Bhai, you tau know I’m a PP (oho baba, Proud Punjoo) and so, when my Chief Minister Sahiba gave us one month to take out our trash and to clean up our act, I tau immediately told Janoo’s sisters, the Gruesome Twosome, kay bhai you should do your duty and take yourselves out.

And you know what? They mind karoed! So touchy. So now, they’re not talking to me.

Vaisay, have you noticed how so many people can’t bear to hear the truth? Like when I told my bestie, Mulloo, at a wedding, with a little si laugh, that she had put on so much kay now she was looking like a hippo in a gharara and she immediately shot back with ‘at least I don’t look like a deep-frozen, vacuum-packed broiler chicken drumstick.’

Dekho zara! So mean, so petty, so personal, so poisonous. You’d think she had an ass to grind against me. And me, her bestie! Vaisay, people have no value for friendship. I tell you, it’s a sign of kayamat.

Everyone’s so touchy these days. It seems people just can’t bear to hear the truth

Anyways, short story shorter, mountain of trash is still vaheen ka vaheen and so are the Gruesome Twosome, sadly. Only Mulloo’s gharara has been removed. And also, she’s not talking to me.

Apart from myself, you know who I’m feeling sorry for these days? King Charles. All his life he’s waited to assert the throne and now that he’s finally sat on it, poor thing, he’s gone and fallen ill. Bechara!

Not like his mother the Queen. She was so healthy, so healthy she wasn’t ill for a single day even. I tau straight away went into shock when I heard she’d passed away, because I thought, like Budha Biden, she’d keep going forever.

So, I was asking Mummy kay why Queen and Prince Philip (he was also a PP! Who knew?) were so tagrra and she said it was because they’d been brought up on desi ghee and orgasmic chickens and charon maghaz, that’s why. Like you Mummy, I said. You are also built like a World War Two ka Pansy tank. So tough.

Mummy ne mind kar liya. Imagine! So touchy. Now, she’s also not talking to me.

Uss kay ilava, what else has been going on? Haan, suna hai, guvmunt is going to treat shopkeepers like all the rest of us and phussao them in the tax net, also. High times, I say.

So, yesterday, I’d gone to my local general store, Butt Brothers, and the biggest Butt Brother, Bahadur Bhai, who is Mashallah se the size of a land cruiser, he was jammed behind the counter and when I went to pay for my sauda, he started mumbling and grumbling and saying that, as it is, mehngai is biting so much that they are all on the drink of starvation and now, oopar se, if they have to pay tax, what will happen to them?

So I told him saaf saaf. I said, ‘Same what happens to us all. If all of the country, including us landowner types who were once khaata peeta and are now bhooka nanga, can give tax, then Bahadur Bhai so can you.’

‘But,’ he started protesting. ‘No ifs and Butts, bhai saab,’ I tittered. ‘And by the way, Eid Mubarak.’ And I swished out with my Birkin in my baghal. I won’t be going there for a little while now, because, I think so, he doesn’t want to talk to me.

I was leaving Butt Brothers when a fakirni tapped on my car window and whined that she had nine children… So, I said, ‘Fortunately, I’m not the father.’ As I was driving away, she made a rude sa hand sign and, I think so, she said ‘Fittay moonh.’ So, it’s mean, she’s also done kutti with me.

I’m so reliefed kay Bushy Bibi is no longer being given Harpic ki drops. Maybe someone was trying to be helpful by cleaning out her insides? Apparently, in super reclusive healthy farms in Swizzerland and Germany, they do same to same, but they call it colonic irritation and, for a small fee of a few thousand dollars, they starve you and irritate your colon every day for two weeks until your insides become your outsides.

Vaisay I tau would never go to healthy farm, because me being khandani type, I’m very delicate na and, instead of the colon that all aam aadmis have, I most likely have only a semi colon.

Khair, whatever it is, I’m tau very thankful that Bushy Bibi’s been given a clean pill of health. Not that she and I were ever on talking terms, par chalo. Can’t have everything.

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 14th, 2024