The Wish Maker (51 page)

Two inward-slanting lines made the cheeks, then a plateau for the chin; a final
M
at the forehead was connected to a cascading hairstyle, and the face of the woman was complete. It now grew a neck and a body in a succession of quick lines and curves.

The completed woman stood holding her hips, wearing gloves that came up to her elbows and boots that came up to her knees. There was a mirror beside her, containing a reflection, and an open window on the other side with the sky and the moon and the stars outside.

“Very nice.”

The hand had stopped moving. The drawing was almost finished.

“Beautiful,” said Dr. Qazi, smiling.

The boy twirled his pencil slowly in his hand.

“We are learning,” said Dr. Qazi to the class, “about modesty. And this one here”—he thwacked the face with his hand—“is making
this
”—he thwacked it again—“in
my
class.” He squeezed the boy by the collar and hauled him up—he lifted limply—and threw him across the floor. The boy stumbled on a chair that was in the way, which the occupant then moved conscientiously to the side.

“Do it again,” said Dr. Qazi, crumpling the paper in his fist and throwing it into the ashen fireplace, “do it again and I will draw it on your smart little face and make you walk around this school in front of everyone, you understand?”

I followed him out of the classroom.

The bell had just rung and the corridor was rushed, but he found a way in it, walking beside the wall, his schoolbag strapped on both shoulders and his thumbs tucked in beneath the straps.

I said, “That teacher’s crazy.”

He was trying to walk ahead, his legs making precise, equal movements.

“You draw a lot?”

It was the wrong thing to ask.

“What’s your name?” And this, at least, was not probing or pitying.

“Kazim,” he said in a way that was almost humoring, so that it sounded after a moment like a challenge.

“Zaki Shirazi.”

But he hadn’t thought it necessary.

So I said, “It’s not right, what that teacher did. He shouldn’t have hit you like that in front of the whole class.” But this had the sound of an added affront, so I said, “Your drawing was really nice.” And then, to make it less meaningful, “You’re good at drawing, you should draw more. You should take art, you’ll get good marks in it.”

We had reached the crowded parking lot, where the boys were waiting on benches and standing among the cars. And the stares were suddenly visible, daunting and stabbing and lustful and even surprised stares that now took on an aspect of reproach. It took a moment to recognize the intention.

“You have a lot of friends,” I said, and laughed without meaning to, hoping that he would understand the impulse and forgive it. But he was already moving ahead into the crowd. “Bye,” he said, almost cheerfully, and walked on.

Kazim went home that afternoon in the school bus. And it brought him back in the morning: he emerged from the rear door, his hair combed back, his tie askew, a button missing from the middle of his shirt and his shoes polished and shining—an odd mixture of particularity and vagueness, a display of attention to a few chosen details within a larger negligence. He wore his schoolbag in the same way, tightly and protectively with his thumbs under the straps; and in that odd way, with legs that seemed to have only now learned to carry out the task, he stepped off the bus and began to walk.

He was absent at assembly and late to class. When he was present he appeared to listen and to work in his notebook, and was then found to have drawn inside the margins, below diagrams and on graphs. It was ignored by some teachers, but to others it gave a fresh chance for enactments of contempt and fury and revulsion that were later ascribed to the need for discipline, without which, they said, no schoolboy’s character could be formed. In the first month alone Kazim Naseer was sent three times to the coordinator’s office, twice for insulting a teacher (vulgarities were found at the back of his submitted homework) and once for failing to answer a simple question in class, which showed that he was elsewhere, mentally, even as he appeared to be involved.

He liked to spend the thirty-minute lunch break in the art room, which was located in an upstairs corridor of the senior building. It was here, in this large, many-windowed room, among the bottles of turpentine and linseed oil, the hardened brushes softening in the sink and the canvases recovering on easels and the paint tubes laid out on the windowsills, that he was free at last to do as he wished: he made his drawings on large, colored sheets of chart paper, using the crayons and markers he had got out of the supplies cupboard. He repeatedly changed his place, for he tired quickly of locations, and went to observe the progress of the few other boys who were allowed to work inside the room. (Entry was regulated by a slim, polite man who had once been a communist and was now an art teacher; he lived in a small brick house behind the campus, the nearness of which caused him to come and go at will, a habit that was noted by other teachers and had led to complaints.) The boys who came to the art room were not of a uniform disposition; they were athletes and debaters and academics, and some who had no professed interest or talent to mark them out; but here they wore aprons and worked with the same materials, and spoke to one another in the shared language of art. Some were better than others: a senior called Salman had a startling gift for rendering things exactly as they appeared in life; one of his paintings, the picture of an ordinary jar beside a window, was up in the principal’s office and was displayed every year in the talent show. And there was a boy who had gone around with sticks of charcoal to the historic monuments of Lahore and produced sketches that were later shown in the youth section of an English-language newspaper. But the art teacher had told Kazim that he alone had expression, an ability to bring things out in novel ways.
Village Life
consisted of four murals that were up outside the art room and showed women, one from each province of the country, in traditional dress and setting, though even here they had staring eyes and sharply angled faces and developed postures that made them seem, among the even fields and matching trees and far-off bullock-carts, like transplanted entities.

