|
WIPE Did Amina Brand conquer the world in the name of cleanliness (which is next to ...)? Did Valikas and Saigols come to ask Ahmed Sinai, 'God, we're stumped, yaar, how'd you do it?' Did high-quality terry-cloth, in patterns devised by Ahmed himself - a li... Posted by lookLV128 on Oct 26, 2011 21:36 (206 days ago) |
Did Amina Brand conquer the world in the name of cleanliness (which is next to ...)? Did Valikas and Saigols come to ask Ahmed Sinai, 'God, we're stumped, yaar, how'd you do it?' Did high-quality terry-cloth, in patterns devised by Ahmed himself - a little gaudy, but never mind, they were born of love - wipe away the moist-ness of Pakistanis and export-markets alike? Did Russians Englishmen Americans wrap themselves in my mother's immortalized name? ... The story of Amina Brand must wait awhile; because the career of Jamila Singer is about to take off; the mosque-shadowed house on Clayton Louis Vuitton bag outlet Road has been visited by Uncle Puffs. His real name was Major (Retired) Alauddin Latif; he had heard about my sister's voice from 'my darn good friend General Zulfikar; use to be with him in the Border Patrol Force back in '47.' He turned up at Alia Aziz's house shortly after Jamila's fifteenth birthday, beaming and bouncing, revealing a mouth filled with solid gold teeth. 'I'm a simple fellow,' he explained, 'like our illustrious President. I keep my cash where it's safe.' Like our illustrious President, the Major's head was perfectly spherical; unlike Ayub Khan, Latif had left the Army and entered show-business. 'Pakistan's absolute number-one impresario, old man,' he told my father. 'Nothing to it but organization; old Army habit, dies darn hard.' Major Latif had a proposition: he wanted to hear Jamila sing, 'And if she's two per cent as good as I'm told, my good sir, I'll make her famous! Oh, yes, overnight, certainly! Contacts: that's all it takes; contacts and organization; and yours truly Major (Retired) Latif has the lot. Alauddin Latif,' he stressed, flashing goldly at Ahmed Sinai, 'Know the story? I just rub my jolly old lamp and out pops the genie bringing fame and fortune. Your girl will be in darn good hands. Dam good.' It is fortunate for Jamila Singer's legion of fans that Ahmed Sinai was a man in love with his wife; mellowed by his own happiness, he failed to eject Major Latif on the spot. I also believe today that my parents had already come to the conclusion gucci online that their daughter's gift was too extraordinary to keep to themselves; the sublime magic of her angel's voice had begun to teach them the inevitable imperatives of talent. But Ahmed and Amina had one concern. 'Our daughter,' Ahmed said - he was always the more old-fashioned of the two beneath the surface - 'is from a good family; but you want to put her on a stage in front of God knows how many strange men ... ?' The Major looked affronted. 'Sir,' he said stiffly, 'you think I am not a man of sensibility? Got daughters myself, old man. Seven, thank God. Set up a little travel agency business for them; strictly over the telephone, though. Wouldn't dream of sitting them in an office-window. It's the biggest telephonic travel agency in the place, actually. We send train-drivers to England, matter of fact; bus-wallahs, too. My point,' he added hastily, 'is that your daughter would be given as much respect as mine. More, actually; she's going to be a star!' Major Latif's daughters - Sana and Rafia and five other -afias -were dubbed, collectively, 'the Puffias' by the remaining Monkey in my sister; their father was nicknamed first Tather-Puffia' and then Uncle - a courtesy title - Puffs. He was as nike shox outlet good as his word; in six months Jamila Singer was to have hit records, an army of admirers, everything; and all, as I'll explain in a moment, without revealing her face. Uncle Puffs became a fixture in our lives; he visited the Clayton Road house most evenings, at what I used to think of as the cocktail hour, to sip pomegranate juice and ask Jamila to sing a little something. She, who was growing into the sweetest-natured of girls, always obliged ... afterwards he would clear his throat as if something had got stuck in it and begin to joke heartily with me about getting married. Twenty-four-carat grins blinded me as he, 'Time you took a wife, young man. Take my advice: pick a girl with good brains and bad teeth; you'll have got a friend and a safe-deposit box rolled into one!' Uncle Puffs' daughters, he claimed, all conformed to the above description ... I, embarrassed, smelling out that he was only half-joking, would cry, 'O, Uncle Puffs!' He knew his nick-name; quite liked it, even. Slapping my thigh, he