Yaba daba doo!

You have to admit when you read “Yaba Shundori (beauty)” the next thing you feel compeled to do is see ithe “shundori” herself – but alas, she was rather elusive and RAB only just kept missing her for an hour! Which, had she had a publicist, would have been her publicist’s dream come true – just follow the line of the stories that were concocted around her and her chubby, yuppie, hubby(?) and their decadent, lascivious lifestyle.

What got the papers excited were talk of her Tk. 70 lakh plastic surgery, skin pigmentation lightening (something tthis writer would have never had known could be done had it not been for Michael Jackson – but wait, his condition was the result a rare African American disease that is so rare that it has never infected another African American!), two maids to look after her beauty, Tk. 1 lakh in beauty products a month – two things dawned on me, a) she was one of spectacular assets, and b), more mundanely, even I could be come a “shundori” at that price!

After all that hype, her picture in the papers was a major let-down. I can understand that the last couple of days would have been very trying for her, her being on the lam and all, but I would not be surprised if her boyfriend-husband-DOM* doesn’t actually sue her when all this is over. I mean, where DID all that money go?! Trying time or no, with that kind of money pumped into her face (where else could it go?), her ogling public, I’m sure, had expected much more.

Guilty or not, what a spectacular lifestyle she lived. If my opinion matters, I think she was just whiling her time away as a boy-toy with this old rich buzzard (come on, he could have used some of that money he spent on her cosmetic upgrades on himself). In all likelihood she was hoping that he would croak on one of their skirmishes – either from their frantic closed door politics in overseas chambers or from the hotel tab the morning after! As for the charges of peddling yaba, it was probably a small favor for her favorite financier. I think that as far as peddling goes, I am sure she took the limo and not the metro! Peddling? No. Courier service, more like it. But then that’s just my opinion, and I have nothing more solid than speculation and wild guesses to back my claims.

Having said that, just imagine the times she lived in! She was young(er), decadent was god, and she was above the law. Foreign trips, chartered GMG flights (this was the clincher, in my opinion, as to their real aspirations – I mean for a couple that reportedly spent Tk. 1.5 crore over 11 days in Tokyo, to charter a Bombadier to Cox’s Bazar for a honeymoon is just so sad), diamond tiaras, designer outfits, Victoria’s Secret lingerie – she was living the fairy tale princess dream; only in this story the princess was a little PG-18 (well, she was 26) and was married to the frog.

What a scandal the press can rile up; oh what lurid details they can hound out – even the ever stoic men in black seemed quite amused to relay stories of ostentation underlined with seductive overtures and insinuations. What’s more, is that you’d think I was making all this up from reading trashy tabloids and not the more respectable mainstream papers! So just imagine what the tabloid had to say! Yaba, whether you did it or not, know someone who does, or didn’t even knew what was happening, is suddenly the story on everyone’s mouth. Respectable people are sneaking peeks, between reading the other stories, at the Yaba story made famous by the Yaba “Shundori.”

Does anyone REMEMBER the six young men who were caught by RAB with Yaba in their procession at all? Amin Huda, that oldish looking 36-year old has some recall value in this development owing to his kinship with a prominent (and as one paper labeled it, controversial) businessman, who himself was quite the rave in his time in the 80s and 90s for his own PG-18 reasons. I mean, wasn’t the story leaning towards Amin Huda being the mastermind and key manufacturer of Yaba in Bangladesh? Now the Yaba story has hit its prime with the “shundori,” and following along the dotted lines of her frequent flier destinations, suddenly the drug is an imported product! At least we are on the downward slope, unless of course there are any more revelations of the “marital” bliss shared between the princess and her lovable hotelier.

As for the plight of our delinquent hotelier, with the weight of the world piling on his shoulders, Yaba “Shundori” or not, Jannatul Ferdous, no matter how cosmetically enhanced, was, at least for him, his first (and last) vision of heaven for a long, long time.

* Dirty Old Man