One night in January this year, my brother’s wife Maliha sat down her two daughters, my nieces Mariam, 10 (going on 23!) and Hana, 6, to tell them that their Phuppo (yours truly) was getting married. The conversation went something like this: “Girls, do you remember Phuppo’s friend who visited us last Saturday?” she asked.

There were blank stares.

“The one who brought chocolate cake?” she added.

Instant recognition. Sparkling eyes. Smiles.

Hana had single-handedly polished off half that cake at the rate of two slices at every meal including breakfast, while Mariam who doesn’t usually have a sweet tooth, miraculously grew one on that occasion and helped polish off the rest of the chocolate cake.

“Well, he likes Phuppo and Phuppo likes him and… they’re getting married!” concluded Maliha.

I was watching Mariam’s face as she digested this news. I could see her eyes starting to pop and her jaw starting to drop. Hana was seated next to me on the sofa. While Mariam was busy becoming progressively astounded, Hana had sidled across the couch towards me and by the time her mother finished speaking, was leaning against me and holding my hand – as if I was about to fly off already.

No sooner had Maliha finished her little announcement, Mariam turned to me with a look of utter incredulity and exclaimed, “But you’re 40!”

To borrow Maliha’s rather descriptive expression, my flabber was completely and utterly gasted.

“Mariam Ali,” I began, feigning an air of nonchalance that I was not feeling, “are you telling me I’m too old to get married?” I asked.

She didn’t even hesitate for a second. “YES!”

I’ll admit that a lot of things about my wedding are unconventional other than the, ahem, mature age of the bride. For one, my wedding event is a tea-time reception not a dinner. This is causing Zaidi Sahab over at the hotel where we’re hosting the reception, much anxiety. Shaking his head gravely, he said to me, “Never in my 30 years of experience in hospitality have I come across a high tea reception for a wedding.” He has even tried to convince me to change my mind, By spending only 150,000 more, he says, I can get an elaborate dinner menu.

It’s not about the money, Zaidi Sa’ab. I’ve always, always, dreamed of a tea-time reception. The tall palms, the balmy breeze, the sloping lawns, the gently rippling creek waters have always seemed the perfect setting for a Karachi wedding. My wedding day in May is a day shy of my 40th birthday. Just in the nick of time… SWOT must not overstay her visa in the land of SWOT (an acronym for single women over thirty, lest you have forgotten).

“There are many advantages to getting married when one is more ‘mature’,” writes my friend Olivia. “Marriage… brings many challenges. Having had lots of experience (of life) helps one meet them.” She is speaking from experience, having herself married post-40.

One advantage of course, is the decisiveness. You know what you want. I even had my jora picked out a year ago. Of course, there wasn’t a wedding in sight back then. I had in fact made peace with the idea that there never would be a wedding. But did that mean I wasn’t entitled to a gorgeous outfit from the bridal wear maharaja, Umar Sayeed? And just because I wasn’t to be married, would my family and friends be spared from giving me gifts of gold, jewels and salad bowls? Most certainly not! This was the deal: I would dress up in my Umar Sayeed jora and host dinner for all my family and friends, thus feeding them the meal that was my responsibility. They, in turn, would turn up with the gifts they would have given me at my wedding - their end of the bargain. It was a perfect plan.

If you want to make God laugh, they say, tell Him your future plans. He had obviously been eavesdropping on a conversation with my friend Rashida over dinner while we were at a yoga retreat in Sri Lanka last October. Rashida and I were all but passed out on a sofa under the canopied dining area sipping lemongrass tea and reading when the phone rang. It had rained all day so the night air was freshly showered. The crickets provided a chirpy background score. The resident pye dog was snoozing beside us. My Sex and the City ring tone pierced the peaceful night. It was my friend Nazi. Should I answer it? The phone was on roaming and this was a personal call. Fate made me take the call. Nazi got straight to the point. “So there’s this guy…,” she began.

From here-on is history. And her story. As in, our story… mine and J’s. But that’s another column – or a novel? – to be written, perhaps, in my SWOT afterlife.

For now, let’s head back to the land of SWOT where I still have resident status for a few more weeks.

When I began writing what eventually became the SWOT column circa the Millennium, I was conscious not to come across as anti-marriage. Not because I was afraid of the backlash from marriage-obsessed Pakistanis (which I still had to face, by the way). But because I wasn’t anti-marriage. I just wasn’t about to marry because it was expected of me. Or because I wanted children. Or because I needed financial stability.

Was I a feminist? I didn’t think of myself as one. Sure, I believed that women needed to be paid as much as men for the same job. But I also wanted men to come to my rescue on the occasion of a flat tyre. This made me more opportunist than feminist, I thought.

Renowned feminist Gloria Steinem spent most of her life thinking that marriage was demeaning. At 66, however, she had a change of heart. She met, fell in love with and married the human rights activist, David Bale, much to the dismay of fellow feminists.

But Steinem didn’t marry because she had to. She married because she wanted to, wearing jeans to her wedding rather than a white dress.

When Steinem became a champion of women’s rights in the early 70s, she resisted pressures on women to marry, take their husband’s names and knock out babies. In Steinem’s day, marriage and its trappings (pun intended) were social imperatives. Twenty-first century women have a choice. A woman need not forego her identity and her rights when she marries. “I no longer felt that I would have to give myself up in any way,” said Steinem speaking about her decision.

Luckily, I didn’t have to wait till 66 to marry, and it’s what I want – not have – to do. As Mariam’s shock indicated, however, even 40 is too old an age for a bride in some contexts. But convention has never been my cup of tea. Nor was it my mother’s - she drank hers black with lemon not milk.

So as I prepare to controversially serve tea at my unconventional tea-time wedding reception as a 40-year-old bride, I want to raise my mug to Ammi. In a country where thousands of women still have no choices, she made sure I did. That I learnt to drive, attend boarding school, and live independently in Islamabad - because I wanted to. Best of all, I was never prevailed upon to marry. And most importantly, that throughout my single, over thirty womanhood I had a voice - my SWOT column.