July 17, 2008

There is something about the word ‘aunty’ that conjures up in the mind of the average Englishman an image of a lady of slightly indeterminate age but anywhere between fifty and a hundred-and-ten, smelling faintly of lavender and living a life of domestic quietude along with a cat called Tiddles and a budgerigar called Sammy.

She is to be visited on high days and holidays, always has her birthday remembered by everybody, is universally loved and can be relied upon to remember you in her will with a little something by way of a legacy so long as duty has been done and you have been good boys and girls.

Aunty never interferes, has probably never disagreed with anybody about anything in her entire life and will die secure in the knowledge that babies are found under gooseberry bushes; or possibly delivered by a flock of extremely busy storks, she was never quite sure which.

Such an image is about as far from the Pakistani version of the aunty as it is possible to get as I discovered within days of marrying the fragrant Rose, jewel of the Punjab, back in 1995. Our courtship had done little to prepare me for ‘the aunty experience’ as it was conducted mainly by letter, with the occasional phone call and audio-cassette to fill out the words on paper.

Such aunties as had a hand in our marriage were well to the background as it was somewhat out of their traditional sphere of operation, and they were not quite sure how to handle middle-aged goras who gave no indication of either awareness of their role in the marriage business or the respect they were due. Aunties appeared soon after the nuptials and have been around in varying degrees of intrusiveness ever since.

My ‘aunty perception antenna’ was unprepared for the shock of meeting aunties of a Pakistani persuasion for the first time, and my vague memories of elderly maiden ladies and their kitties and budgies was blown apart as I caught a broadside from a brigade of aunties in shaadi mode.

I discovered that aunties are a sub-species of the human race, a fearsome clique of almost-human creatures that inhabit dim recesses of every home in the land. They have 10-feet arms and eyes in places no self-respecting person ought to have eyes. They are the purveyors of every type of malicious rumour; utterly unscrupulous and completely ignore everything by way of external advice. They are also the hinge around which all matters marital, arrangement thereof, pivot.

The aunty is the most formidable item in the entire Pakistani family arsenal. They can operate singly or at squadron strength, they are heavily armoured, impervious to more or less everything except a direct hit by a nuclear weapon, can spot rich potential partners for girls whose faces would curdle mercury and are purveyors of pusillanimous and unfounded gossip of the vilest kind.

Aunties can exist in dark corners unnoticed for decades, possibly generations, and then bounce out guns a-blaze at the merest hint of wedding or scandal in order to offer their invaluable services and advice.

Ignoring the advice of an aunty can consign you to a place beyond the pale, somewhere on the far limits of family life where the chapattis are always cold and hard and nobody ever asks you if you want a drink of water.

Not only was Rose of the Punjab the apple of my newly-married eye, she was, I discovered, an aunty herself and it was her role in the marriage of one of my several million newly acquired relatives that finally opened my eyes to the awesome power of the fully-developed and mature aunty.

Aunty Rose is at the extremely serious end of the aunty spectrum, a fully armoured all-terrain Auntie Fighting Vehicle (AFV). Top-of-the-range AFVs are equipped with long-range heavy wedding guns, radar that can spot ‘stinking-rich, with land and a house’ from whole continents away, grappling hooks for close-quarters work with massed relatives and an array of shackles with which to bind their victims once subdued.

Spotting a flash of nuptial potential at a social event in Karachi, Aunty Rose loaded a bride-seeking missile into the launcher, hit the ‘fire’ button and it was all over, bar the shouting, seven months later. Aunty Rose marshalled the AFVs from her vantage point in the UK, coordinating the heavy armour with all the finesse of a seasoned general and it was truly a sight to behold as a brigade of AFVs, smiling and radiant, rounded the corner preparatory to the wedding ceremony. Shoving the bride and groom to one side they beamed into the video-wallah’s camera, reducing the rest of us to little but a sideshow. Marriage? What marriage? This is the aunties show!