The Wish Maker Page 2

  “Well, it’s true,” said my mother, and went on talking despondently on the phone to a woman, an NGO-worker friend of hers who had sold her property just before the boom.

  So there had been a boom. And there was talk inside the boom, talk in magazines and on the radio and talk on the TV channels, which had multiplied and were being watched by more and more people. In the morning, while cleaning the rooms, Naseem switched on the TV and saw politicians cut ribbons and make speeches for seated audiences. She heard the speeches and learned about violence, extremism and enlightened moderation. She saw the news when it broke: a program interrupted, the flashing red silence and the newsreader’s announcement; then sirens, policemen, the ongoing chaos at the site of the attack—the bombers had come in from both sides and blown up the cavalcade; the president had escaped but his guards were dead; then the shift of scene to the well-lit studio, where analysts sat behind a long, continuing desk and were questioned by a journalist, who frowned and appeared to take notes. There was talk of the establishment, talk of America and its allies, its interests and its changing relations with the Pakistani military. There was talk of 9/11 and the Jews. And there was talk of Islam, a religion of peace that was being misunderstood. Some channels were devoted exclusively to Islam, to its history and doctrinal particularities, to questions about the hereafter and to questions about the here and now as well—the correct Islamic expressions for meeting and departing, the right amount of head-covering and the issue of makeup, whether things such as nail varnish were haram or halal. And there were channels where these things were taken for granted, channels where women appeared in half-sleeves and sat on sofas with their legs crossed and chatted with other women who held degrees in subjects such as child psychology. The women conversed and then took questions from callers. A housewife from Rawalpindi was worried because her eight-year-old daughter had seen one of the films her father kept in his nighttime cabinet. The caller said she wasn’t worried about her husband, who was unstoppable; she was worried about her daughter, whose young mind must now be rushing with things the caller couldn’t bring herself to articulate, let alone explain in some way to a child. The housewife wanted to know of a way to undo those things and take them back out of the child’s mind. The host nodded understandingly and deferred with her palms to the expert, who said that the question was a good one, the issue here was trauma, the child had been exposed at an early age, but there was no way of undoing the exposure; in fact it wasn’t even necessary. It was parents who had to accept that children were intelligent and had motives of their own and were always going to break out of sheltered environments. Later in life they became adults and had children of their own and created those very same shelters; and again the children broke past. “But that is the fact of life,” said the expert, and smiled at the host. “It is always going and going in circles.”

  “Going and going in circles,” said Naseem. She was chopping salad vegetables on the stone worktop in the kitchen. She chopped briskly and transferred the choppings into a bowl, then returned to the act of chopping. “We are also going in circles.” She said it comically, with a self-disparaging laugh, but also with a philosophical intention, a need to draw connections between ideas and things as they were in the real world, a need she had developed during her time in Saudi Arabia. There she had seen the people of the world brought together in one mission: they wore the same cloth and prayed to the same God and went round and round the same monument. It had alerted her to the presence of a single underlying system.

  “The house of God,” she had said. “It opens up your eyes.”

  Now she sought that larger logic in the everyday and came up repeatedly against herself. Last week she had been made the recipient of some money, ten thousand rupees that Daadi, my grandmother, had passed on to her as an offering, a kind of alms given out to mark the approach of a wedding. At once Naseem was planning what to do with it, seeking counsel and discussing possibilities. My mother advised her to invest in a sewing machine and to start a part-time stitching business from her quarters at the back of the house. It was a start, said my mother, and offered to print a black-and-white ad for Naseem in the magazine. Naseem was persuaded. She made the calculations and found that she would have some money left after buying the sewing machine, and she set aside a part of it for a well-known lottery. Then she announced that she was going to buy the bride a wedding gift.

  “No, no,” said my mother, who was refusing on behalf of the bride.

  “But I must,” said Naseem.

  “Why must you?”

  “I must.”

  “No, but why?”

  “Buss.”

  “But why?”

  “She is my child.”

  “She is everyone’s child, Naseem. We are all doing what we can. And you have done a lot; you have done just as much as the others. You don’t have to buy a gift. You must do no such thing.”

  Naseem went on swaying where she stood, blushing and looking down at her feet, made emotional by her own offer, which was not that of a servant because it exceeded the means of a servant.

  “Save your money,” said my mother. “Start your sewing business.”

  And Naseem smiled and said that she would.

  Then the weekend arrived, and she heard that her husband had appeared outside the gate. He was not supposed to be seeing her because he was unemployed again, after quitting his job at a factory near the village, and it was known that in these periods of recklessness he would exploit her. Naseem went outside the gate to see. He was there. They spoke. Naseem brought him inside, fed him in the kitchen and allowed him to stay the night. And in the morning, after he had gone, she was filled with remorse, having parted with most of her money and exposed herself again as a weaver of wishes, a person who habitually amounted to nothing.

