“So one leak down and how many more to go?” “Don’t be facetious – leaks are the bread and butter of…of…”

“The media and that too till the next one and given that they are being released with a regularity worthy of a serial killer who escalates…”

“Stop; anyway granted our politicians, worthies all, are immune from naming and shaming, my question is who was so divorced from this basic national trait as to reckon that naming and shaming would act as a deterrent to activity that, how shall I put it, is either lucrative materially or politically or socially or…”

“True the tax returns filed by parliamentarians are now made public and each year when it is made public there is hue and cry and then…!”

“Hue and cry only in the media nowhere else.”

“Right then there were the Panama papers, made a big splash in this country as it implicated the family of the then prime minister…but five years down the line that balloon is not only all fizzed out but…but…”

“One question: what is this with picking up a piece of sweet and feeding another as a celebratory gesture?”

“Well Maryam Nawaz was a happy camper after the verdict and wanted to share the news with Unkill…”

“Uncle? Really? Granted that I know of no other family in this country where a close male relative is referred to by the generic English word Uncle rather than say chacha (father’s younger brother) but…”

“Do you know any family with the kind of wealth enjoyed by the Sharifs! Anyway in spite of using Anglo Saxon names for their offshore companies and referring to their chacha as Unkill the fact remains that The Khan would never ever feed and be fed a piece of sweet as a good news…”

“That’s because he knows the West – there only at their own wedding the groom and the bride feed each other a piece of the wedding cake but you have to give Maryam her due share, I believe she fed her Unkill gulab jaman, and I do love gulab jaman.”

“You are so shallow, I know why she calls her Uncle, not because she has pretensions of being more comfortable with English than Urdu but because her spiritual leader told her that Chacha does not have any letter in the Urdu alphabet that would be beneficial…”

“Oh shut up.”

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022