The Wish Maker (57 page)

Daadi switched off the lights in her room and went to lie down on the bed. She allowed the descent into her thoughts. The day had passed; a government had ended, a new one had begun and things were at rest. She thought of the soldiers climbing the walls. They were brave. But then she thought: it is duty, nothing more, and they all follow commands delivered by someone else, and their lives are for nothing, and their deaths are for nothing.

She thought it was a dream. And she thought she had forgotten it already, something she did often now, not like in childhood, when she remembered every single dream and what it was made of.

She sat up and swung her legs off the bed, put on her slippers and went into the bathroom.

But when she returned she was filled with dread. If she slept now she would dream again, and she knew that it would lead to mutations of the things she had seen in the day, which were mutations of the things she had seen in her life.

For some minutes she paced the room in the dark.

She went into the dressing room, found the small brass key under the carpet and opened her cupboard. It gave its customary creak, a sound of submission. She opened a drawer, took out an oval tin box and returned with it to the sofa in her room. She switched on a lamp. The pictures inside the box were the same. She saw now, in this half-slumber, that she had stopped collecting photographs at a particular point in time. She could name the year. And she could name the day. It was when her son died.

The crying had been a release until it became a habit, and she recalled the swollen eyes, the throbbing head and the squeezed ribs. She was glad it had stopped. But she wanted to know that she could do it still, and without having to revive a grieving self.

She took out a photograph and held it up like a shield. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them she found an old picture, one of her oldest, from the days when she was still a girl. The girl standing next to her with the hair parted in the middle was Amrita, her friend and neighbor, and they were standing behind the shrubs in Amrita’s garden. It was the summer Amrita had left.

The Hindu family next door, the Parsi gentleman who lived in the secretive double-story house and ran the laundry on Mall Road, and Amrita’s family, a Sikh family—all of them had locked their houses and gone away.

The year before, things were different. The word “Pakistan” had been on people’s tongues, a word they used mostly in slogans, and their lives in Lahore were unaffected by it. Daadi’s father came home in the evenings and spoke about Gandhi going to jail, Nehru going to jail, Jinnah appearing in the newspapers and asking for concessions for the Muslims, and it was a part of his personality, his way of talking in English and smoking cigarettes on his own in the darkened veranda.

“Cripps Mission,” said Daadi in the morning.

“Cabinet Mission,” said Amrita.

The taanga was taking them to school. The horse’s click-clock made them bump.

“My dear,” said Daadi, fifteen this summer and newly enamored of the English language, “it is all politics.” She said it and leaned back in her seat. The world around them was one of overhanging trees and dirt tracks paved recently for travelers.

“Politics,” said Amrita satisfactorily. Then she said, “I don’t think I look like her at all.” And she meant Noor Jehan, the young singer who had hijacked All-India Radio and was being praised for singing a difficult qawwali in the film
Zeenat
.

Daadi had told Amrita earlier that morning that she looked like Noor Jehan, who was marked by a cleft chin and sullen lips.

Daadi said, “You look just like her.”

“You keep on saying it,” said Amrita.

“Because it is the truth, my dear.”

“I know why you say it.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s because you don’t look like anyone.”

“I look like myself.”

“Only yourself.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

“Damn you.” And Amrita said it and blushed, her sullen lips hanging uncertainly, and looked around as if for witnesses.

They were neighbors. Daadi lived in the small house with the terrace, and Amrita lived in the house with the telephone. It sat on a stool in their veranda and rang loudly in the evenings. A Muslim bearer hurried in, stooped to pick up the handle and passed it on to Amrita’s father, a Sikh lawyer who wore his turban like a fabulous crown and reclined in his long veranda chair to discuss the amounts of money involved in his cases. People said Amrita’s father was a show-off, and Daadi’s mother had told her that people were jealous.

“In this neighborhood,” she said, standing one morning with her sleeves rolled up by the kitchen window, “everyone is one thing on top and another thing inside.”

She meant that they were unreliable, and she liked to give the example of her own husband, who spoke agitatedly of education and progress but had nothing to show for himself.

“If I didn’t send him to work every morning,” Daadi’s mother used to say, “we would be paupers, we would be begging on these streets.”

It was true that Daadi’s father was fond of sleeping. (He ran a pharmacy that doubled as a dispensary, and he claimed that nobody in Lahore required his services before noon.) She had to rouse him on her way to school. And she often had to go afterward to bring Amrita out of her house. On the way she passed Amrita’s mother, a round-faced, broad-boned lady with coal-black hair and a dark slit between her two front teeth. In the morning she sat on her burgundy rug and recited gravelly hymns from the Granth Sahib. She saw Daadi enter the house and nodded with her front-toothy smile. Then Daadi passed Amrita’s older brother, Ajit, who took morning classes at the Law College. Ajit was a large fellow, high and hefty, with massive, sloping shoulders and a childish sulk. People said he sulked because he was struggling with his father’s shadow; Daadi had heard their loud arguments, the ones that took place in the veranda and usually followed their legalistic discussions, culminating in the slamming of doors, which rang like gunshots. Amrita said her brother was like her father in every way.