  “You deserve nothing,” said Daadi from her bed. She was in her seventies now and shriveled; she no longer spent time on the sofa in her room and merely sat on it occasionally with her back hunched, her palms placed for stability on her knees.

  Naseem stood where she stood and said nothing, her fists clenched and her toes curling.

  “Ten thousand rupees,” said Daadi. Her eyes were narrowed in cold amazement and her eyebrows were up.

  Naseem was swaying.

  “How much is left?”

  Naseem opened her mouth and said, “Two thousand.”

  “Two thousand!” said Daadi.

  “She can buy a pair of shoes with it,” said Suri, and laughed lightly. She was the elder of Daadi’s two daughters. She was considered active for her age and lay on the other side of the bed with her back propped up against pillows.

  “Or you can give even that to him,” said Hukmi, Daadi’s other daughter, who was younger than Suri by three and a half years. She made her comment and looked around to see if the others saw that this was exactly where those two thousand rupees were going to go.

  “It was my fault,” said Daadi. “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have given her the money. I should have gone and thrown it in a well.” And this was rhetorical, since there were no wells nearby.

  “Oh no,” said Suri calmly. “You won’t throw it in a well. You’ll give it to her again. You’ll keep on giving it to her.”

  And Hukmi said, “And she’ll keep on giving it to him.”

  Naseem, smiling, drawing strength from her own abasement, looked up from the carpet and said, “Round and round.”

  Hukmi looked at her blankly, then looked excitedly at Suri and said, “Village mentality!”

  And Naseem went on smiling, not knowing what that was, not caring at the moment that she didn’t; the lift out of the scolding and into the present comicality had enabled her retreat, which was what she wanted.

  But the talk in the room was of money even after Naseem had gone; it was of money for the rest of the afternoon, since it was money and not love that made the biggest difference, money that in the end made marriages and families and enabled understandings betw
een people, and money that made the world go round and round.

  The sisters were inside the boom. Suri’s husband was now working out of an office at home and using phones and a computer to trade on the stock market.

  And Hukmi’s husband was running his own showroom of used and reassembled cars near Kalma Chowk on Ferozepur Road. They were living in the same area still but had restyled their homes: the driveways of both houses sloped gently outward past steel gates, and the names of the owners and the house numbers were inscribed on separate brass plaques that were nailed to the outside walls. Inside too there had been changes: the upstairs bathrooms were fitted with Jacuzzis and modern showers; there was wallpaper on the walls; there were split-level air conditioners with remote controls in the living-dining area and also in the bedrooms; and there was wall-to-wall carpeting downstairs, for which the removal of shoes was required. One of the homes, Suri’s, had been used in an ad for a telephone service-providing company, and the experience was continually recalled with surprise and merriment: the names of the executives and the professionalism they had shown from start to finish, and the antics of the cast and crew, and the things they had said, on-screen and then off-screen, about the house and its contents.

  “The sofas they all loved,” said Suri. She was not one to boast but this was a fact.

  “And the loveseat,” said Hukmi. “The actress wouldn’t come off it. She said no, no, leave me here, leave me here.” She closed her eyes and swooned.

  “Taubah!” said Daadi, and clapped her hands excitedly. “Taubah!”

  To Suri and Hukmi she had surrendered her dependence. They took Daadi in the morning to the market, to the bank and to the tailor’s and to the fruit and vegetable stalls outside Pioneer Store, where they haggled for her with the vendors, since it was they who now managed her money. They took her to the doctor’s when she felt unwell but only when their own attempts to locate the problem had failed: they measured her temperature with a thermometer, took readings on the blood-pressure pump, stroked her back and monitored her posture on the bed. They were followers of physiotherapy and had replaced her mattress and had made her buy a new foam pillow that kept her neck straight at night. They regulated the items on her mantelpiece, the medicines she could need at any time and also the things she needed generally, the Swaleen pills and the packets of Johar Joshanda, which she drank every morning to kill the colds that developed suddenly in winter. The doctor had said that at her age it was necessary to take precautions. And for this reason the windows were kept shut, the heater was kept alive until night, and the tub of Vicks nose rub was always kept on the bedside table, between a tall cylinder of Tender Rose air-freshener and a framed photograph, old and spotted now, of Flying Officer Sami Shirazi, Daadi’s son and my father, who had been dead for more than twenty years.

  “I can’t sleep,” said Daadi. She was sitting up in bed. Her hair was spoiled. She had been changing the position of her head on the pillow, but the noise outside had gone on.

  “You’ll never say anything,” said Suri unhelpfully. She meant that Daadi was unwilling to go outside and stop the laborers who were setting up the marquee on the lawn. “You won’t say a word.” She lifted a hand and ran it unhurriedly through her hair. “You won’t say or do a thing.”

  Daadi said, “What can I say?”

  “You can say you will not have people in this house after two o’clock. You can say that, can’t you? This is your house too. You too have given for this wedding.”

  “We have all given,” said Hukmi grandly.

