Unmarriageable

by Soniah Kamal

  Sherry flinched at the word ‘barren’. Alys shrugged an apology to Sherry for having landed at their house in the midst of this mess. Mrs Binat continued telling Alys what she thought of her until the man of the match, Farhat Kaleen himself, entered the room.

  Mrs Binat quieted. ‘Girls,’ she said, adjusting her eyelet chador prettily over her shoulders, ‘be quiet now. Kaleen and I have important matters to discuss.’

  Kaleen pointedly ignored Mrs Binat and turned to Sherry: how were her parents, brothers, sister, cat? Alys took the opportunity to slip out of the living room. Jena, Mari, and Qitty followed her, and though Qitty tried to pull Lady along, Lady would not move. Once Sherry satisfied Kaleen that her family and cat were well, she glided towards the window and pretended to busy herself checking the growth of the money plants on the sill. Like Lady, Sherry was tuned in to Mrs Binat and Kaleen and so she was witness to Mrs Binat’s utterly doleful ‘Hai, Kaleen! Believe you me—’

  ‘Pinkie, please.’ Kaleen pressed his palms together. ‘Let us forever be silent on the utter anarchy plaguing this house.’

  He settled ramrod straight on the Victorian chair adjacent to Mrs Binat and proceeded to shatter the silence by assuring her that he did not resent Alysba. Why waste his time, he asked in a grave tone, resenting a woman whose favour he was beginning to be glad had been withheld after all? Obviously, Alysba would not have proved to be a perfect companion for him, let alone a good mother for his children, for he needed to marry a woman who knew her place, and Alysba had exercised displacement.

  His first impulse had been to leave the Binats’ home for a hotel, but in remaining, he hoped to protect the family’s reputation from gossip. Pinkie was to rest assured that he did not hold her or Mr Binat responsible for their daughter’s behaviour. He was a father and knew how hard it was to control one’s children these days, although Alysba was no longer a child but a very aged woman. Alysba was lucky that he was not the sort of man who’d respond to her insult of a refusal by throwing acid on her. In fact, he was firmly against such retaliations.

  Mrs Binat felt faint as Kaleen’s speech came to an end. Excusing herself, she fled to her bedroom and sobbed. Lady left the living room in order to give her sisters a rundown of Fart Bhai’s speech – not the type to resort to an acid attack! – and she glanced down at him with horror before flouncing out.

  Kaleen scowled at Lady’s back and decided that this behooda – vulgar girl – not ending up his sister-in-law was a blessing in itself. And Alysba too, he decided, was no doubt pretending to be pure and pristine, for she was far too sexy to really be a good girl. As Sherry turned from the money plants, the mid morning sunshine bathed her in its golden glory and it suddenly occurred to Kaleen that Alysba’s friend looked like a spotless sturdy sapling of some spotless sturdy tree. For the rest of the day, he paid great attention to Sherry, partly in order to pointedly ignore the Binats and partly, he hoped, to annoy Alysba.

  The next day, Sherry arrived yet again to aid the Binats by keeping Kaleen occupied. Alys thanked her best friend for doing so, but Sherry had an ulterior motive. If Alys did not want Farhat Kaleen, then he was fair game for her. That evening, the Binats and Kaleen dined at the Loocluses’, and Sherry was dismayed to hear Kaleen proclaim that his late wife believed women who smoked possessed loose morals.

  ‘My late wife,’ Kaleen said, ‘God grant her a place in heaven, agreed with me that cigarettes are different from the hookahs our foremothers used to smoke, for hookahs do not possess the indecent shape of a cigarette.’

  ‘Your late wife,’ Mrs Binat said spitefully, ‘seems to have missed the fact that tobacco is tobacco no matter the receptacle.’

  Mrs Binat was most unhappy at Mr Binat forcing her to attend this dinner at the Loocluses’ when all she felt like doing was pining away in bed. She darted a poisonous eye at Alys, who seemed truly unaffected, and at Kaleen, who seemed to have recovered all too fast. Why was he praising Bobia Looclus’s decor? Pinkie cast a baleful glance over Bobia’s tiny drawing room, the discoloured cheap lace curtains behind a sagging plastic-covered sofa, the wobbly coffee table, the fraying artificial flowers atop an outdated TV, which, gallingly enough, reminded Mrs Binat of the fact that, growing up, her family had barely been able to afford such a one. The only redeeming feature of this entire evening, she granted, was the delicious dinner poor Sherry must have spent the entire day preparing.

