Trembling Camera Flare on a Column Within a Column

Writer’s Disclaimer: This piece of writing proposes (pun intended) discussion only about the share of women that obviously are reflections in the mirror held up. Unsympathetic wankers with arguments on how large or small the fraction is should do the earth

a favour and contact Dr. Kevorkian.

In newspapers…
Have you ever read the matrimonial section? I have and it’s not a pretty sight.

Pay attention even if your head hurts. These are poor women who end up in this exclusive club-like section in newspapers. These are real people. Trapped in a system they didn’t create and never wished for. Read their lives aloud and know the torment of a young woman with suitcase fantasies and no groom. Mother pales by the winter fire and dear old dad weeps in the john. The life gets sucked out of them. Hope evaporates slowly, methodically…like ice…melting in a perspiring glass. The ad is their life. Imagine. A human being. Trapped in simple case of text, a hundred words of past, present and future. Those newsprint pleas. That stupid perch of ours as we skip the section almost conceitedly. Screams and pallid requests caged in that little box. Five hundred rupees per line. Small photographs of failure, overexposed, tossed around marriage bureaus and locked in the abysmal dark of wise aunt W’s purse.

Single, Sunni, middle class, well educated, fair skinned, has lucrative job. Each word a hook. A flinging of the fishing line with bait all-too familiar to the fish. A sad lure as hopeless as the words indicate. How many people actually tell the truth in their adverts? Do they feel pleased at their lies? The guilt is worth it all. Necessary lies for the phone to ring. Any phone. Those long hours of re-reading the advertisements, biting those nails. Did I miss something? Depression suspended like angels in a mystery play. White societal strings. Held up by confused morals, as further from any religion as they profoundly claim to be closer to.

Mrs. Javed runs a small matchmaking business in a small office she shares with her husband who runs a real estate business there. Her opinions are frank, novel and bitter. She started out three years ago, as those wise aunties who know just about everyone. Her first client was her neighbour’s niece. Her history was this…Salima was 29 years old and was divorced at twenty-three after a month of marriage. Apparently, her husband and his parents assumed that Salima’s father had left them a sizable fortune and the middle class family had deeper pockets than they demonstrated. Her husband wanted to build a new home in DHA and expected his wife to chip in. Salima laughed at the idea when it first emerged. But she wasn’t laughing when she received divorce papers in the mail from her globetrotting husband. Tales of Salima’s beauty had echoed in the closed circuit of the city and proposals had come weekly before her marriage. But there were other stories. Stories of her single promiscuous life. Stories of affairs that resulted in the failure of the marriage. People had ears for the filthier hearsay. There were no ears for Mrs. Javed propositions. And all these stories are loose threads that lead to no proof. But no one really gives a damn. Salima, now 32, lives in a two-bedroom apartment with three cats and has given up on marriage bureaus. Mrs. Javed’s views, while highly jaundiced, on marriage bureaus aren’t colourful. “They’re all in it for the money.” says she. “I have nominal charges but not a widespread reputation. Most bureaus charge two thousand rupees to have a small talk and no results. Cases of success aren’t always success. Some girls have problems settling down. Some are just unfortunate.” “Sometimes, the proposers back out after strangers stop them in the street to tell stories.”

It is not normal people who follow the smiling family that just proposed to the lonely thirty-year-old girl in the neighbourhood. Who follow and eventually stop them to narrate unverified tales of dishonour and offer free advice. These are not normal people wearing their Superman costume under that grey Shalwar Kameez. They are filth. Truth, Justice and the Pakistani way and its supporters should be exterminated with extreme prejudice. All those implacable laws and rule-of-thumbs of society built to save one and damn a hundred. The crashed system with its head in the people’s arse.

But we’re so afraid of life that we follow blindly the road that leads nowhere. The unending road that offers no thrill of the journey. No grief for a backward glance. We’ re so afraid of living life the way it is, full of shitrains and pointless suffering, that we wind ourselves into the disgusting inhuman engine called society. And believe me, we all get our share of guano regardless of society’s dung-detectors. To steer ourselves clear of any serious damage we can allow decent people to drown and have the unappeasable sharks eat their flesh. That thirty two year old woman wasn’t old enough to get married ten years ago. It’s people who turned her down for ten years for a new excuse to result. There are people who never even make it to the matrimonial. Their only fault is being afraid. Their only disease: cancerous poverty. It’s women. And most of them are just waiting. Waiting. Lives like midnight waits in cold train lounges. They’re waiting for society to grant them a mask. A mask that makes people take their vulture’s eyes off them. An invite to the masquerade where the only music is moans and screams. The only entertainment contrived laughter. And the drinks are served in fragmented glasses built from someone’s shattered self-esteem. The value of families. It takes one act of callousness and insensitivity to ruin a family. And all it gives the world…another spectacle.

And we return to begin again. Those small black hearts printed in that small box. Augurs and omens. All the important letters drowned in the dull font and the sea of useless information. All screaming signals and ghost transmissions. All messages forming the spiral that they promise to develop. The golden spiral rising into one famous scream, one day-breaking line…
“Will you marry me?”