Damn! Saira has a 14-year old daughter! Flashback to 1991 … Saira, my classmate in Kinnaird College, was among the first of my larger circle of friends to get married. Hence in 2006, Saira is at the Karachi airport seeing off her afore-mentioned 14-year-old daughter on a school trip to Islamabad. Yours truly is also at the Karachi airport having a fit that Saira has a 14-year-old daughter. Damn, damn, damn! Am I really that old? Could I have been mother to a 14-year-old? Holy moly!

Forty-eight hours later, I am back on familiar territory – in a scene that could well be from my all-time favourite TV show, Sex and the City – sharing the airport incident with four girlfriends from my inner circle of college friends while talking about life, love and relationships at a crowded Lahore restaurant (is there any other kind?).

There’s Naurin, a lawyer, who works for a multinational clothing company ensuring that her employer’s reputation is never legally compromised by its suppliers. It’s called social responsibility compliance, if I remember correctly. She jet-sets from China to Cambodia, from Manchester to Manhattan, from Delhi to Dubai. Because Naurin is single.

Samiya is a back-to-nature farmer who runs an organic foods business encouraging people to revert to organically grown grains, pulses, and indigenous vegetables in an effort to propagate a healthier lifestyle. Lahori eating habits don’t seem to be changing, however. One look around us at the crowded fast food restaurant tells us how unhealthily attached to their burgers ‘n’ fries, sweets and Patchi chocolates Lahorites are. Samiya is a divorced mother of two.

Shazia is raising a family of three energetic boys —make that four, since hubby Gohar would be mighty miffed at being left out — ranging from ages four to 40. She is expecting her fourth baby, finally a girl. In her spare time, she has begun to volunteer at a school for girls set up by her great grandmother, revising the English curriculum and teaching both teachers and students conversational English. She is also actively consuming and promoting Samiya’s organically grown atta. Shazia has been happily married for … wow … 13 years! And then there’s me. Once-upon-a-time journalist turned NGO-type. I can’t claim to have made the world a better place, but I try and create an environment for journalists to remain in journalism and not scamper off to the development world like I did! Needless to say, I too am single.

Naurin, Samiya, Shazia and I are from Kinnaird’s Class of 1990. We contested a college election together, which Naurin and Samiya won; Shazia and I lost. We worked in Najmuddin Dramatics Society plays together, Samiya and Shazia on stage, Naurin and I building, setting up and dismantling sets behind the scenes. We ate naan-haleem and samosas, and drank full set chai under shady laburnum trees at Choudhry Sahab’s tuck shop.

We helped each other drape saris while celebrating our last week in college. There’s a photo of us in those saris, some draped too high like dhotis, blouses loose or a tad too tight – all eager to fast forward from girlhood into womanhood and leap out of academic life into the real world. A world where happy marriages, delightful children, fulfilling careers, heartbreak, divorce, the death of siblings, the demise of parents, and single womanhood, awaited us.

Sixteen eventful years later, we are enjoying high tea at a cacophonous restaurant on M M Alam Road – Lahore’s audacious attempt at outdoing Rodeo Drive. All around us kitty parties are in full swing. We are flotsam – not to mention highly unfashionable – in a sea of blonde-streaked and ironed hair, Fendi bags and Tiffany diamonds. Naurin and I are the first to arrive, and while we wait for Samiya and Shazia to join us after dropping their firstborns to birthday parties, we trade travel itineraries – she’s going to London, Dubai and China, me to Cairo, Kathmandu and Delhi in the next few months.

Once the other two arrive, we assemble platefuls of sandwiches, canapés, dahi phulki, fried fish, and lasagna, and settle down to exchange news about each other’s lives, and share insights and experiences. I’m not sure why, but I find my love life under discussion and I’m soon chattering away about the new man in my life, someone whom I feel is a serious contender for THE ONE.

But the more I talk about this guy, I realise much to my dismay that he’s actually the one I think I must settle down with because I’m getting too old, because he loves me to distraction, because he’s non-controversial, because he’s a decent chap not to mention a thoroughly nice guy, because he will likely be a good father and husband, etc. Who am I trying to convince? Myself? Because I can see Shazia is quiet, Naurin bemused and Samiya is wincing.

And I have a strange sense of déjà vu. Another flashback ... another candidate … chosen for similar reasons. Then that incorrigible romanticism – which one usually acquires circa 16 and if one is not married by then, loses at 26 – mysteriously reappeared and pulled me back from the band, baja, baraat, stage. Not that I left him at the altar; nothing that dramatic or cruel. But I retreated because I realised that I had not given up on love.

Hearing myself speak, I find it dawning on me as clear as my own name that I’m making the same mistake twice. None of my friends says anything. They just listen. And so do I — to my own voice — reminding me that it makes sense to be practical. But, in Jane Austen’s definition of the term, it’s infinitely better to be sensible. n

*SWOT is the acronym for Single Woman Over Thirty