My matrimonial problems began in America; there weren’t any serious problems, only small ones like cleaning dishes, helping do the laundry etc, which thanks to the volubility of my wife, ‘Wiji’ (‘my wife’ sounds too much like property) ballooned up to be larger than life issues. It’s not that I didn’t help Wiji in household chores; it’s just that each time I did the laundry or washed the dishes, it never met the high standard of chore-core that was set forth by Wiji. Only a few days after landing in America, Wiji was chit-chatting with all the women in the neighborhood and a week later when I came back home from work, lo and behold my entire living room had been transformed into an Oprah Winfrey show, with all the neighborhood women monopolizing the seating space and incessantly going on with their complaints about men and how Pakistani cardamom spiced tea tastes so much better than regular tea. Consequently and expectedly Wiji came up with the idea that we need to go see a shrink, initially I was reluctant, thinking,’ Shahnawaz Khar the blood of warriors seeing a shrink, no way Jose’ but a few months later I gave in, wistfully thinking that it might have a channel-changing effect on my living room conditions. Our shrink’s name was Wendy, before our first session began; she explained to me all the fine points on how to milk my Company, so that all her bills were covered by my health insurance plan. After money matters were resolved the session commenced with Wiji taking the lead and beginning her tirade while I breathed away time with a guilty glee massaging my invisible beard, looking at the ceiling and feigning to admire the paisleys on the Persian carpet. Even before Wiji could finish, Wendy cut her short by saying, “stop complaining and get used to it, men are like that!” and then Wendy began narrating how lazy and useless her husband and sons were and how much better I was from them. Resultantly our matrimonial issues were resolved and surprisingly Wiji would always be reluctant to go to Wendy while I found myself enjoying the sessions and whenever we would have an argument, I would always quote Wendy, “But Wendy says……” So my brothers in sex, counseling turned out to be not a bad option. In one of the hate-mails I got from a fellow chowkie, a gentleman suggested that I should stop writing articles and focus more on beating my wife as we ‘Khars’ seem to be better at it. I will admit again at the cost of my socialite career that I don’t have a Van Gough ear for the idea but there is a problem; Wiji once got suspended from Rawalpindi Convent for smashing a brick on someone’s head and me being a man of a cowardly disposition like America would never risk fighting an opponent who has the ability to fight back. Although for now, America is a distant memory, I am back in the land of the pure and like a returning French educated Turkish Pasha in the Ottoman era, I am quickly and conveniently unlearning whatever I had learnt in the West at the speed of societal-pressure. I have a career choice to make; plenty of options abound, when I was young I wanted to work for the foreign service but I don’t think I will make a good diplomat-----defending my country, while shopping in western capitals, no longer has the former appeal. I was thinking more on lines of setting-up my own event management shop; I could charge people money for killing their wives and people could pay to watch. Each event would be a charity ball type event, with an Inca & Maya theme of sacrificing women. I would have a hundred Rajputs Daewoo-ed in from Muzafargarh and fitted into Maya and Inca costumes. A percentage of money would be donated as gas money for the fleet of Land Cruisers owned by numerous ghost Ngo’s working in rural areas for the uplift of women. If the capitalistic justification for pornography is that it is a million dollar business, then my idea also seems to fall in place: market dynamics seem to be notched in my favor, killing women has always been the in-thing and never seems to go out of fashion. I have a good chance of getting corporate sponsorship. There is a good opportunity for anyone to make money in this business and why not me? After all I have a last name, and I am not ‘a’ Khar but one of ‘the’ Khars. If some people are interested in getting rid of their wives, I will have to allude a lot less effort in convincing them to employ my services. Now for my would-be clients I must elaborate further; for killing women, a plethora of options are available, but the most common and civil in my area is via poisoning: it combines the classical and the modern. ‘Heer’ was poisoned and nowadays thanks to agriculture, poison is profusely available and used in the form of crop pesticides. Women poisoned are those who are found guilty of promiscuity but to put the record straight majority of the women in Southern Punjab for promiscuity are not killed but are taken back in the family fold and redeemed Dostoevsky style by keeping them employed in a life long of hard labor, I don’t think the same can be said about our Northern provinces. Most of the cases of poisoned women are dubbed as suicides. One aspect cannot be negated that these promiscuous women are no ordinary women, they have the courage to challenge the might of the entire social strata, which they know is completely rigged against them, maybe if Pakistan were a free and developed nation these women would have been in leadership roles; like the four women F-16 pilots of the American airforce who bombed the Taliban out of their manhood, while they were busy bludgeoning women. Even for the sake of argument if 99% of these women commit suicide, the one percent that are murdered do not shove poison down their throat on demand nor can it be mixed in food because the redolence of crop pesticide is too overwhelming and is easily detected. In village houses and neighborhoods there is no concept of privacy; the average villagers home is a four-walled structure with an open courtyard, veranda and two to three bedrooms. Everyone lives in a joint family system; sleeping and all other household activities are done in the open courtyard or in the veranda when it rains, while the rooms are mostly used for storage facilities. Perceptibly and unavoidably poisoning your recalcitrant wife has to be like an event, it cannot be done, any other way. First she will have to be beaten black and blue, if not in the open-courtyard, then in the rooms within audible distant of the neighbors and the grandparents and children sitting in the open-courtyard. Also assistance of relatives and friends will be needed to hold or tie the woman’s hands and feet while someone shoves poison down her throat. After death is confirmed, a funeral is held where everyone condoles with the husband at the loss of his wife and nothing is discussed about the wife except the fact that she was of bad character. The entire idyllic and rural scene of the village has a surrealistic dimension to it and I mentioned this observation once to my friend Alllah Doveayah and he had asked me as to what it was? I had replied, “Everybody seems to have blood on their hands”. Courtesy Chowk