then. No questions, no answers. Just “go!” And no matter how she weeps, how much she howls, how much she kisses my feet and begs to stay, I’m going to say, “Leave!” Befooling me like that, after I’ve done so much for her.
You should have seen her when she first came here. Thin and starving and dressed in rags. A real down-and-out pheasant woman from some lost village God knows where. Muhammad Hussain, our driver, brought her and said, please give her a job because they are eating stones in her village. And now look at her. Plucked eyebrows, bleached face, dressed in all my last-season designer
joras
and fat as a hen. And those earrings I gave her, they alone cost me sixty thou. Wait and see what I’ll do to her when she comes back. Liar. User. Faker. Hippocrit. As Mummy says, we should never trust these people. They don’t have morals. Because they are uneducated. And not from our baggrounds.
17 October
Honestly the sich is so bad, so bad that don’t even ask. No water, no electricity, no security, no schools, and still no wife for Jonkers. Every day bombs bursting everywhere and people dying like flies. Just today the beardo-weirdos attacked that police-training centre inside Lahore. Not some faraway place in the Frontier like Peshawar or Swat, or even not so far away as Rawalpindi, but in
Lahore
. Okay, it was on the outer outer-skirts of Lahore in some God-fortaken place called Manawan or something, but still it was Lahore,
my
city. Apparently, they did the attack in broad daylight. Just came running in, shooting Kalashnikovs and bursting grenades and God knows what, what else. What cheeks, no?
As usuals the stuppid police-
wallah
s didn’t realize what was happening at first, and when they finally did, they ran away and hid but when they finally, finally realized they were going to get killed in any case, they at last started shooting back. The fighting went on for three full hours before they were all killed (the terrorists, not the police, thanks God; well one or two policemen were also killed, but mainly non-officer-types whose names even don’t come in papers). Just imagine! All this happening inside Lahore. Not fifteen miles from where we live.
I swear I feel frightened myself going to the bazaar in case some mad weirdo arrives and shoots me for buying western food like chips or for wearing western clothes like pop-socks. All the time I’m looking over my shoulder, all the time thinking someone standing behind me in a shop or parked besides me on a bicycle in a traffic jam might blow me up. It’s been two full months since I went to Avari Hotel on the Mall to get my facial (the spa there’s the best at giving facial, na). Ever since the Marriott was bombed last year in Isloo—Islamabad,
yaar—
I’ve
tau
stopped hotelling. The only thing I used to still go for was my facial. Now I get a girl to come to the house but she’s not a thatch on the Avari one. And also she has b.o. Honestly, what the Talibans have put us through! So when people say Americans are behind all this killing-shilling, I say I
tau
use Estee Louder products for my facial. And Estee Louder, as everyone knows, is American. So why would Americans put axe in their own foot by causing all the killing in Pakistan so no one could even leave their houses any more to get Estee Louder facials,
haan
? In any case, who is against facials? Is it Americans? No. Is it Indians? No. Is it Talibans? Yes. Yes. Yes. No one but the Talibans.
At least Lahore isn’t as bad as Isloo. There
tau
everyone’s under house arrest. So many important foreign types keep coming there,
na
, that guvmunt’s shut down everything to protect them. First came Senator Carry, remember the one who lost that election to Bush? Then came the Turkish PM, what’s his name, Astrakhan or Ardogan or something (such strange, strange names people have) and then Hilary Clintoncame. The guvmunt, as you can imagine, is scared sniff about where Talibans will strike next
You should have seen her when she first came here. Thin and starving and dressed in rags. A real down-and-out pheasant woman from some lost village God knows where. Muhammad Hussain, our driver, brought her and said, please give her a job because they are eating stones in her village. And now look at her. Plucked eyebrows, bleached face, dressed in all my last-season designer
joras
and fat as a hen. And those earrings I gave her, they alone cost me sixty thou. Wait and see what I’ll do to her when she comes back. Liar. User. Faker. Hippocrit. As Mummy says, we should never trust these people. They don’t have morals. Because they are uneducated. And not from our baggrounds.
17 October
Honestly the sich is so bad, so bad that don’t even ask. No water, no electricity, no security, no schools, and still no wife for Jonkers. Every day bombs bursting everywhere and people dying like flies. Just today the beardo-weirdos attacked that police-training centre inside Lahore. Not some faraway place in the Frontier like Peshawar or Swat, or even not so far away as Rawalpindi, but in
Lahore
. Okay, it was on the outer outer-skirts of Lahore in some God-fortaken place called Manawan or something, but still it was Lahore,
my
city. Apparently, they did the attack in broad daylight. Just came running in, shooting Kalashnikovs and bursting grenades and God knows what, what else. What cheeks, no?
As usuals the stuppid police-
wallah
s didn’t realize what was happening at first, and when they finally did, they ran away and hid but when they finally, finally realized they were going to get killed in any case, they at last started shooting back. The fighting went on for three full hours before they were all killed (the terrorists, not the police, thanks God; well one or two policemen were also killed, but mainly non-officer-types whose names even don’t come in papers). Just imagine! All this happening inside Lahore. Not fifteen miles from where we live.
I swear I feel frightened myself going to the bazaar in case some mad weirdo arrives and shoots me for buying western food like chips or for wearing western clothes like pop-socks. All the time I’m looking over my shoulder, all the time thinking someone standing behind me in a shop or parked besides me on a bicycle in a traffic jam might blow me up. It’s been two full months since I went to Avari Hotel on the Mall to get my facial (the spa there’s the best at giving facial, na). Ever since the Marriott was bombed last year in Isloo—Islamabad,
yaar—
I’ve
tau
stopped hotelling. The only thing I used to still go for was my facial. Now I get a girl to come to the house but she’s not a thatch on the Avari one. And also she has b.o. Honestly, what the Talibans have put us through! So when people say Americans are behind all this killing-shilling, I say I
tau
use Estee Louder products for my facial. And Estee Louder, as everyone knows, is American. So why would Americans put axe in their own foot by causing all the killing in Pakistan so no one could even leave their houses any more to get Estee Louder facials,
haan
? In any case, who is against facials? Is it Americans? No. Is it Indians? No. Is it Talibans? Yes. Yes. Yes. No one but the Talibans.
At least Lahore isn’t as bad as Isloo. There
tau
everyone’s under house arrest. So many important foreign types keep coming there,
na
, that guvmunt’s shut down everything to protect them. First came Senator Carry, remember the one who lost that election to Bush? Then came the Turkish PM, what’s his name, Astrakhan or Ardogan or something (such strange, strange names people have) and then Hilary Clintoncame. The guvmunt, as you can imagine, is scared sniff about where Talibans will strike next
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