Trust

 She did not even whimper, aghast … a slight painful sound seeee! She looked like a lamb strangled under the lions paws and a fiercely grown mane.

It was a nice sunny Monday morning; everyone in a small house (flooded with relatives & neighbors) was in a joyous mood except the bride to be! Inner city Lahore, previously known as a walled city, inside the walls exists another world. People are knitted closely together, like embroidery with one thread, if one end of the string gets loose the whole pattern suffers the consequences! Architectural structure of the area reminds the grandeur of not so long ago past. Neighbors, families, friends, beggars, hawkers, tonga driver, grocer, barber who is working without a mirror for almost quarter a decade…are all knotted in strange tie. They laugh and cry at the same time, they love and hate in one instance…. weird and wonderful world of the walled city!

“Trust me beti, he is the one best suitor ever”

“But ma-moon!” (Ma-moon, mother’s brother, uncle who has a mother’s face, a relation one can trust with out a single stray thought)

“Buss Buss! Now no Buts and If’s, I am like your mum and dad, if they would have been alive today…and you cant live here forever, can you?”

And the pompous procession reached outside the big bungalow… a house like a big beautiful decorated castle…grandeur of present. The journey from the grandeur of the past to the present just took an hour and the half. As a kid her visit to such a house was limited to the day dreams she used to have when playing under the shade of Banyan tree with her childhood mates. And when a prince would have come to rescue her from one of the gaols made out of banyan’s overgrown roots. The only one who came at that time was a chacha gee, the watch man for the chaudahary’s herd of sheep and cows. And now she was sitting in a rolls roy besides a man who did not at all resemble the dream prince any girl would have dreamt about in their girly play of “Rescued by a charming handsome prince”.

He, a man in his late forties , married twice, four kids from the first wife who died during child birth, along with the dead unborn. Second wife still alive but separated but not divorced, three kids living with her maternal grandparents house but alas all the seven children born are girls, spitting images of their father!

A big leap! Grandeur of the past to the present… A girl, a wife and a mother now…just in a couple of hours. Outside the huge wrought-iron gates, amidst the strangers all dressed up in heavily embroidered chiffon and finest silk, with curtly smiling faces, speaking foreign language and an alien staring through her veil, waiting for a camera man to give a signal to move so that a moment of transition from the walled city to walled castle like house, be captured in a perfect of manners.

Her life has never been that simple and straight forward. Mere memories of past can only shred her apart and now the present! As a kid in her village she once had an accident while chopping a fodder, two fingers of her left hand came in the fiercly rolling blade of a chopper and she lost tips of two little fingers. Fodder became red with the flood of blood gushed out her hand that day… That was a pain she went through with her mum and dad rushing for her rescue.

Under the lions fiercely grown mane and paws she looked around for some one running towards her to provide comfort and rescue… there was no gushing blood, there were no screams…it was all legal… she was a legitimate wife, wed to bear a boy!