The Wish Maker (47 page)

Lahore Airport was the same. The conveyor belt took its time to start and then, having started, stopped. There was confusion.

A young porter in the gray porters’ uniform made a show of indignation and went in behind an unmanned door. After some minutes he returned, and stood confidently beside his assignee, an old white-haired man in an off-white suit. The conveyor belt started up again. And the porter kept his look of indignation, not willing to overlook the lapse in the machine’s function, aware of his victory in getting it started and aware too that his demand for a tip was now unassailable.

“Oho!” cried another porter, who was hurrying through the stranded crowd toward the bend in the moving belt. But the suitcase he lifted was not the one. He abandoned it and stood back, undaunted by failure or embarrassment.

He dusted his shoulders, first the right and then the left.

The man he had displaced said something from behind his back.

It was ignored.

Our suitcase appeared and I caught it; we had no trolley and wouldn’t need one—the suitcase had wheels and rolled. We rolled it across to customs, where it was stopped and opened and searched for illegal items, and then we rolled it out into the crowded haphazardness of International Arrivals.

My mother saw Naseem and extended an arm in a sideways embrace.

Naseem returned the embrace and took the suitcase by the handle, and led the way across the cracked airport floor. The night outside was suddenly cold, the sky blurred with smog.

“It’s winter already,” said my mother.

We walked past the line of waiting taxi drivers, past two beggars settled against a pillar on the floor, an old man in a turban and an old woman, both thin and wrinkled and sitting on their haunches under the cover of a single shawl. Watching us go past, watching the people behind us go past, they were waiting for someone to stop.

“All is well?” said my mother. She was walking behind Naseem, following through the spaces between parked cars and buses.

Naseem was walking briskly now, and far ahead of us.

We reached the car, which was parked toward the end of the last row. Barkat emerged from the front and lifted the suitcase with Naseem and dumped it into the trunk.

We sat at the back, Naseem beside Barkat in the seat ahead, and the car started.

My mother said our holiday had been enjoyable.

Naseem said nothing.

Barkat stopped the car to pay for the parking.

“What’s happened?” said my mother.

Naseem was quiet for a moment, a moment in which the car passed through the checkpost and the airport gates and went out into the white-lit street. And then she spoke, but it was gravelly and splintered; she coughed, rolled down her window and spat out the phlegm, then rolled it up again. She said, “The girl is gone. Her mother came and took her. We tried to stop her but we couldn’t.”

“Sit,” said Daadi.

She was walking up and down her room.

Naseem said she was taking the suitcase to my mother’s room.

“Go,” said Daadi.

Naseem left the room and closed the door behind her.

My mother sat on the sofa and said, “Will someone tell me what has happened?” Her fists were pressed into her knees.

Daadi said Chhoti had arrived four days ago. She had sat with Daadi in her room, asked for a glass of cold water and drunk it slowly, pausing to consider her sips. Then she had gone into her daughter’s room. Daadi hadn’t suspected, and so she stayed where she was and didn’t follow through the door. But then she heard the sounds, the thudding and the shrieks and then the crash—the lamp had tumbled and fallen—and when they opened the door they found Chhoti standing above her daughter with a shoe in her hand, bringing it down again and again.

Tell me
, she said,
tell me what you did.

The girl was screaming and sobbing.

Daadi tried to pull them apart.

She has soiled me
, said Chhoti,
she has soiled me soiled me soiled me.

It was known to the women of the village. The boy’s mother had brought it to them. The girl, she said, had tried to seduce the boy. But the boy was not ready, and it was an unsuitable match, one they couldn’t consider after knowing the ways in which the affair had been conducted.

Chhoti’s sisters-in-law had been to see her at her house. They said they had heard disturbing things.

One bad egg ruins the batch
.

And they said,
We are concerned, for she is our child after all.

“
Tell me!” cried Chhoti. “Tell me what you did!”

“We tried to stop her,” said Daadi. “She was someone else. She was made of stone.”

Chhoti beat the girl and took her in the car. And there had been no word from her after that.

“I always said,” said Daadi. “I always said send the girl away, send her back. But no, I was told, let her live, let her breathe, she is only a child. It was interference. She was not yours or mine to raise.”

My mother took me by the arm and went into her room. She didn’t switch on the lights.

“You knew?”

I was looking at her face.

“Answer me!”

“Don’t interfere,” I said.

“What did you say?”

“You like interfering in my business?”

“How dare you talk to me like that?”

“What happened to democracy? What happened to art music architecture? What happened to progressive?”

“How dare you?”

“Face it,” I said. “You’re nothing but a half-baked liberal.”

Her face was blank. Then her mouth twisted, and she raised her hand and struck my face with a force that swung her shoulder.

TWO

13

The difficulties of adolescence are the first of their kind. There is nothing like them in the chanciness of childhood, just as there is nothing, no resonance or meaning, in the sayings of those who have crossed the waters and speak now exhortingly as from the shore. Words are vacant, adrift, waiting for contact with life, for moments that will come to cause the unmistakable throb of recognition.

