The Wish Maker (59 page)

“Cow,” said Seema to Daadi.

The woman was short, dark, round, wrapped in yellow silk and glinting with diamonds. She could have been a washerwoman in someone else’s clothing.

“Wait and see,” said Seema.

Daadi joined the tips of her forefingers and prepared herself.

The singer held out her hand. Her eyebrows went up, and her mouth released a single note. Her voice was nasal, importunate and quavered uncertainly. The yawning strings of the taanpura floated with her. She went up and touched a place, fled from it and came back up. Now around that place she wove, higher and lower, and the place where she was heading, the place at the heart of it, the same as before, became a destination. But she touched it and went past it. And she was too high now, and fell; but she fell on the same place in a lower scale, so that her flight became a recovery she herself had predicted.

The audience clapped.

She opened her eyes and looked at her musicians, sniffed and dabbed her mouth with her shiny veil.

The tabla stumbled. The sarangi wept.

She was listening.

The sarangi gave a summary of what she had done.

She summarized it back.

The sarangi mimicked her and then took it higher, a challenge.

She copied it but brought it down.

They wrestled, and merged upon the moment when the tabla struck.

The audience clapped again.

And she smiled at the audience and nodded agreeingly.

Daadi’s fingers, joined previously at the tips, had joined fully now, and to someone watching she may have had the appearance of a devotee.

She inclined her head and said, “What is she doing?”

Seema’s father said, “It is Shankara. It is the melody of Lord Shiva.” His hands enacted a flowering.

His wife said, “People are listening.”

So they heard the rest of the song in silence. And it was the same after a while: the singer sought a ceiling, and sometimes she was able to touch it; but she always fell back and hung on the note that came before the last one. After the song had ended, when the Queen of Music was talking to her musicians and the people in the audience were talking to one another, Seema’s father removed his glasses, wiped them with his shirt and said, “It is a difficult melody, you see. She must bring out the quality of Shiva, who is
both
the creator
and
the destroyer.” His eyes were bright with emphasis, and his lips were smiling. “There is a place between the two, you see. And she must bring it out. That is why she stays on that second-last note: it is where the yearning is the highest, the
highest
, but also the closest to ending.”

Seema’s mother crunched disdainfully on her powders and said, “He is always saying big-big things.”

At the end of the year Daadi was married, and moved with her husband into his three-bedroom house in Mughalpura. She was living there in one room with him; in another room lived his mother, a widow; and in the third room lived his younger brother. Within a year of their marriage Daadi’s husband sold his shop (they made oil-based perfumes and sold them to retailers in the city) and became the manager of a rubber factory in Lyallpur. The factory was in debt; the rubber it produced was inferior. But the owners offered to make the manager a shareholder in the company, and the new manager, encouraged by his new wife, agreed to take the job.

He went away. Four months later he sent for his younger brother, who was to work with him in the factory. Daadi was alone in the new house with her mother-in-law. The woman awoke at dawn, said her prayers in her own room, then wandered out to the bathroom, washed her face in the sink, spat and gargled noisily and cleansed herself in other ways, and went to sit outside with her gramophone in the baithak room. She sat there in the light of the window, ate paans and listened to the gramophone, swaying to heartbreaking songs by K. L. Saigal and C. H. Atma. She expected her daughter-in-law to take her dirty clothes out to the washerman, dice the onions and tomatoes in the small kitchen, put the pot of water on the hob and go into the bathroom with rags and a bucket and clean it up.

Daadi said, “Anything else?”

“Not for now,” said the woman, swaying to the music.

Daadi went in and found a mound of soft, black shit in the squat-toilet with flies encircling its peak.

She came out and fainted.

Her mother-in-law said, “She has insulted me!”

Her husband was gloomy.

Daadi said, “I am not staying here,” and put her clothes in a bundle and went back to her parents’ house.

It became a way of living. She fought with her mother-in-law, fought with her husband, fought with his brother’s new wife, and came away always to her parents’ house. She was likely to stay there a week. Then her husband was expected to appear with an apology, and she was expected to accept it; and they were expected to go back to Mughalpura in a hired taanga.

The same taanga brought her husband back to her parents’ house. He said, “She must come with me.” He was wearing a gray safari suit and pacing the veranda with his hands clasped importantly behind his back. His salary had increased, and was the source of his current confidence. In the safari suit his stomach hung like a sack.

She said, “I will not take my daughter back to that little hole.”

The daughter was two years old. Her name was Musarrat. In the house they called her Suri.

Suri acquired a sister.

Seema came to see Daadi at her parents’ house and said, “She looks like a doll!”

Daadi told Seema that the child weighed nine and a half pounds.

Seema said, “You must give her a strong name.”

They settled on Hikmat.

“Suri and Hukmi!” cried Daadi. “Come here at once! We are going away from here!”

