January 30, 2003

I was contemplating spending yet another Saturday night with a remote control, a bar of chocolate and a box of tissues when I suddenly felt an urge to speak to my best friend Amina. I had forgotten to call and wish her on her birthday two weeks before (that’s the thing with birthdays when you’re over 30; you’re so busy trying not to remember your own, that you end up forgetting other people’s). So I booked a long-distance call to her in her little hamlet in a European enclave only to be told by a voice on the other end that she was in fact in Pakistan.

Well, that’s swell, I thought. She’s in Pakistan and hasn’t even called me! So I dialled her number in Islamabad and when a sheepish Amina came on the line seconds later, I of course forgave her instantly, and we chatted happily for the next 45 minutes. (How I’m going to pay my phone bill on a Dawn freelancer’s earnings, I will have to figure out later.)

She apologized profusely about not calling me earlier, when she’d arrived, but explained that her in-laws had also arrived in Pakistan around the same time and her brother and his family were down from Australia. And by in-laws she didn’t mean just parents-in-law, but sister-in-law en famille and brother-in-law en famille as well. When it rains in-laws, they keep pouring in! There was absolute bedlam, of course, and with her two-year-old clinging to her constantly, her 36-year-old also demanding attention and her in-laws needing to visit bazaars and jewelers and dyers and tailors and shoemakers and carpet dealers and palm readers all at once, there was “no time to even take a peaceful piss” let alone make STD calls to best friends. Besides, friends would understand; in-laws, not a chance.

But they were finally gone and she was just left with the clingy two-year-old whom the doting grandmother and mamu were great about relieving her from so she could have an uninterrupted 45-minute telephone tete a tete with yours truly.

But though the susraalis were gone, the maike-walas were being demanding. Her phuppis were complaining of not being visited morning and evening, assorted cousins were complaining of not being given an opportunity to take her out for coffee at the Serena, and her mamu was insisting on a weekend excursion to Lahore on the M2 in his new colour TV-ed Land Cruiser. Never mind if the only channel it could catch was PTV.

“I just want to curl up in a corner and sleep,” Amina protested over the phone. Back in her other life — the happily married one — she often went to bed with a tension-and-endless-loads-of-laundry induced backache. In her parents’ home, at least the laundry routine was gone, but she was still worrying about whether the toffees her two-year-old ate were made from pasteurized milk, or whether she would get lice if she played too long with the chowkidar’s children.

We talked for quite a while about what had been happening in each other’s lives since we’d last met, and while mine seemed to be a series of SWOT columns, hers sounded more like a Fatima Surrayya Bajiya meets Chris Columbus screenplay.

Suddenly my Sexless & the City life seemed altogether peaceful and even glamorous compared to her tension-filled, pamper change punctuated existence.

And it wasn’t about to get any better for her. Pretty soon, once her two-year-old started school, her month-long escape to Pakistan would become a fortnight. Summer vacations were longer, yes, but who would deal with the flies and power outages and monsoon rains and mosquitoes. And the constant fear that if your kid lost 200 grams of weight, your in-laws would put you on a summer entry control list in Pakistan.

I didn’t need to hear any more to be convinced that though the grass may appear greener on the other side, that was actually a gardenful of green weeds I was looking at, not grass. Suddenly, my less ‘fertile’ existence seemed perfect. I couldn’t hear my biological clock ticking anymore. Perhaps the battery had suffered sudden seizure. My dreams of matrimonial bliss and parental delight could wait awhile, I thought to myself. For now I was quite content with a quiet Saturday night spent in the company of a bar of chocolate and cable TV.

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