  At the dinner table Mrs Binat flinched when, after a few bites of the feast, Kaleen exclaimed that it was by far the best meal he’d eaten for days.

  ‘Compliments to your cook, Bobia jee,’ Kaleen said, raising an appreciative eyebrow at the perfectly round puffed chapatis in the bread basket.

  ‘Sherry is our cook, mashallah,’ Bobia Looclus said. She pressed upon Kaleen the mutton pulao and achaari chicken. ‘There is magic in her hands.’

  ‘Indeed! Magic!’ Kaleen liberally helped himself to these dishes as well as the chapli kebabs and shahi korma.

  From across the table, Sherry refilled his glass with sweet lassi. The extravagance of the meal had cost them a good amount of her pay cheque, but she was determined to show off her cooking skills.

  Alys was dismayed when her mother rudely interrupted Kaleen’s praise with the prayer that the Loocluses be able to hire a cook so that poor Sherry could see the last of the hot kitchen and stinky dishes.

  ‘Pinkie,’ Bobia Looclus replied in a pinched voice, ‘I hope we never see the day where we can afford a cook if it means our daughters forgetting how to cook. Girls who cannot cook are destined to be divorced.’

  ‘Then,’ Mrs Binat said, ‘all the upper-class women should be divorced.’

  ‘Trust me’ – Bobia Looclus glanced keenly at Kaleen – ‘if husbands had to choose between wife or cook, cook would win hands down.’

  ‘Bobia’ – Mrs Binat glanced archly at Kaleen – ‘cooks may be irreplaceable for you, but for me wives are.’

  Kaleen was too busy eating to give either woman attention and, anyway, he wasn’t in the business of giving the bickering of elderly housewives much thought. Instead, he complimented Sherry on her cooking again, much to Bobia Looclus’s gratification and Pinkie Binat’s chagrin, as the desserts – a green jelly trifle and a red carrot gajar ka halwa – were brought out. By the evening’s end, Sherry was sure that if only Farhat Kaleen were to remain in Dilipabad long enough to eat her meals for a few days in a row, she might stand a chance.

  The next morning, Sherry awakened for dawn prayers in the bedroom she shared with her younger sister. After praying, she stretched her arms in a yawn and, glancing out of her tiny window, she saw Farhat Kaleen shuffling up the lane. Sherry dressed as fast as she could and set out to meet him by accident.

  Kaleen turned into Sherry’s narrow lane. Though stirred by Alysba’s spurning of him, he was not so shaken that he did not, the morning following Sherry’s divine dinner, decide, after his prayers, to slip out of Binat House and make his way towards Looclus Lodge Bismillah. Stepping on weeds growing out of the dirt road, he continued rehearsing the very speech he had laid at Alysba Binat’s feet. To his tremendous delight, Kaleen saw Sherry walking up the lane.

  Sherry and Kaleen stood at the edge of the empty lane in the early morning under a mango tree that had grown not by design but due to littering. After exchanging shy salaams, Kaleen plunged straight into affairs of the heart. Sweating profusely, he hung his head and spoke of recently proposing to Alysba, of which Sherry was well aware.

  ‘A terrible mistake,’ he exclaimed.

  Sherry assured him that although she and Alys were friends, in too many respects she and Alys were opposites; one was not the company one kept. Minutes passed as Kaleen enumerated why Alys would not make an ideal wife. Sherry began to worry that Alys or one of the Binats would venture out to the lane and see them or the school van would arrive. Kaleen was assuring her he had lofty roots. His ancestors had owned carpet factories in Kashmir. When his side of the family had left the Kashmir Valley f
or the Punjab plains in order to further the family trade, they became known as simply kaleen wallas, carpet makers. Over time, the carpet trade had fallen away, and now all the connection that remained to their once-prestigious status in Kashmir was their name, Kaleen, ‘carpet’.

  Kaleen told Sherry that he’d grown up in a half-loving home, with a stern, unaffectionate father who owned a small handicraft shop and a stay-at-home mother who, amid constant hugs and kisses, never let him forget that he was the most handsome and intelligent son in the galaxy. His late wife, he informed Sherry, had held the same opinion. Sherry glanced at the rising sun as Kaleen branched off into the virtues of a good wife: cooking skills; a natural shyness combined with a cultivated modesty; could have opinions but must not voice those opinions, especially if they are in opposition to a husband’s opinions; serve in-laws; cleanliness, punctuality, innocence; sacrificing self and career for children’s well-being; sacrificing self for husband’s well-being; sacrificing self for everything.

