The Wish Maker (2 page)

The house was on its way. The paint was fresh and drying quickly on the outside walls; the wrought-iron gate was sharp with varnish; the driveway, once lined with cracks, was smooth now and still shining wetly in places with newly laid asphalt. And the lawn was mown. A dense row of marigolds on its fringes gave it the feel of a real garden, rather than just a plot of grass, while at night it became a rich, golden place, a revealed world of glowing depths and shadows, of dimensions and mysteries created by the positioning of hidden lights.

“The bride can’t come right now,” said my mother. It was morning, and she was talking on the telephone to the tailor, who was altering the blouse and wanted to have another round of measurements. “This is no way. We have trusted you, and this is what you are doing. We could have gone to many other places, but we came to you. And this is what you are doing. This is no way.”

Eventually my mother granted a time for the fitting but insisted that the tailor should come to the house with the outfit. The bride was resting and would see him briefly, and then he would go back and stitch up the blouse and deliver it on the promised date. After settling with the tailor, she spoke to the beautician, again on the phone in the veranda, where she was sitting in a white wicker chair and leaning forward and rocking slightly with apprehension: the beautician was a detached Chinese woman who first wouldn’t come to the phone, and who then gave a weak and suspicious-sounding answer, an “Okay” or a “Maybe” that confirmed only the possibility of an appointment. And then there was a quarrel with the caterers, who had not included Diet Coke and Diet 7UP in the revised order: my mother threatened to cancel the order; they insisted it was right; she threatened to expose them in the magazine she owned; and they backed off slowly, coming round to the need for an apology, which she accepted in the end.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she said. She meant organizing the wedding, and organizing it single-handedly, for though the funds and the resources had come in from all quarters of the family, there was a feeling, aired more and more now, that the toil and the drudgery had been left disproportionately to my mother. “I resent it,” she said, and gave a short, curt nod. “I do.”

Then she sighed and sank back into the chair and covered her eyes with her hands, as if to say that she was overworked and undervalued and thus allowed to say unreasonable things from time to time. And when later in the day the wedding cards arrived in a mound from the printer’s and were found to be satisfactory, she did say, “One does it for the children,” in a way that affirmed her organizing role, her skills and her patience, as well as the vague parental function she was serving, and recast the whole thing in a positive light.

“Look at this,” she said, and trailed a proud finger along the first line of the invitation card:

You are cordially invited to the wedding of Samar
.

“What do you think?”

I said it was nice.

And it was more than that: it was valid and it was true, the granting of a wish-made send-off to Samar Api, who was my first cousin, once removed, and for whom, after years of separation, I had now come back to do the rites.

I had returned to Lahore for the first time since leaving for university. And it was of university that I was still thinking. Over there, in Massachusetts, it was winter break now, the end of the autumn term, and that life—of snow and wind, of blocked, frozen streets and the retreat into heated buildings, the snow continuing to descend outside—that life went on as an imagined progression of familiar feelings: taking the shuttle on time to class in the morning, then from class to the dining halls and back in time for class. And at night: the sofa before the fire in the common room, a place that became noisy and rushed on the weekend with music and dancing and a crowded slippery bar area, and then the culminating solace of a bedroom. That was my memory of it, newly formed. And with it I was filling up the present, knowing too that the halls were locked, the fire dead, the campus emptied and shut down.

That was there, and I was here now, at home.

But home too was changed. The airport was new, and the roads were new; the billboards and buildings on the way from the airport, many had come up in these last two years alone and pointed again and again to the ongoing nature of things. There was an added estrangement from the known: the drive home was too short, the bridge too small, the trees not high enough on the canal, while in the house there was an odd shrunken aspect to things that made them less than what they once had been: the bed in my room was just a bed, narrow and hard, and the pillow was incongruously large, the room itself just a room with patching walls that would curl with moisture in the summer. The veranda was no longer an avenue, and all day the kitchen had a smell.

“What smell?” said my mother.

The smell of frying oil and onions and ginger and garlic.

“Drink lots of water,” said my mother.

It had a taste.

“There is no taste in water.”

“There is.”

“Then get your own. Go to the market and get your own. Put your own things in the fridge. Make your own food.”

I got my things from the market and took them to the fridge. And it was full: the raw vegetables were in the bottom compartment, the saalan dishes and the chutneys and condiments on the upper shelves, the preferences of different people stacked precariously and collectively for now to make room for the bride’s requirements, which were on the final shelf: a small jug of freshly squeezed orange juice and a few cans of Slim-Fast, and some empty space for other things.

“Grilled things,” said my mother. “Dieting things. But sometimes she wants sweet things. You never know.”

My mother was staying indoors. The books and magazines and newspapers in her room, once stacked on the floor and left to accumulate, had been organized and placed on shelves on the walls. There were lamps on all the tables now and no overhead lights: she had read about the adverse effects of bare lightbulbs, and said that she had always felt it as an influence on her temperament but had never had the sense to sit down and identify the problem. She believed in identification: she spent the last few hours of every night researching health-related topics on the Internet. And in the morning she was slow to rise and shift to the sitting area, where she lay again on the sofa and read newspapers, not one by one in quick succession, the way she had before rushing to work, but slowly, and with genuine involvement, lingering over things that had once been irrelevant. Over the course of the morning she drank down the tea in the teapot and sent it many times to be reheated. And she kept the TV alive. She watched it for the news but also for the cooking shows, the talk shows, for Indian shows in which young people stood on stages and sang old film songs with live orchestras behind them, and were then judged by panelists. My mother had favorites whose progress she followed until the end: she noted their singing skills but also their expressions, their dressing habits, their postures and physiques. She knew about physical fitness and sat through the late-morning exercise shows with the fast-paced music in the background. Sometimes she tried to repeat the moves, and the curtains were drawn. Then she showered and went to the office in her new car with the new driver, and Naseem came in to clean the room and afterward sat on the sofa and watched the TV channels. In the evening my mother returned with Zarmina and Rubab, two new girls who were working with her on the magazine, which had expanded, and required a division between the management of content and revenue: Zarmina commissioned the pieces and subbed the English and sent the files on a CD to the Urdu department, which translated everything for the Urdu version of the magazine; and Rubab sat in a rotating chair at a desk and spoke on the phone to advertisers, making statements about sales and target audience and about the quality of the product, which was made with the “bouquet” approach and offered a wide range of things to read and things to look at. The last issue of
Women’s Journal
had reports on rape and domestic violence, and an interview with the victim of an acid attack who was now seeking treatment in Europe; a long piece on literacy among the women of Pakistan, with pictures of peasant women squatting outside schools in the Sindh Desert, their arms stacked with bangles, and with accompanying pie charts in desert colors that gave percentages and years and the comparative costs of primary education in the four provinces; and a four-page spread on the global community of Muslim women who had in their own ways resisted the recent American invasion of Iraq, a piece written in an admiring and accessible tone by a Pakistani student at the University of Birmingham, UK. The last quarter of the magazine was devoted to Society, to photos of people at tea parties and dinner parties, weddings and milaads, the pictures brightened on a computer and accompanied by the names of the subjects, many of whom called in afterward to thank the
Women’s Journal
team and to give information about upcoming events, the corporate balls and fashion shows that had begun to occur frantically among the people who, in one of the earlier articles in the “Issues” section, had been described as “the new crop of disconnected elites that has come up in Karachi and Lahore.”

“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.”