Into the eye, the cauldron of evenings

Wedding number one kicks off with daily washes and sketches of people whose intimate details are handed out heaps per minute. Last night mum offered a swatch of two years of a girl present, who, I whispered to Mama, looked endangered to me. You know, the slim tall type with eyes too large and liquid to reflect intelligence but dripping Austen in every gesture, in the double shaded lace edging her clothes, the one you can’t help smiling with. She was married to some long distance relative, whose immediate family flew from the U.S.A for the event, were put up and hosted by the girl’s family for two weeks. Once the ceremony was over the husband and family left with most of the gifts (which I think is upper class euphemism for dowry) given by the bride’s family and most of the bride’s stuff, things she had made and collected for her wedding, so that when she would follow later-once her immigration papers had been processed- she would travel light. A few days after their departure the bride receives a sheaf of papers divorcing her from the man. Just like that. Easy peezy. I cannot begin to imagine the horror in that house at that point. I’m sure this is illegal; there must be a law angle to it. Later on they discover, the man had a wife and two children in U.S.A already. There must be a unique hell, on par with those built for murderers, for all those complicit in carrying something out like this. What brings the bile to my mouth in this scenario is that in all those weeks of planning and thinking and doing, at no point did any one member of that family feel enough remorse to stay their sleight of hand. Bambi thankfully (remember Austen) is engaged now to a cousin. I’m not sure if it is a mark of maturity or conformity that I no longer turn cat eyes on people who dare to suggest that girls like Bambi have through a second engagement found a new lease on life. Mostly because I know, even at LUMS, a bulky 50% of the female population gives primacy to a good marriage and family and it is not because of lack of opportunity for a number of them.

My judgment pendulums about the weave of wedding gatherings, very much I think overcome by the apparition of these faces in a crowd, there are points when I despair,a tar kind, the kind you can only feel in an Urdu class where the younger Ms. Siddiqui monotones aquatically, while you are guillotined each second limping towards release. In the adult world one will rarely come across sensations that parallel the awfulness of child landscapes. Another one of them is the itch of knowing there are untold worlds rustling in some drawer while you work on inexplicably gnarly algebra. In the adult routine it’s never that bad, because you always have the illusion of choices. To a child consequences are as big a reality as taxes but to an adult the eventual consequence is what decides the choice. I left the seminar on Literature and Social Change the minute I got a waft of J’s talk, he was going to speak on what he had got up thinking that morning and not on what K and I had hammered out for him. I chose instead of run around the grounds with Hamza. At one point, I saw him squatting down in his pratty khakhis on the lawn. It looked fairly suspicious from afar, I walked over and he looks up crinkling his eyes in a grin as black as the sin of Hades, his mouth crammed with the fertilizer lying on the lawn. I give children +25 points for entertainment value and –30 for wearing diapers that make their bum stick out like Daffy Duck.

POSTSCRIPT I have work in 3 hours but I must state at once how much I LOATHE mehndis where I am expected to sit sterile, by the dance floor, because our side is such a wuss and watch the other side dance their booty off.I only go to weddings because of the dances, I just haven't reached that stage of exhibitionism where I can do solos and I'm sure it's against some international human right law to come away from a function feeling like THIS: starved of dancing, feeling like withdrawal symptoms will kick in very soon.Tonight I miss LUMS with angst, one I could only counter by sending Minchka (one of my dutiful dance partners)anguished texts in triplicate, I miss the weekends of dancing, of coming back to the dorm with party dresses soaked in sweat and kathi smoke albeit second hand(alcohol I see sense in, drugs I don't).*cwies*I know it sounds trivial but it isn't.*cwies some more*