  ‘I can be a good wife,’ Sherry blurted out. ‘The best.’

  It was out, and she was relieved. Let the likes of Jena Binat leave the likes of Fahad Bingla wondering whether she wanted to marry him. Sherry had meant it when she’d told Alys that a woman should not leave a man in doubt of her interest. If Kaleen laughed at her, she would survive. There were worse things in life than being laughed at, and one of them was being a poor spinster. She glanced at her cat slinking down the gutter along the side wall, a large ball of grey fur. Why was Farhat Kaleen not saying anything? Was he appalled by her directness? She badly needed a cigarette. Two cigarettes.

  ‘You can be a good wife,’ Kaleen repeated. He wasn’t sure what to make of such straightforwardness. He’d promised his late wife that he’d remarry a woman as worthy as her, and just as she’d begun to instruct him on what exactly constituted worth, she’d taken her last breaths, which had sounded like a cat meowing. Now here was a grey cat meowing at him. Suddenly Kaleen knew this was the clue his pious wife had given him for recognising a worthy woman; that it should be a cat’s meow made perfect sense, because the Prophet Muhammad’s favourite animal was the cat, and righteous people received signs in religious terms.

  Kaleen would have fallen to his knees in a prayer of gratitude had the dirt road not been excessively strewn with stones. God had known Alys was the wrong woman for him all along and thus her shockingly unexpected refusal. Instead here was Sherry Looclus, the woman who was to be his wife, and God again had blessed him by making her reveal herself to him by her boldness, for there were certainly times when natural shyness needed to take a back seat. Meow-meow came again from behind him, and Kaleen took a giant step forward. Taking Sherry’s hand in his, he declared:

  ‘You, my sweet, will be my wife, for, trust me, it has been ordained.’

  Sherry’s knees nearly buckled. She caught herself. Until a moment ago she’d been sure Kaleen was going to spurn her. Instead, the opposite. Would she truly never have to work again unless she wanted to, or fret about bills again, or worry about whether a sister-in-law would turn her into an unpaid maid? Best to get Kaleen inside and announce the unbelievable proposal to her parents and legitimise it before he had time to reconsider. As for smoking, she would try her best to quit. But the fact was, she had a bigger secret than smoking, and though she could have hidden it from him, Sherry did not want to dupe anyone into marriage.

  ‘I have something to divulge,’ she said nervously.

  ‘Tell me, sweet, sweet Sherry.’

  ‘I am unable to have children.’

  ‘Truly,’ Kaleen said, ‘God is showering me with blessings.’

  Her lack of a working uterus suited him perfectly. He wanted a mother for his children, he told her, but he did not want any more children.

  Sherry hurried her beau into her house, where he proceeded to formally ask Haji Looclus for his daughter’s hand. Sherry shivered the whole time. She could hardly believe that her spoilt uterus had not ruined her prospects, having constantly heard that grim verdict over the years, and now she promised God a gratitude Hajj, extra prayers for the rest of her life, and even more alms for the poor.

  Her younger sister, Mareea, shed happy tears that no one could ever mock or dismiss her hard-working elder sister for being barren. As for Sherry’s brothers, Mansoor and Manzoor, their delight was unparalleled: they loved their sister, but they were beyond relieved that someone was finally marrying her and that she was going to her ‘real’ home.

  Bobia Looclus chortled with pleasure – Bobia 1, Pinkie 0 – as she retrieved her Quran and blessed the future couple by touching the holy book to their heads. Whatever his reasons for marrying her, she informed Sherry in the kitchen as they quickly prepared chai, Sherry was not to worry – Allah nigehbaan, God was watching over her. Sherry was going to prove to Farhat Kaleen that he’d made the best decision. Why should they care that Kaleen had only days ago proposed to Alys. Every man was allowed his blunders. Alys’s loss was Sherry’s gain. The Binat girls were spoilt, and their mother was to blame for always telling them that they deserved no less than princes and presidents.

