I don't have a lot of pieces, though. I have my wedding set, given to me by my in-laws on our wedding, and a small simple bracelet and simple string necklace that were wedding gifts also. (The necklace was a gift from my three brothers- and sister-in-law, the bracelet was a wedding gift from my husband. His moo dekhai for me.) I have a similar wedding set that we bought in Karachi when we threw ourselves a Valima there in 2004, and I have one medium-sized round pendant that hangs lower than the rest, bought with the money given as wedding presents at that very same Valima. That and a few very small pieces given to me (at that Valima) by close family members (I think two rings and maybe three sets of earings) make up a very small collection for the typical Pakistani woman. But I'm neither Pakistani nor typical, so I've always been fine with my small collection. Except for one thing that I really wanted: a gold bangle bracelet.
All the older women in M's family wear at least one gold bracelet on each arm. I've seen a lot of Pakistani women who weat gold bangle bracelets, but I have almost never seen my MIL without hers, and other women in the family are similarly braceleted. I haven't asked my MIL about it, but I think it has to do with his family being from Bihar, originally part of a Bengali state, and lived for some time in Bangladesh. So some Begali things show up in their family's cultural practices. It's just a not-all-that-educated guess by me, but I think it's from growing up where the giving and wearing of bracelets is part of the wedding traditions, which I know about only by reading about Gori Girl's wedding and seeing the picture of her bracelets. Well anyway, that's getting away from my point, which was only that I wanted some bracelets! When we all dress up in our party outfits and I line up next to all these women - my family - I had a big gaping hole in my jewelry library in the form of two missing matching gold bracelets. So we decided to go shopping.
Well, that's not true really. I was pretty against it. Buying gold right now is about the stupidest way to spend your money - or it was eight months ago, I don't know if that's changed. But back in December, gold prices were at an all time high. In 2009, gold cost three times as much as it did in 2004 when I went to Pakistan for the first time. I thought we should have waited to buy the bracelets. But Mian thought we should buy now because you never know, maybe prices are never going to get better and anyway, he wanted me to have those bracelets. He was the one that brought it up because he'd planned to get them as a anniversay and/or birthday present. We compromised and bought only one bracelet, because after all I still really like to wear glass bracelets on the other arm!
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| Mian and Aapi, in the gold store |
First, though, we had to go pick up our secret weapon - Aapi. Mian's cousin, Farhat Aapi, whom M has always called Aapi - one of the respectful endearing terms for an older sisters and cousins. Aapi is a ruthless bargainer. She is so good at haggling that we can bring her shopping and get the best price, even if I'm sitting right there dressed in jeans. Usually prices are directly related to how visible I am, how much pasty white foreigner skin I'm showing. They assume that a foreigner must be making a lot of money to afford to visit Pakistan and they also know that we are unlikely to know the accurate price for most things, so shopkeepers try to charge double and triple the price. If I'm a visible foreigner, we get jacked up prices. If I stay home or dress up head to toe in black, cover my face and hands and keep quiet except to point to whatever I want to buy, we get regular prices. But shopping that way is quite a burden, and not much fun. Aapi levels the playing field. She knows what an outlandish price sounds like, and she's able to cut through any bargaining crap so that I can look, touch, feel and discuss all my options before deciding what to buy. Plus I can go shopping wearing regular clothes rather than having to dress up like a poor villager woman to try and fake out the shopkeepers. We always coordinate shopping trips with Aapi whenever we're shopping for big ticket items, and she came with us to go gold shopping.
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| Sizing rings for bracelets |
At the gold shop, they first brought out the sizing rings. Most Pakistani women I know are impossibly tiny, with thin, delicate wrists. I am not any of those things. We'd assumed that we'd be buying the absolute largest size of bracelet, but lucked out - the second largest fit too. A small but welcome relief in both my ego and the price of the bracelet! The next step was to trade in all the old stuff I'd brought.
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| The stuff I'd brought with me to trade. |
I brought other pieces to trade in as well. Some of it was rings, given to me as gifts but that wouldn't fit my fingers and were too delicate to have sized. One extremely delicate and intricate ring that did fit my fingers had broken. One earing had lost its pairing. Two pendants for necklaces just weren't my style, and one pair of earings had insanely large studs that I was only able to force through my earlobes once. On their way back out, I realized that for some strange and painful reason, the studs had ribbed, screw-like ridges on them. It was like pulling a tiny saw through a hole in my ear, and they made my ears bleed. I traded those suckers in, all right!