One day he went upstairs and found that the murals had been defaced: someone had drawn a mustache on each of the women, the same black line in marker.

“Whores,” he said.

This was a habit: whenever he was called upon to give an account of something, to describe an event or explain a happening, he resorted to a language of types in which everyone was assigned a motive and a mission, and was made, in the end, a female. And so the principal and the coordinator were witches, with hidden lives in their offices, and had brooms and cats at home; the English teacher was Alto, named after a stout, economical car, while Dr. Qazi with his henna-dyed beard was Ginger Spice. “She’s bursting,” said Kazim conspiratorially after enduring one of the beatings, which had reddened his ears and left a cut on his lip, a beating again observed in silence in the classroom. “She’s going to go home and suck on a carrot.”

We were walking toward the canteen, and passed the senior benches on the way. A monitor watched with surprised amusement as one of his friends stood up, placed a hand on his heart and began to sing a song about a girl with a tantalizing gait. The boys around him hooted and clapped.

I said, “Don’t you feel ashamed?”

And Kazim sighed, as if the only thing to feel here was exasperation, and said that they were dried-up women who went home to hidden lives, to armchairs and fridges and radios, and he carried on with this imagery all the way to the canteen, developing scenarios and laughing at comeuppances that hadn’t been suffered and wouldn’t be suffered, and kept it alive until we had entered the crowded area inside, where the real noise ate it up.

I was alone when Kazim withdrew to the art room. On those days I had to walk myself to the canteen, where I was not without options: Saif, my first friend, was still approachable. He had by now established his place at a bench behind the cypress trees, where he sat with two unchanging companions, friends from before, a boy called Mooji and another called EQ. They were joined sometimes by others, who always brought their own food and left before the bell had rung, which was required of itinerants. Saif still offered to share his food with them but didn’t insist when it was declined; restraint was a part of his personality.

“Shirazi!” he cried. He was sitting on the stone bench with his arms spread out and his feet lodged on the table.

I sat across from him on the adjacent bench, shook his hand, then shook the hands of his friends.

“Thirst,” said Mooji, a dark, muscular boy with a long face. He stood up and yawned.

“Coke?” said Saif.

Mooji thought about it and said, “Coke.”

Saif took out the money from his wallet. The third boy, who sat slouching into himself with his elbows in his palms, was called EQ, which was short for something. He made no contribution to the funds, and didn’t seem to think it was required.

“Shirazi?” said Saif—he was handing out the money. “What do you want? CokeFantaSprite?”

“Fanta for him,” said Mooji.

EQ laughed.

Saif was looking at me and waiting for an answer.

“Coke,” I said.

“Coke,” said Saif. He passed the money to Mooji, who took it with him into the canteen.

“Where’s your friend?” said EQ. He was looking at the tops of his fingernails. They were gnawed down and lined with filth.

“Oi,” said Saif.

EQ grunted and bit into his thumbnail. He tore it off and spat it out; the undernail was pink.

“Fucking animal,” said Saif, and his disgust was encouraging, a compliment EQ had earned. “Fucking
rhino
.”

EQ was biting his other thumb.

Mooji returned with the Coke bottles held between the fingers of one hand. He placed them on the cracked stone table, and lowered himself slowly onto the bench, looking around and frowning as if alerted to an ever-expanding threat in his surroundings.

“Cheers, mate,” he said in a jolly Australian accent; he laughed briefly and determinedly to fill the ensuing silence; he took quick, scowling gulps of the Coke and gasped rewardedly. “So,” he said, bouncing a knee in anticipation, and wanting to hear some jokes now, since his own hadn’t led to amusement, “Shirazi’s got a girlfriend?” He looked from me to Saif in puzzlement.