  ‘Agar uski betiyan ghar behtee reh jayen – if her daughters rot at home for the rest of their lives,’ Bobia muttered, ‘it will be Pinkie Binat’s fault for giving them standards instead of teaching them to make do.’ Bobia kissed her daughter’s forehead. ‘I cannot wait to tell snooty Pinkie our good news.’

  But Sherry made her family promise that they would keep this a secret until she told Alys herself. Everyone agreed, though Kaleen wished he could go straight to the Binats and inform them that he was marrying Alysba’s friend. Instead, when he returned to the Binats’ house, he packed his suitcase to immediately leave for Islamabad and surprised the Binats by his graciousness and promise to return very soon. As his car drove away, Mrs Binat mentioned to Mr Binat that she was sure Kaleen meant to turn his attentions to Mari, since she seemed to actually enjoy his sermons.

  Sherry avoided telling Alys her big news during the school day on the pretext that it was the wrong venue but that evening, as they had their smoke in the graveyard, she could no longer stall.

  ‘Alys,’ Sherry took a deep breath, ‘Alys, I’m engaged to Farhat Kaleen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m engaged to Farhat Kaleen.’

  Alys had wondered whether Kaleen might be interested in Sherry, but she’d failed to imagine that Sherry would reciprocate.

  Sherry lit a fresh cigarette with trembling fingers. ‘Stop looking at me like that.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘This morning,’ Sherry said. ‘Before the school van came.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You see?’ Sherry said. ‘That’s all you’re going to say?’

  ‘Congratulations on a fine catch,’ Alys said. ‘If he could, he would come for you on a stallion, did he say?’

  ‘Tch! Don’t be like that! He doesn’t care that I can’t have children, and because he doesn’t care, perhaps one day I truly won’t care. Alys, the biggest attraction in marrying him is that his children will be mine. I will become a mother. I swear, his youngest already looks at me with so much trust and affection.’

  Alys wanted to tell Sherry yet again that she was more than a childbearing and child-rearing machine. But what was the use? Perhaps you truly could not make someone disbelieve what they’d been so thoroughly conditioned to believe.

  ‘You know,’ Sherry said, ‘if you had accepted his proposal, you could have resigned from British School today without having to listen to Mrs Naheed and Rose-Nama’s mother’s demands ever again.’

  ‘I’d rather be accused of imaginary crimes my entire life than become that man’s wife.’

  ‘He has shortcomings. He’s human! No one is perfect. Not even people like Darsee, or you.’

  ‘You’re taller than him,’ Alys said feebly as she looked up at Sherry.

  ‘I don’t care, and he hasn’t said anything,’ Sherry said. ‘And, anyway
, only by one inch.’

  Alys took a deep breath. ‘Listen, Sherry, I’m happy for you if this is what you really want.’

  ‘I want.’ Sherry took a long puff. ‘Of course I want. Children. Hel-lo: S-E-X. Car, driver. And he’s a British citizen because of which I will become a British citizen. And then I will be able to sponsor my parents, my brothers, and my sister. This will change our lives. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Love? Like? Respect? Or do only the material things he can provide count?’

  Sherry shook her head. ‘You want to call me a gold-digger? Go ahead. But my name should be Budgeting, Saving, and Serving. I’ve been working outside the home ever since I can remember, as well as inside cooking and cleaning, and I want to be in a relationship where duties will be shared. My husband-to-be may say ridiculous things like “Dignified women do not work outside the home” and “Men who expect their wives to earn are losers”, but I am perfectly capable of being content in a traditional marriage. He will be an excellent provider and, I guarantee you, I will be the best mother and homemaker in the world.’

  Alys sighed. ‘Sherry, people marry for money, for security, for children, then get stuck in crappy financially dependent relationships.’

  ‘Alys, stop being dramatic. I’m not saying I won’t ever work outside again and earn my own income. When I choose to, I will.’

  Alys raised a brow. ‘And you think your husband-to-be will give you that choice?’

  Sherry took a moment to answer. ‘I am practical, Alys. I am not you. Please try to understand. Please. For me marriage is not a love story; it’s a social contract. Inshallah you’ll get your love story and never have to compromise, and I sincerely pray you find a man who’ll respect and appreciate you exactly as you are, and you a man you respect exactly as he is. But let me tell you, if Farhat Kaleen talks about me half as affectionately and respectfully as he talks about his late wife, I will be a very lucky woman.’