I cringe while I drive back from a party with Lahore’s crème de la crème, fearing some invisible illness that haunts them will latch onto me too.
What a vision they create: dresses made in flowing pastels, strings of weighty pearls adorning slim necks, Bottega and Chanel clutches tucked in the crooks of arms, Gucci loafers and a forehead free from the creases that plague the lesser lot. They’re utterly beautiful and look like they’ve been carved from porcelain – not a hair out of place – but the rot has long set in and it creeps out as the facade cracks. As the cracks in the facade showed, I tried searching for their personality and their soul – and found an echoing hollowness.
Does entitlement breed mediocracy? Or does money become a plague when it passes from the generation that spent years building a legacy to one that thinks this is what is owed to them.
Their banal conversations about who wore what, who’s having an affair with who’s husband and who has gotten so fake after they came into even more money numb my ears, as if seeping like poison into my nerve endings. They clink their champagne glasses full of Murree’s vodka with slices of lemon and strawberries together, before bursting into laughter and accidentally spilling their drinks onto clothes worth enough to clothe an entire family for a month.
They laugh at the damage – because they are they ones who never have to pay the price.
I feel as though being in their company has defiled me somehow, and I wonder what their presence means in the bigger scheme of things. They float through life, taking away chances from those who deserve them, reaping the benefits of those they take advantage of and looking down their noses at those who they consider the have-nots.
I pull into my modest sized home, which is not in DHA, feeling relaxed and wonder what the creme de la creme feels when they return to their bungalows fortified with security guards and dogs, which keep the people out but also keep them locked in. Do they feel more relaxed as they slip their feet out of their LV’s and into Tommy Hilfiger’s slide ons? Does sleep come easier to them when they slip into their silk sheets. Do they think of their existence as their eyes shut, or has the rot consumed them to an extent that they do not feel anything at all.
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