They were playing with the girls of the neighborhood in the street. Daadi saw the stained faces of the children, their torn clothes and wild, lice-infested hair, and shouted, “From now on you will not play with these urchins! You are from a
good
family! And they are from the
streets
!”

Offended mothers appeared, and came forward to claim their offspring.

In the taanga Suri said, “They will never play with us now.”

Hukmi was crying.

Daadi said, “And I am
glad
that they won’t. I am
very
glad.”

Seema came to see her and said, “You must build a house of your own.” She herself was living now in Rawalpindi with her husband, who was in the army. Seema had said that her house had six rooms, a garden, a driveway for keeping the car and a terrace with wicker chairs and a plastic table. “All white,” said Seema, closing her eyes with satisfaction. “Everything is white.”

Daadi said, “We can’t afford it.”

Seema leaned forward in her chair and said, “Your husband is supporting his mother and his brother. The day he stops filling up their pockets you will have the money for your own house.”

Daadi smiled and said, “It is not like that at all.”

And later, to her husband, she said, “When will you stop filling up the pockets of your mother and brother? When will you do something for
us
?” She was standing in their shadowy room between the two beds, one for her husband and herself and the other for her daughters. She said, “How long can we live here? How long?” She stretched out her arms on either side, and they almost touched the walls. “Do you think I can bring up another child in this room?”

He sat on the bed, his elbows on his knees, his fingers on his temples. He said, “We will see when you have another child.”

She said, “Yes. We will see. We will see. That is what you always say.”

But it was a boy.

Seema said, “Now is the time.
Now
is the time.”

And her wish was granted: her husband bought a two-canal plot in an area that had once been a mango orchard and faced the canal. She hired a contractor and took him to the site to discuss the possibilities.

Seema showed her the picture of a French house in a magazine: the corners curved, the lines sloped elegantly, and the windows were round like windows in the cabins of a ship. Seema said, “It is a new style called Art Décor.”

Daadi summoned the contractor to her parents’ house and said, “Art Décor.”

He was an old man. He wore a checked blue-and-red lungi over his legs, which were covered in sores, a white turban on his head and misted-over glasses on his face. Most of his teeth were missing. He said, “What?”

She said, “Art Décor. It is a new style. In France.”

He didn’t understand.

She took him to the site and said, “Round, round, everything round.” And she showed him the picture of the house in the magazine.

He nodded thoughtfully and said, “It will raise the cost.”

She said, “You think we have sugar mills? You think we are sitting on a gold mine? What are you thinking in that head of yours?”

She went herself to the brick kiln to select the bricks. There was a cheaper variety of yellow brick.

“But I want the red bricks,” she said to her husband.

And she went to the office of a cement factory, bought the cement at a discounted rate and counted the number of bags that were loaded onto the taanga.

The contractor said they had to start building before the monsoon. “Otherwise the walls will become soft,” he said.

She said, “You have seven months.”

He said, “The laborers will have to put in extra hours. It is not in my control. If it was a question of my hours you
know
I wouldn’t ask you for more.” He was looking at her plaintively and licking his lips.

She said, “I will see who is working overtime.” And she sat on a charpai in the shade of a mango tree and oversaw the construction. She noted the white insects on the bark of the tree; and she noted that with the approach of the summer their numbers increased.

Seema said, “Mango bugs,” and shuddered theatrically.

Daadi told the contractor to take out the tree.

“You must have a tree,” said Seema. “It brings good luck.”

Daadi said, “I will plant it myself.”

And so began the project of her garden. She demarcated a patch at the front of the house, and planted a tree she had seen in other houses on the part of the lawn that abutted the gate. It grew slowly. She was tired of waiting for the small white flowers, and she dug out a line of soil around the lawn and planted it with marigolds. She had learned from the man at the nursery that it was a resilient flower, needing only water and light, and grew quickly.

She strung the orange flowers on strings and hung them around the house. They hung from the pillars in the veranda, from the handles of the cabinets in the kitchen and on the knobs of the bed. They looked pretty but gave no fragrance. On the third day they had shriveled, and were brown and soggy. She thought it was deceptive.

Seema came to the house and said, “But what is there to celebrate?”

She acquired a car. Her husband took it with him to the factory in Lyallpur but brought it back at the end of every month. And every morning she took the garden hose and stood before the car, her shalwar raised to the knees, the sleeves of her kameez rolled up to the elbows, her dupatta tied into a knot at her waist, and shut her eyes and turned away her face and heard the water crashing against the windshield.

Seema said, “It is not a thing for the mistress of the house to do.” She was grave.

Daadi said, “Who will do it?”

“A driver,” said Seema, and added that in Rawalpindi they had two. “There are lines of them,” she said. “You won’t even have to look far. You just have to build a quarter at the back.”

One day, with the new driver, in the new car, they went out of the house. Seema and Daadi sat in the back and looked out of their windows at the world.

“Must say,” said Seema. She was impressed.