The Wish Maker (6 page)

2

We had grown up together in the house. She was really my father’s first cousin: her mother, Chhoti, was Daadi’s younger sister and lived with her husband in Barampur, a small village that she disliked and considered unsuitable for the raising of her only child. So at the age of two Samar Api came to live with Daadi in Lahore. Two years later I was born, and though in moments of hostility she claimed to be my aunt, entitled by the nature of that position to deferential treatment, we were raised from the start to consider ourselves part of the same litter.

We weren’t alone. Suri and Hukmi often went away in the afternoons and left their children with Daadi in the house. Aasia and Maheen stayed inside, played with toys and fought; and Isa and Moosa played squash against the wall of the veranda and cricket on the lawn with the boys of the neighborhood. Occasionally they allowed me to play with them: they made me wait in the driveway, then let me field the ball or stand behind the wickets; and then they withdrew, sometimes citing a lack of skill as the cause, and sometimes nothing at all. It was made clear to me from the start that I wasn’t one of
them
, since
they
had fathers, one each, whereas mine had left me for the skies.

My father, Sami Shirazi, had been a flying officer in the Pakistan Air Force. I had never met him. He died when I was minus two months old; my mother was heavily pregnant when news of his death reached our house. He was flying a new kind of airplane above the Sonmiani Hills when a fault occurred in the control column, causing it to lock, and the plane spun out of control.

I wasn’t told the rest. It was withheld from me, for instance, that after taking the squadron leader’s call my mother had abandoned the telephone and wandered with a hand on her belly out onto the lawn, where she had tried ambitiously to vomit. It was also withheld from me that the incident was quietly mourned—accidents in the armed forces were not to be played up—and a fussy funeral was not observed. In any case, nothing had survived the crash, nothing but a few resilient components from inside the aircraft that were taken away at once for an inquiry. Daadi didn’t take the news well. She fumbled for her sleeping pills and took mental leave. Suri and Hukmi sat by her side and stroked her back, soothed her with words when she awoke, made her drink glasses of water, had her pace the room and encouraged her to go back to sleep. It went on like this until my mother walked in one afternoon with a baby in her arms, and Daadi sat up to receive the baby, reviewed its features and saw that they were hers. Only two words came out of her quivering mouth: “My grandson.” Then she burst into howls. Suri and Hukmi began to stroke her back, and my mother recovered the baby from her arms and clasped it to her own chest, trying very hard not to cry.

And so I came to learn that I had been given to Daadi as compensation for the death of her son. “Remember,” she would say, pointing a forefinger to the ceiling, “with one hand Allah takes and with the other He gives. You were given to us.”

She taught me to recognize my father in the pictures on her mantelpiece. First he was a boy of six, posing with his cricket bat. His hair had been combed into two tidy flaps and his scalp was a stream. His face was guilty: the eyes were frightened and staring, a bit of tongue was showing—he had done something exciting and adventurous that had later turned regrettable, and he was trying now to hide it. Suri and Hukmi stood behind him. They were ten and seven respectively, wore matching white frocks and stood with their fists clenched and their chins raised, their eyes aware of the photographer’s presence and looking on mistrustfully.

At seventeen my father enrolled in the Air Force Academy and went away to live in Risalpur. He was a young man in this next photo, a cadet like the rest of his teammates, who had just participated in a hockey match. He wore a vest and stood with his chest out; he had scored the last goal and his side had won the match, and his heart was still beating from the exertion. The boy beside him was starting to smile. My father had cracked a joke, something about the cameraman, and his friend was trying not to laugh. The other boys wore morose expressions to please the coach, who sat in the central chair in a tracksuit and was a middle-aged man with a dark, jowly, no-nonsense face, his hair dyed and combed back and his fists positioned demandingly on his knees. The names were listed under the picture on yellowing cardboard.
Second Row, L to R (standing): M. Khalil, B. Jabbar, S. Shirazi
. . .

But he outgrew the prankster and graduated from the academy, and passed the various tests and conversion courses, until he was posing for a picture with the first jet he was going to fly. He wore his g-suit here and was frowning in the sun, preparing himself for the flight, though he couldn’t yet imagine the feeling. The new, unworn helmet was raised to his heart.
To my mother
, it said at the bottom in a swift, looping hand,
with all my love, Sami.

“
Look,” said Daadi, singling it out from among the other pictures on her mantelpiece. “Your father was such a dashing young man.”

My father was a dashing young man in Daadi’s room. But in my mother’s room he was someone else, a scattered man who lived in many things. The few books he had owned were kept separate from my mother’s in the last drawer of her bedside table, which had once belonged to him: they were books on aviation,
The Pilot’s Encyclopedia of Aeronautical Knowledge
and
Episodes from the History of Pakistan Air Force: An Insider’s Account
, and a book called
Poems by Faiz
, in which there was Urdu as well as English writing. The pages of this last book were crisp and deliberately yellowed, and the writing was black and rich. Some of the pages had folded corners.

“He memorized the ones he liked,” said my mother. “And he recited them to me sometimes.”

I told Daadi.

She raised her chin and folded her hands in her lap, and said, “I don’t know about that. All I know is that he was a very serious young man.”

But there were pictures that my mother had and they testified to his whims. One morning he was stark and unshaven and went out to row a boat in a lake, or a river—only a stretch of water was visible behind him—and his hair was dirty and uncombed, his eyes almost shut against the glare. My mother said he looked like that because he had drunk a lot of alcohol at night. “Nonsense,” said Daadi in her room. “Who tells you these things? He never touched it in his life. Others may have, but he didn’t. He always refused it.”

I told my mother.

She said, “It’s wishful thinking.”

“Why does she do it?”

“Because she’s his mother. She’s had to keep him alive. People need things to believe in.”

She was lying in bed and trying to read a book.

I said, “Even if the things aren’t true?”

She lowered the book, thought about it and said, “Well. It’s hard to say what’s true sometimes. One person might have one way of looking at things. And another person might have another way. You can hold your own beliefs as long as they allow other people to live their lives. You can’t tell me that your beliefs are better than mine. I wouldn’t like that. And neither would you, if you put yourself in my position.

But Daadi had said, “The truth is always there, whether you believe it or not.”

So I tried to believe in what remained of my father, and looked at his pictures and read his books:

The shiny g-suit hung in the wardrobe and was ready for wearing.

He stood beside the jet, his helmet raised to his heart. He was going to fly it alone for the first time.

He was trying to move the control column but it was stuck in his hands.

The plane was shuddering.

But the plane went down. And he died all over again.

“Good night,” said my mother. She had finished reading her book; she returned it to the bedside table and reached out a hand to extinguish the lamp.

And the thoughts stayed on in the dark, and changed their shapes and became wishes that were made silently to a dead father, who was always somewhere, even after he had died, even after it was known that he would never respond—he was alive and he was listening.

In the morning my mother shook me awake for school.

“I don’t
want
to!”

“Well, you have to.”

And she forced me to bathe.

“What will they say? That Zaki smells? You want them to say that?”

“I do want that! I do!”

“Be quiet. You’ll wake everyone.”

But Daadi was up already. She awoke at dawn to say the fajr prayer and was reading the newspapers when we went into her room. Naseem brought tea and rusks on a tray and sat herself on the carpet.

My mother said, “This milk is bad.” She was standing above the tray with the small jug of milk in her hand, and was holding her briefcase in the other hand. She took it every morning to the office of the English-language daily for which she worked, and returned with it in the evening; and by then all items for the running of the household had been bought.

Daadi looked up, saw the milk, saw the briefcase, wanted to say something, decided against it and raised her newspaper instead and read out the headlines.