Me and Janoo, you know, we have a lot many discussions. All about big, big, important, important topics like politics and what happens to us after we die and all.

So yesterday, after lunch, he was reading the papers and I was filing my nails and suddenly he crunched up the papers into a big ball and threw them across the room and said, ‘This country is going to hell in a handcart.’

Aik tau Janoo is also such a boom merchant na, always running us down and out. Bus Allah mokka day. So, I said to him, ‘Why should we be going anywhere in a handcart when yesterday only I saw two Merks and three BMWs parked outside Jalal Sons? And it wasn’t even the fancy Jalal Sons in Defence but in Main Market only.

‘And our prime ministers and top kay generals Mashallah se, whenever they go abroad, always they go on personal jets, instead of travelling like ghareebs in commercial flights. Make us so proud to be Pakistani, I swear. Makes such a nice impression on foreigners, get us so much of izzat. Even our maali comes to work on a motorbike. So, no one is going anywhere in a handcart, okay?’

If only bills could be signed without paying them…

So, he said that I hadn’t heard the first bit of what he’d said about going to hell. I said I don’t know about where you’re going but I’m going to jannat, sorry jannah — jannat is sooo last millennium — because I kept all my rozas this year. (I was earning sawaabs while doing itinerant fasting na).

Also, I gave four of my 10-year-old designer jorras to Daddy’s poor cousin, Farhat Apa, who is a widow with four daughters and she was so grateful, so grateful she gave me five thousand duas and she said to me ‘you will go straight to jannat beti’.

‘You mean janaah, Farhat Apa,’ I said to her. ‘No one goes to jannat anymore.’ So please Janoo, don’t tell me where we are all going because I’ve done my bundobast from now only and I’m sorry to say but we are travelling to different destinations.

And then Janoo asked kay had I heard how President Alvi said he hadn’t signed any bill and that he asked his staff to return it unsigned but they went and signed it with his signature behind his back? I told him it was very strange because, whenever I’m presented with a bill, I’m never given the option of returning it.

So Janoo said it wasn’t that kind of bill but another kind of bill that only presidents are given and, when they sign it, it means that they okay whatever’s written in the bill and their signature means now a law has been passed saying whatever it says in the bill.

I said I wished somebody would give me a bill like that which only needed signing and no paying, because I would sign a bill saying that no bijli bill must ever come to this house again and that gas is to come every day, all day and that my friend Baby cannot do any more show offing about her daughter Bubble’s engagement to the eldest son of Muqqadas Textiles.

So Janoo took a deep breath — like when doctors put a periscope on your back and say take a big breath please — and he said in his special super sarrhial voice, ‘The point is that the president is claiming he never signed a document that bears his signature.’

‘Haw tau Janoo iss mein kya hai?’ I asked. ‘It must have skipped President Alvi’s mind. It’s common at that age. Don’t you remember how last month Aunty Pussy made a big tamasha about how her maid had stolen the key to her safe and eaten all the chocolate she keeps there and after everyone had turned the house upside down and the maid had sworn on her children’s head that she didn’t touch the key, Jonkers discovered the chaabi in a little side pocket in Aunty Pussy’s bag and found the chocolate bars under her pillow, all melted and grubby?’

Janoo was looking a bit dizzy by now, so I said, ‘Theek ho? Have you heard what I’ve been saying?’

‘My head is spinning,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know how we got from the president’s bill to Aunty Pussy’s melted chocolates.’

Oh no, I hope so Janoo isn’t becoming like Aunty Pussy and President Alvi and losing his memories...

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 27th, 2023