry’s disclosure, asked for a cigarette.

  ‘I managed to get engaged a second time, this time to a non-relative, at my insistence.’ Sherry handed Alys a cigarette and struck a match. ‘He wanted to marry immediately, but my mother was undergoing knee surgery and we had to wait. Shortly after our engagement, he passed away. Turned out he’d had kidney problems, which his family had kept from us. His parents were very aged and they wanted a widowed daughter-in-law who could earn as well as look after them. I tell you, God saved me from that terrible fate. But as far as everyone was concerned, I’d driven one man into the arms of a foreigner and another into the mouth of death, so obviously I was manhoos, an ill omen. Then we found out I couldn’t have children. Useless Uterus, that’s me.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Alys said, flicking ash onto the path.

  ‘Everyone else does. Basically, until I started teaching, I was nanny to my sister and two brothers. They’re much, much younger than me. After having me – a girl, unfortunately – my mother suffered from years of miscarriages. If my paternal grandmother had had her way, my father would have remarried for a son, but he refused to, and thankfully, through the miracle of praying and manaats, my mother was able to produce live births again and, finally, my precious brothers.’ Sherry took a long drag and looked out into the distance. ‘Anyway, I still pray that one day my shehzada, my Prince Charming, will come. I still get the odd proposal, but they’re from either men who come with a dowry list as long as my arm, which my family is in no position to fulfil, or widowers with children looking for a nurse-plus-nanny in the guise of a wife, or divorced men known for domestic abuse or something similar. Listen, tell me, Ms Burger, what is the English word for a man who is divorced? I know a woman is a “divorcée”, because that’s what everyone is calling an aunt of mine who left her cheater husband.’

  Alys frowned. ‘Actually, there’s no specific label for a man. In English we apparently live in a world where we only keep track of whether or not a woman is a pigeon.’

  ‘Pigeon?’

  ‘Virgin.’ Alys glanced at Sherry to see how she’d taken the use of the supposedly bawdy word. Sherry was chuckling. ‘Pigeon is my and my elder sister’s code word for virgin.’

  ‘I love it!’ Sherry said. ‘Pigeon. Let us pray that one day my pigeonly feathers flutter and I fly the coop.’

  Sherry and Alys gave each other shy high fives.

  ‘By the way,’ Sherry said, ‘my real age is thirty-one. I’m thirty-one years old.’

  Ten years later, Sherry was forty-one, though as far as the rest of the world was concerned she wasn’t a day over thirty-five. Over the years she’d begun dying her skinnier braid and plucking her chin and, when she laughed, which was often, her laugh lines deepened. Yet she still hoped her Prince Charming would come, if only because there was simply no other respectable way for a girl from her class in this country to have sex.

  So Sherry reminded Alys as they slipped into the graveyard and headed towards the spot where they’d first met. Sherry cleared leaves off a stone slab and sat down. She lit a cigarette. Alys did too.

  ‘I would,’ Sherry said, blowing a smoke ring, ‘like to experience sex before dying, and not just with my hand. Rishta Aunty—’

  Alys groaned. Rishta aunties were the local matchmakers, a perfect job for professional busybodies. Paradoxically, the key to a rishta aunty’s success was keeping the secrets she learnt about prospective clients to herself. Her job was to get people married off, but she did not guarantee happiness or children and she was very clear about the fact that if marriages were decreed in heaven, divorces seemed to be too, and that even spouses in perfect health could die and she should not be made to give a refund for services rendered.

  While risht
a aunties were a regular fixture at Sherry’s home, Looclus Lodge Bismillah, Mrs Binat did not entertain them. Not because she cared that it embarrassed her daughters to be forced to parade the mandatory rishta trolleys, prepare cups of chai to display their domestication, or be picked apart by prospective mothers-in-law, but because Dilipabad’s rishta aunties were not up to standard. To Mrs Binat’s disappointment, they did not have the network or connections to go beyond Absurdities and middle-class Abroads, categories that Sherry’s parents – Bobia Looclus, a homemaker, and ‘Haji’ Amjad Looclus, a supervisor in a factory – were in rapture over.

  ‘Rishta Aunty,’ Sherry continued, ‘told us this prospective groom-to-be is on the lookout for a nubile virgin. Pigeon I am, nubile I’m not, but Rishta Aunty believes this one is my stud of a Prince Charming. He’s sixty-one and, despite managing a grocery store, apparently does not possess too big of a potbelly.’

  ‘Better to die a pigeon than copulate with a potbelly,’ Alys said solemnly.

  ‘Clearly,’ Sherry said, ‘you’re enjoying your hand.’

  ‘That I am.’ Alys laughed.

  ‘Anyway, this particular potbelly has never been married, because he was looking after two unmarried sisters. The sisters recently married two brothers working in Sharjah, and so now he’s looking for a bride of his own. He’s probably as eager a pigeon to fly the coop as I am. He’s fond of massage and being read to, because his eyesight is weak but he doesn’t like to wear spectacles. Rishta Aunty told him I was strong and I’m a teacher, so I can read very well and earn. Let’s hope that incentive seals the deal.’

  ‘Can you please meet the man first,’ Alys said, rolling her eyes, ‘before agreeing to marry him?’

  ‘Not up to me, is it,’ Sherry said. ‘I’ll wheel out the rishta trolley with the expected cake, fruit chaat, and shami kebabs. I’ll make chai for him and the rest of his relatives, who’ll have accompanied him for free food. I’ll confirm that I’ve cooked all the food from scratch, which, in my home’ – Sherry looked archly at Alys – ‘I will have done. Unlike you Burger girls, I can actually cook and don’t just bake for fun.’