  Daadi frowned for a while, then said, “Does anyone listen? Does anyone care what I say?”

  Suri said, “And how will they care if you keep sitting here and saying things? How will they care, when they have been allowed to think that they own everything?”

  Hukmi said, “They don’t own everything.”

  Daadi continued to frown, her annoyance brought out in this way and made binding by the involvement of her daughters. “I am telling her,” she said decidedly. “I am telling her to wrap it up. There will be no hammering here. There will be no tent and no wedding. She can think what she likes; she can write it in her magazine.”

  She meant to say these things to my mother, her daughter-in-law, who lived in the same house and ran a magazine and was organizing the wedding and was felt to have acted as if she owned everything.

  “There will be no wedding,” said Daadi. “We are not responsible for any wedding.”

  She had gone too far.

  “There is no need,” said Suri philosophically, “for anyone to do anything for anyone else.”

  “And still people do things,” said Hukmi.

  “They do,” said Suri.

  “From their hearts,” said Hukmi.

  “From their hearts.”

  “And we are doing whatever we can from our hearts.”

  “Because we feel,” said Suri, and placed a hand on hers, “that the girl is our child, that this wedding is our duty. We are not doing it for ourselves.”

  And Hukmi said, “There is no doubt in it. There is not a doubt.”

  It had come up earlier in the week. They had gone to Saleem Fabrics to buy outfits for the groom’s mother and sisters. It was an important marital tradition—the women of one family gifting embroidered cloth to the women of the other, so they all went: Daadi, Suri, Hukmi, my mother. And inside, amid the unfurling fabrics and the busy mewl of bargainers, they had managed somehow to agree: they consulted one another on colors and patterns, pressed their fingers to the material, made faces and asked for rates. Within the hour they had formed a pile of possibilities that was then reduced to eight final pieces, two from each of them. They monitored the measurements and oversaw the folding and wrapping. And at the counter their resolve collapsed: they were short of money, this was typical, who was short of money, and why should we give when you haven’t, and from there the accusations flew: I have done so much for this wedding while you have done nothing, well, well, what? Well, we are not responsible. Then who is? Who is?

  The cashier pressed his palms together. Who was the mother of the bride?

  They looked at one another and looked away.

  Hands went into handbags. I’ll pay, no I’ll pay, no let me, no please . . .

  And they left the shop and returned to the house in the car with the gift-wrapped bundles clutched to their laps.

  I had been asked to distribute the invites. It was distressing. I didn’t recognize most of the names and addresses that now appeared in embossed golden script on the envelopes. But weddings, like funerals, required staging to an audience, and the final list of names had come to one hundred and seventy-three. I now had to make perhaps as many trips to unknown houses in the city and was grateful when Isa and Moosa, my cousins, offered their help.

  They had changed. Isa, Suri’s son, had settled into adulthood (he was twenty-three this year) with an airtight, burp-coming chest and a toughened but tolerant look. He wore full-sleeved shirts with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his jeans, which were fitted along the thighs and bulged provocatively at the back with his wallet. (He had joined one of the new international banks on Main Boulevard.) When we met he posed many quick questions about life in America and then answered them for himself. He asked about housing, rent, taxes, interest rates, and then disregarded my answers and delivered an unprompted omen on the boom. “Too much too soon,” he said in English, shaking his head gloomily, and I heard him repeat it later at night, so that it appeared to have been picked up from one of the new business channels on TV.

  And Moosa had changed too, but not in the same way as Isa, who had come to inhabit his personality with an air of confirmation. Moosa, Hukmi’s son, was twenty-one this year, only two years younger than Isa (and older than me) but somehow elderly already, as though he had learned a humbling lesson that had left him subdued and even grateful; he wore sweatshirts and baseball caps and walked around the house with a slouc
h. And he hadn’t shaved in weeks, and responded to related inquiries with a smile.

  “Mullah!” I had cried in greeting.

  “Naw, man,” he said, shaking his head in the new disarmed way, “bro’s a hippie now. No more drama, man. No more of that stuff.” It wasn’t clear what he was referring to—he was aggressive once but that was long ago, a thing from childhood.

  “Smoking?” I said.

  Again he shook his head, this time in defeat. “Old habits, man . . .” And again he smiled, incorporating the habit into his new, pleasant take on life.

  Their car was now a red Honda City that Isa had acquired with a loan from the bank. It was a strong, stout car, inexpensive but efficient; Isa gave me a proud external tour of the thing, tapping the shiny bonnet and praising the tough tires that he claimed could handle a mountain. “Get in gear,” he said, soaring his hand like an airplane, “and that’s it. Takeoff.”

  “Frickin’ awesome,” said Moosa, who was standing nearby and nodding.

  I thought of the old Suzuki with its one functional headlight, its dark, furry boot and slackened dashboard. The memory was attached to the faults, things we had then wished away.

  “Solid,” I said, and knocked on the bonnet to confirm it. “Yup. Looks good. Take it for a ride?”