At home there was no recourse to hollow wisdoms. There was only the loss, and it took the place of life, of habitual arrivals and departures and of sounds from behind doors that now stayed shut. My mother woke late and slept early. On some days she didn’t go to work; she stayed in bed and read, or watched TV and used the telephone. At night the only light in her room came from the bedside lamp, next to which she kept the packet of pills, small pink ones with a dose-maker’s line running clearly across the middle. She had bought them without a prescription to ease the nights, and arrived at her own conclusions.

Daadi allowed the days to pass, allowed them to wash away some of what had happened, and then picked up the phone and dialed Chhoti’s number in Barampur. She asked after her as if nothing had changed. Chhoti was not dramatic, and gave an unremarkable account of things. Daadi mentioned the remaining days of the school term and the fees that had to be paid, and Chhoti said she would speak to the administration herself.

“And the things?” said Daadi. “The clothes and the things in the room . . .”

Chhoti said to pack them in boxes. She would collect them on the weekend.

Late on Friday afternoon the car came to the house. And the driver was alone. He stood by the open trunk and counted the cardboard boxes, and watched as they were loaded one by one.

Naseem was asked to clear the room. The bed was draped, the posters torn from the walls and rolled up and secured with rubber bands. The clothes had gone already; the picture frames and cosmetics and the few discovered magazines were packed into boxes and stowed away.

The lights were switched off.

And the door was locked.

“What’s done is done,” said Daadi. “No point dwelling on it now.”

But it was impossible to not dwell, to resist the pull of what had not been witnessed and survived only in the telling of others. Every version led to fresh imaginings. And to imagine was to enter alone, witnessing without witnesses, with some of the pain and none of the consolations allowed by actual experience.

I went driving with Isa and Moosa in their car. They were excited because they had tickets to a cricket match in Gaddafi Stadium. They struggled in the queue outside and struggled inside to reach the seats in the upper enclosure, and the whole match went by, the floodlights and the cheering and the tooting of horns in the crowded vastness, and again there was only the night, my bedroom and the shadows on its ceiling.

One afternoon Naseem went down the lane to Mrs. Zaidi’s house and returned with a thin, harassed-looking boy, who was made to wait in a chair by the gate. She came inside and said, “An old friend has come to see you.”

But Mazri had come only out of obligation, and was too old now to play video games in arcades and to run after kites on roofs. He was awkward too, dressed in a loose gray shalwar kameez that was too big for his body, even after the sleeves had been rolled up and the shalwar hitched up at the ankles; his feet were in rubber sandals that extended well past the heels and flapped when he walked. He had little of interest to report: he was working now at a bicycle repair shop in Canal Park, fixing chains and pumping air into tires; he had lost the old bicycle years ago (it was stolen from outside the arcade while Mazri was playing video games inside); he had not yet bought another, though he intended to—he had his eye on a Sohrab Eagle that had come into the workshop and needed only a little bit of work, it wouldn’t cost him if he repaired it himself, and he had spoken to the workshop owner and the man was not opposed.

We sat in chairs by the gate and talked for some minutes. We agreed to meet again, perhaps at the workshop, perhaps even later in the week, and exchanged details about timing and location. Then we parted and I saw Mazri out of the gate, knowing already that the plan was canceled.

Daadi said, “You must make friends. This is no way to behave. Children your age are running around and doing every kind of thing, and look at you.”

Exams at school were left unattempted, the papers rolled up and compressed into balls and settled like decorations on the desk. Equations and unwanted sentences appeared instead on the sheets of drawing paper handed out in art class, the numbers and letters all carefully sculpted and shaded appropriately with darknesses. The art teacher snatched the sheet and took it to the blackboard and held it up for all to see. The class tittered and applauded.

One day, in the indoor gymnasium, the boys of the junior classes were learning to swim in a large inflated pool and a smashing sound sent them screaming and splashing; a window had burst—a stone had burst it. The boys went to stand by the supervisor and hugged their little bodies, naked and dripping, suddenly vulnerable and screaming with certainty. The incensed supervisor went outside to see and found the culprit standing at the site of the crime with his hands inside his pockets.

“Mrs. Shirazi,” said the headmistress. She removed her glasses and sighed and brought a pressing fingertip to her temple. It stretched one eye felinely. “I’m afraid this is getting out of hand. Homework we can handle. Active misbehavior we cannot. You should take him to a child psychologist; it shouldn’t be a problem in this day and age.”

“Child psychologist,” said my mother in the car. “She should take her
self
to a child psychologist.” After a gathering pause she said, “This school is no good, Zaki. I’ve felt it for a while, and now I know it. You’re just not going back there. We’ll find another school for you. There’s no shortage of schools here. Child psychologist.” And she gave a humorless laugh and shook her head, her eyes wide and alert and unaccepting.