cried, 'Playing hard to get, eh? Darn right. O.K., my boy: you pick one of my girls, and I guarantee to have all her teeth pulled out; by the time you marry her she'll have a million-buck smile for a dowry!' Whereupon my mother usually contrived to change the subject; she wasn't keen on Uncle Puffs' idea, no matter how pricey the dentures ... on that first night, as so often afterwards, Jamila sang to Major Alauddin Latif. Her voice wafted out through the window and silenced the traffic; the birds stopped chattering and, at the hamburger shop across the street, the radio was switched off; the street was full of stationary people, and my sister's voice washed over them ... when she finished, we noticed that Uncle Puffs was crying. 'A jewel,' he said, honking into a handkerchief, 'Sir and Madam, your daughter is a jewel. I am humbled, absolutely. Darn humbled. She has proved to me that a golden voice is preferable even to golden teeth.' And when Jamila Singer's fame had reached the point at which she couldGucci Shoes for Men no longer avoid giving a public concert, it was Uncle Puffs who started the rumour that she had been involved in a terrible, disfiguring car-crash; it was Major (Retired) Latif who devised her famous, all-concealing, white silk chadar, the curtain or veil, heavily embroidered in gold brocade-work and religious calligraphy, behind which she sat demurely whenever she performed in public. The chadar of Jamila Singer was held up by two tireless, muscular figures, also (but more simply) veiled from head to foot - the official story was that they were her female attendants, but their sex was impossible to determine through their burqas; and at its very centre, the Major had cut a hole. Diameter: three inches. Circumference: embroidered in finest gold thread. That was how the history of our family once again became the fate of a nation, because when Jamila sang with her lips pressed against the brocaded aperture, Pakistan fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl whom it only ever glimpsed through a gold-and-white perforated sheet. The accident rumour set the final seal on her popularity; her concerts packed out the Bambino theatre in Karachi and filled the Shalimar-bagh in Lahore; her records constantly topped the sales charts. And as she became public property, 'Pakistan's Angel', 'The Voice of the Nation', the 'Bulbul-e-Din' or nightingale-of-the-faith, and began to receive one thousand and one firm proposals of marriage a week; as she becameGucci Shoes for Women the whole country's favourite daughter and grew into an existence which threatened to overwhelm her place in our own family, so she fell prey to the twin viruses of fame, the first of which made her the victim of her own public image, because the accident-rumour obliged her to wear a gold-and-white burqa at all times, even in my aunt Alia's school, which she continued to attend; while the second virus subjected her to the exaggerations and simplifications of self which are the unavoidable side-effects of stardom, so that the blind and blinding devoutness and the right-or-wrong nationalism which had already begun to emerge in her now began to dominate her personality, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Publicity imprisoned her inside a gilded tent; and, being the new daughter-of-the-nation, her character began to owe more to the most strident aspects of the national persona than to the child-world of her Monkey years. Jamila Singer's voice was on Voice-Of-Pakistan Radio constantly, so that in the villages of West and East Wings she came to seem like a superhuman being, incapable of being fatigued, an angel who sang to her people through all the days and nights; while Ahmed Sinai, whose few remaining qualms about his daughter's career had been more than allayed by her enormous earnings (although he had once been a Delhi man, he was by now a true Bombay Muslim at heart, placing cash matters above most other things), became fond of telling my sister: 'You see, daughter: decency, purity, art and good business sense can be one and the same things; your old father has been wise enough to work that out.' Jamila smiled sweetly and agreed ... she was growing out of Gucci Hats sale scrawny tomboy youth into a slender, slant-eyed, golden-skinned beauty whose hair was nearly long enough to sit on; even her nose looked good. 'In my daughter,' Ahmed Sinai told Uncle Puffs proudly, 'it is my side of the family's noble features which have prevailed.' Uncle Puffs cast a quizzical, awkward glance at me and cleared his throat. 'Darn fine-looking girl, sir,' he told my father, 'Top-hole, by gum.' |
Prev: dowry |
 |
Comments |  |
