With one word, he had changed her life forever. He was the usual Desi man,
dark, short, thin, with glasses that seemed to accentuate his unimpressive
mustache, dark hair parted in the middle, and a shirt that should've been
retired by now.

Normally, she wouldn't have paid much attention to whatever came out of his
24 year old uncorrected overbite, but today, he grabbed her undivided
attention with that one word . In the time honored Desi tradition, he had
just addressed her as AUNTIE!


Auntie? She felt as if she had been electrocuted. "But I am only...,just
because I have..., you don't...,you moron,!" Within the next nanosecond,
her mind went through more thoughts ( and expletives) , than she could
count. He was saying something, she didn't quite know what he was talking
about. Her reality was melting into a psychedelic flashback, things around
her suddenly seemed unreal, oddly distorted. She was experiencing an
existential crisis as his annoying little voice was trying to interrupt.

In her mind, aunties had been all those other women, her mother's friends
mainly. The ones whose obesity bubbled to stretch their faithful clothes
until the seams showed the bare thread trying to bridge the gap between
their corpulence of today, and their waif like figures of premarital times.
Aunties shopped endlessly, talked about best ways to cook karela,
complained about unfaithful maids who left for better wages. They wore hot
pink lipstick, and hairdos from the decade when they last cared about what
was fashionable. Aunties were always surrounded by bratty kids who broke
fine china in their hosts' homes.

Then there were uncles, those domesticated husbands whose bellies hung
over their belts as proud proclamations of auntie's culinary skills. They
had well cared for mustaches, wire rimmed glasses, and hairy chests that
thin muslin could not conceal. They talked politics, cricket, and politics
of cricket. They always repeated the same sexist jokes, and never missed
the PTV (Pakistan Television) news.

She wasn't much older than him , but it didn't matter, she had now been
sentenced to auntiehood. She knew, every time that she'll see him, he'll
call her that. Others will hear, and a chain reaction will start, he had
maliciously planted a virus in the central processing unit of her universe
that'll destroy all pre existing identities, and replace them with auntie,
auntie, auntie!

She tried to focus on what he was saying, but couldn't. How could he? The
initial shock had since given way to rage. Finally, he left her alone, much
to her relief, as she looked around to make sure no one else had heard the
conversation.

She thought of many women, some very young ( something she realized only in
retrospect) who she had casually called by the 'A' word. No doubt this was
divine retribution, the list of her sins was long and heinous, her victims
too many to count. Who cares about his juvenile nomenclature anyway, she
thought to herself. He had mislabeled her in the prime of her life , even
though ten years ago, she would have described her present age as a little
past prime, but then, what did she know back then.

She (now) knew that over the years , her analytic abilities have been
inversely proportional to acne. Her new and improved self didn't know or
care about the latest Hollywood heartthrob until National Public Radio did
a movie review on the movie Titanic. Yes, she listened to the news on
Public radio, and no, she didn't see Titanic. She even glances through the
newspaper inserts that announce white sales in her area.

She has dealt with an ever increasing waistline by investing in more
forgiving designs, rather than going into melancholic isolation every time
her clothes mysteriously changed their size all by themselves. She worries
about eating disorders in women who look malnourished in this land of
plenty. She now looked at herself in the mirror only when she puts on the
lipstick in the morning, and considered full length mirrors to be cheap
devices of narcissistic indulgence. She was finally at peace with the
hands that nature or nurture have dealt her. She was boring, predictable,
and a tad out of sync with the trends of today, "So I guess all that does
make me an auntie", she thought. It was a long journey, but she had
arrived.

She physically restrained her bratty child from pulling at the tablecloth,
and grabbed her suitcase of a purse. She then started the process of
extricating her husband from the group of middle-aged men with hairy
chests, so that they could go home to her comfortable suburban existence .