Swiss Mangoes

SEPTEMBER 1997 - Why is everyone after Poor Pinky and Hubby Dear’s blood ? For one thing, they have only well-oiled gold coins flowing in their blood stream. Why can’t we ever learn to let things be ? I mean there was this Surrey or Murree lodge that she was supposed to have filled up with mangoes last summer. Honestly how far can you stretch things ? Ok the lady may have a yen for mangoes or is it zen ? Anyway how many mangoes can a Prime Minister eat, any Prime Minister ? The English press went on a rampage against her simply because they can’t stand her success, she refused to be drawn into a street brawl and said nothing about that Surrey-Murree thing. Of course some people took this as admission of guilt. Baloney. Next they’ll be telling us Ayub Khan was killed by a crate of bad mangoes or was it Liaqat Ali Khan ? Darn. Can’t remember. I know there was somebody.

Just as we were about to forget all those nasty stories about mangoes and what not - they even had the cheek to flash consignment notes showing Bilawal House at one end and the Paki High Commission at the other. Honestly, can’t the government ever cook up a half way decent story ? I mean even if the Zardaris, A & B, actually did ship out crate-loads of what we will call mangoes for want of a better name, would they be such nerds as to pen in Bilawal House on the shipping documents ? They’d have to be real retards to do that. Well just as we were getting over a season where we had more than our share of mangoes, Christina Lamb goes and does the ultimate number on poor Pinks.

Now who is Lambkins you may well ask ? The very same who flew with BB to Saichin top and did her exclusive story while Paki journalists were not ‘security’ cleared. Can’t blame poor Pinks. After all Lambkins is white and Pakis are terribly black, the poor dears, the press especially. Dark shade of black with a tinge of yellow. Lambkins was not only very white like the driven snow of Saichin, but very British, the Pinky’s favourite race. So for all that VIP treatment that the British Lamb got, she spills the beans now and tells anyone who is within earshot that A & B are calling it quits and chucking ‘till death do us apart’ out of the nearest jail window, airplane porthole or centrally air-conditioned feudal haveli, whichever of the three options is handy.

Now that terribly nosy Senator’s dashed off to the land of cheese and bank accounts and brought back some very bad cheese. Smells to high heaven and has a rotten look to it. Not edible by any means I assure you. Some obscene amount of green backs have been discovered waltzing in the vaults of the dour Swiss and the hills are filled with the sound of currency notes. This isn’t fair. You make a little bit of money and before you know it, the nosy team is in bankland holding their noses with large bandannas and muttering, ‘there is something very rotten in the state of Denmark,’ which is very silly because we all know they are in Switzerland. The Swiss who can no longer trusted have blown the whistle on the only decent royals we’ve ever had. Now the Brits are making their move. What’s the world coming to ?

Now you may have a bone to pick with AZ who is not into bones, being a polo man and not a dog man, but when a man cannot be allowed to call his own honest earnings his own, things have indeed come to a sorry pass. However while the Swiss have ratted, quite understandable with all that cheese about, the lady in pink has said they have no accounts, what accounts, so what if we have accounts and is it a crime to have accounts, all in the same breath. If this is true and truer words I have never heard, then shame on this government, or as we call it, ‘the present government’ for maligning what have been the two most exemplary public figures we have ever had. An apology is due but this government is broke anyway. Perhaps we should ask the Polo ponies to march on to those unreliable Swiss and teach them a lesson. In the meantime, I hear the lady is singing the blues which go something like ‘Don’t cry for me Pakis-Tina, the truth is I never left you, Only my mangoes, my foreign moneys, they travelled Swissair...’