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| Bangles on display for you to pick from |
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| My two favorites |
There were two bracelets that I couldn't decide between. I liked the little beaded detail on the one on the left, but I liked the more scroll-y, flower-y decorative etching on the one on the right. The jeweler said he could combine the styles when he made mine. I had to have it custom made anyway, because of that wrist-size thing. They just don't carry my size bangles ready-to-wear, unfortch.
After that, since we were in the Hyderi market anyway and that's where I generally buy the fabric to make my clothes, Aapi asked if I wanted to look around for clothes. Aapi is a busy wife and mother, and I'm always worried we're usurping too much of her time, but she likes shopping (and she likes me!) and she insisted, so we took a stroll and bought a few outfits.
The fabric stalls in these meandering markets never cease to amaze me. Countless rows and stacks of alarmingly bright and beautiful prints, each display stage packed with bearded and/or mustachioed Pakistani men shopkeepers. Strange men who call to you "Sister, sister! What can I get for you" and throwing their orangest, most geometric print in your path to catch your attention. Men who wouldn't usually talk to an unknown woman except that they do it all day, every day. It's just such a lesson in separation and contradiction. These markets are filled primarily with women, in a country that frowns upon the mixing of genders. Men's space and women's space. Men's things and women's things. Yet for these very girliest of products, Pakistani women squeeze tight into this smallest of spaces with the most manly of Pakistani men who tell them how beautiful this fabric would look, what great quality that bra is. And no one cares or perhaps even notices this contradiction. Maybe it isn't even a contradiction except to those who would see it through western eyes and biases.
The fabric stalls in these meandering markets never cease to amaze me. Countless rows and stacks of alarmingly bright and beautiful prints, each display stage packed with bearded and/or mustachioed Pakistani men shopkeepers. Strange men who call to you "Sister, sister! What can I get for you" and throwing their orangest, most geometric print in your path to catch your attention. Men who wouldn't usually talk to an unknown woman except that they do it all day, every day. It's just such a lesson in separation and contradiction. These markets are filled primarily with women, in a country that frowns upon the mixing of genders. Men's space and women's space. Men's things and women's things. Yet for these very girliest of products, Pakistani women squeeze tight into this smallest of spaces with the most manly of Pakistani men who tell them how beautiful this fabric would look, what great quality that bra is. And no one cares or perhaps even notices this contradiction. Maybe it isn't even a contradiction except to those who would see it through western eyes and biases.
I love how they'll model the clothes for you. Though I did not buy this one. Orange and pink Irish skin just don't go together in my mind, and I've never been one who could rock a leopard print. Or whatever print that is, I think it may be more than one animal!
I think we bought six outfits here, enough that they quickly realized they could convince me into buying just about anything they threw in front of me that didn't include animal print, geometric shapes, or the color orange - and enough to send their errand boy to bring us ice cold glass bottles of soda (or as Pakistanis call it "cold drink.") You just can't pass up the chance to go shopping with Aapi. These suits probably cost us half what they would have if we'd gone shopping the next day.
We had an evening outing that day too. For several days we'd been trying to decide what to do with all that money we'd extorted out of Chachoo on his wedding night. Since it was a big group of cousins who'd done the haggling (though I take all the credit for the amount - they were all willing to cave in way before I was) it was decided that all the cousins should split the money and instead of dolling out a few ruppees per person, we should all go to a nice place to eat together. One set of cousins knew of a nice, new place that had a "Hi Tea" service (I swear, it was spelled that way on the menu.) It's served between lunch and dinner times and included lots of different appetizer-ish food items, sweets and tea for a relatively cheap price, so that's the place we went to - Rangoli.
Rangoli turned out to be the nicest restaurant we would go to on our trip. We liked it so much that we came back again so that we could bring Ammi and Abbu with us - they had not been there before either. It was impecably clean and the service was excellent. No waiting around for drinks at all. The food was also really good and they had a couple of things that made me feel happy to eat - especially the pasta with marinara sauce. It was nice to eat something other than Pakistani food! There seemed to be a lot of "high-class" or even expatriate clientele there too, as uneducatedly guessed by me based on clothing alone - but it meant that I got stared barely at all while we were there.
The buffet
The decor
The food
Murals painted on the walls
The waiters presenting the bill - the final total for 17 cousins to eat was about 7000 rupees (or about $80.)
Rangoli is just a part of a larger entertainment complex in Karachi. They also have a bowling alley, an ice rink and an aracde - I think this part is called "Arena" - and I also saw a huge gym there, and they're right next door to the Maritime Museum. I don't know if there's more or not, but it's definitely worth a visit if you find yourself in Karachi.
