The Edge of Reason.

I'm a very rational human being. I've always prided myself on that.

When people around me are cursing and going nuts and fulfilling every textbook principle under the heading of 'mob thinking' I'm usually the one asking myself why God deprived human beings of reason sometimes. When people go and confuse "Jihad" with political agenda, religion with culture and self-righteousness with morality, I can usually find it in myself to see the vague and blurry lines - and manage to come out of the insanity around me with my sense of self and of the world in one piece.

But I am sorry today. I am sorry because this bloody world of materialism, globalization and capitalism has won over all that for these moments. And I didn't even see it coming.

I blame you, Saira. You should have stopped me. You knew this is what happens when you go inside. You knew it and you let me go in. You shouldn't have. I was so happy. So playfully ignorant of a world that was filled with those scents and colors and lights. And bam. Ten minutes take place and my eyes won't stop looking glassed over.

2 hundred thousand. 2. And 5 zeros.

For three pieces of clothing.

And me.

A person who used to mock and scoff and deride every woman in the world who had the guts to express a desire of this kind. A person who could break down markets and their effect on the public when it came to consumerism. A person who could elegantly and swiftly glide out of a momentary lapse of reason through reason itself and call it a psychological need for social approval.

And right now my eyebrows are still fixed the way they were when I walked out of there. My eyes are still unblinking at the thought of it.

It.

There it was.

Standing on its three pieces on the third floor of Park Towers. Gold and maroon and pearls. Twined like a royal magic carpet ride on the border of the dopatta. The small fitted blouse that was to be worn over the jamawaar gown that was zaree-filled. Two rows of ridiculously beautiful and even more ridiculously expensive lines of Aisha Varsey.

Why. Why was she born.

Who told her to become a fashion designer. And buy a shop in Park Towers. And spray that great designer scent. And drape her shop with those snazzy, crystal-tipped curtains. And why are girls so goddarn sentimental. And why did I go in.

Effing dream merchants.

My God. It's Barbie dolls all over again.

Only this time.

It costs 2 hundred thousand rupees.

One more political assassination and it's going to go double.

I'd forgotten what it was like. I'd forgotten what it was like to have a fantasy.

To want something so unbelievably out-of-reach it drives you insane - while at the same time giving you that rush that won't go away. That you don't want to go away. When all my rationality has failed. I am not thinking that in that amount four girls could get married with dowry, that all my beliefs, morals, principles are against these acts of hideous spending, that all my life, I've been such a staunch believer of the level-headed, economic virtuosity that drives most rational human beings, that all this is nothing but a play of market forces and a result of a post-modern equation. My brain is at the highest point of struggle against nature and living in the world of fashion designers, the dignity of work, ethics, logic, reality - and being a girl.

Oh my God.

This is going to take a while.