“They should get along,” said Amrita.

“Not at all,” said Daadi.

“
I
think so,” said Amrita.

They had their opinions. Amrita wanted to have two children—a son and a daughter. “Older son, younger daughter. It’s always better.”

Daadi said she wanted two daughters and a son.

“Why not two sons and a daughter?” said Amrita.

“Because a girl needs company.”

Amrita said, “Girls fight much more than boys.”

And Daadi said, “What do you know? You’re just making it up. You always make things up on your own.”

The arrival of the refugees was unexpected. Daadi heard it described in the house and informed Amrita.

“It’s true,” Amrita said. “My father has said they’ll be coming to our house. My mother will make their beds.”

“How many are there?” said Daadi.

“I don’t know,” said Amrita. “It’s all politics.” Then she said, “Muslims are killing them for no good reason.” And she said the words like a lawyer, with her hands laying them out in the air.

Daadi said, “Muslims were killed first.” It was what her mother had said in the morning with the rolling pin in her hand.

“No, they weren’t.”

“The truth is the truth.”

“Muslims lie all the time.”

“You don’t wash your hair.”

“I do.”

“Your father doesn’t. Your brother doesn’t. They keep it all day in their turbans.”

And Amrita made a face and went home.

Earlier in the year there had been riots in Calcutta between Hindus and Muslims. Calcutta was very far away, a five-day journey on the train from Lahore. Rioting in Calcutta was as remote as the fighting (her father had called it a “fiasco”) that was happening between the countries of Europe. But the riots in Calcutta led to the killing of Muslims in Bihar, and then Hindus in East Bengal, and then, most recently, the killing of Sikhs and Hindus in the northern provinces. The northern provinces were not so far away, just a five-hour journey by train, and the attack on Hindus and Sikhs had sent them with their families to Lahore. Amrita’s own house, in keeping with her prediction, was currently full of relatives who had fled the fighting.

Daadi’s mother said, “We should shut our windows. Who knows what they have brought in their hearts?”

Daadi’s father was reclining on the divan in the veranda. He raised his head from the pillow and said, “Don’t be so narrow-minded, my dear.”

Daadi’s mother widened her eyes, opened the corner of her mouth and said, “Yes, my dear,” and went away to shut the windows.

Later that night she said, “These British. They are evil geniuses.”

But Daadi’s father said not everything could be blamed on the British. He was lying still on his divan, listening now to the gramophone that sat next to him on a high table and was possessed by the spirit of Noor Jehan.

“Whose fault is it?” asked Daadi.

“Our own,” said her father. “Man is an animal. He must always curb his instincts. It is only under the influence of discipline and restraint that man is Man. Remember that.” The possessed gramophone sang a sad verse about moons and broken hearts.

By summer the madness was everywhere. The British were leaving and there would be two countries, India in the center and Pakistan on each side—a long strip to the left called West Pakistan, and then to the right, after one thousand miles of Indian territory, another Muslim land called East Pakistan. Hindus and Sikhs were going to India and Muslims were coming to Pakistan. The Parsis and Christians were unsure, and had been told to make up their minds.

Signs appeared on doors. THIS IS A PARSI HOUSE. THIS IS A CHRISTIAN HOUSE. Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs didn’t put up signs because they feared identification. There were riots on Mall Road. The mostly Hindu neighborhood of Shahalmi was torched. Thick clouds of smoke settled on the horizon and spread like the blackness that suggests a storm. The stories were fantastic: people had seen bodies piled up against walls, thrown into ditches, severed heads and hands and cut-off breasts. Refugee trains were arriving at their destinations with corpses inside. A woman who had made the journey across the new border said that she had climbed a pile of bodies in order to hop across a high wall. Daadi was trying to keep up with the stories, trying to picture Mall Road without the Parsi laundry, Shahalmi without Hindus, the River Ravi without its funeral pyres, a plain gray without its blaze of orange. Could there be Eid without Holi and Diwali, Noor Jehan without All-India Radio, Daadi without Amrita in the mornings?

She thought of an absence, and saw dark windows where the laundry had been, silence where there had been songs, a hollow house instead of a home. She would live to see the adjustments: how the shutters came down on an abandoned laundry and opened the next week on a bookshop; how Noor Jehan gave life to the microphones of Radio Pakistan; and how quickly that house, once Amrita’s, came to belong to strangers. She would live to see it go into the blur of elapsed time. And she would learn difficult lessons: that ruins become relics; that a blankness is also a whitening, an opportunity for new inscriptions; that older losses become obscured by newer ones. And still the will to act remains.