The Wish Maker

by Ali Sethi

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  TWO

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2009 by Ali Sethi

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned,

  or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sethi, Ali.

  The wish maker / Ali Sethi.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-06128-2

  1. Boys—Fiction. 2. Fatherless families—Fiction. 3. Women—Pakistan—

  Fiction. 4. Pakistan—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9540.9.S46W

  823’.92—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Dadi Apa

  The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

  —GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

  ONE

  1

  The clouds approached from below and went upward and onward until they had left behind the view; it was of the turf, gray turning to green and brown, a mosaic that now grew zones and roads and began to show the specks, expanding into vehicles, that were moving and heading in the pale morning light to destinations of their own.

  Naseem was at the airport. She stood near the railing with her small, stout form pressed ahead into the bars. Her feet were placed solidly apart; she was trying to thwart the pushing crowds, trying to dominate the commotion with the square cardboard sign that was held above her head. It said my name (MISTER ZAKI SHIRAZI) in my mother’s assertive handwriting.

  I waved.

  Naseem saw. She lowered the cardboard and grinned.

  “Salaam, Naseem.”

  She embraced me and tried to take my suitcase.

  “Don’t worry, Naseem—”

  “No, no.”

  “Naseem—”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “No, no.”

  I followed her outside. The air was moist and cold, and the sky was smothered. The new airport had a beige exterior (the old one was white) and was planted with advertisements in the parking lot: we went past a sign for a restaurant chain, then a live screen that was showing an ad for a new brand of toothpaste. The ad was soundless; it ended with a splash of color and started up again.

  “It’s not that cold,” I said.

  “You’re right,” said Naseem. “It’s not.”

  The car was in the last row. A man was waiting inside, a young and relaxed-looking man with his knees drawn up to the steering wheel, his wrists crossed in stylish repose behind his head. He saw us and sprang up; he smiled and nodded vigorously and shook my hand and hurried to take the suitcase from Naseem, who didn’t introduce him and instead monitored his movements with a tolerating look, the assessing, unsmiling stringency of delegated authority. She stood behind him and watched as he lifted the suitcase with a moan and hauled it into the trunk. The impact sent up the smell of new carpeting.

  “Had it serviced,” said Naseem.

  She sat next to the driver and gave him unnecessary directions out of the parking lot. At the tollbooth she gave him ten rupees, which he gave to the warden beyond his window.

  “Receipt,” said Naseem, and secured it notingly.

  The driver rolled up his window and began the drive away from the parking lot, away from the airport and out onto the road. His hands gripped the steering wheel. He was frowning in concentration and licking his lips.

  “New driver,” said Naseem.

  “I see,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  We drove along a curve in the road and the car tilted, and Naseem reached for the strap above her window. Then the road was straight again. A part of it was cordoned off and still being paved; the laborers were absent and had left behind some of their implements as a promise of return. The road led into the bazaar and became cracked and dusty and crowded. Naseem was still holding on to the strap, and switched on the radio with her free hand; it interfered with the noise, the bumping and the shuddering, which lasted for some minutes. After that the bazaar was gone and the road was smooth again: we were in Cantt now, among large residential walls overgrown with bougainvillea and ivy, and among old trees and parks and military compounds that grew behind unproclaiming gates. The road was mostly empty. The driver became emboldened and skipped a traffic light, then another. Naseem didn’t stop him. She was absorbed in the radio: a female voice was lecturing its audience in a soft American accent on the perils and advantages of love. The voice laughed from time to time and Naseem laughed with it, and brazenly, for she was laughing at the audacity and outrageousness of the concept. She slapped her thigh and shook.

  “Radio,” she said with a fond nod toward the thing.

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Radio . . .”

  We drove for some minutes in a radio-expecting silence.

  “So, then,” she said, “how is America?”

  “America is well,” I said, as though formerly it wasn’t. I wanted to say more but the question was vast.

  “Good,” said Naseem. “And how are your studies?”

  “My studies are very well.”

  “Ve
ry good.” She paused, holding on to her strap, her smile one of accepting and continuing goodwill. “You know there is no place like Saudia.”

  She had been recently to perform the Hajj in Saudi Arabia.

  “Really?”

  “No place like it in the world,” she said, and gave her head a slow and solemn shake. “Everything, they have: KFC, McDonald’s, anything at all, you name it and they have it.”

  “Really.”

  “Oh yes. And the house of God—it opens up your eyes. Everyone is there: black, white, this, that, everyone from everywhere. Over here I am a servant, but over there no one is a servant. It has such a feeling of peace that your heart fills up with tears. I kissed the Black Stone with my own lips.”

  “How does it feel?”

  She blinked, trying to recall the experience. It took her a moment. “Like a stone,” she said eventually, with a note of surprise.

  We passed a billboard on the bridge. It was advertising a new deal for mobile phones. The model was a local girl who had her shiny shoulders up in a shrug; one hand held her pelvic bone, the other pressed a phone to her ear. Her head was tilted and her enlarged eyes were startled. “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “Here and there,” said Naseem. “No rest in this time. But weddings will do that. Always, always, it is madness. You will see when you get home. No one is the same.”

  The house was on its way. The paint was fresh and drying quickly on the outside walls; the wrought-iron gate was sharp with varnish; the driveway, once lined with cracks, was smooth now and still shining wetly in places with newly laid asphalt. And the lawn was mown. A dense row of marigolds on its fringes gave it the feel of a real garden, rather than just a plot of grass, while at night it became a rich, golden place, a revealed world of glowing depths and shadows, of dimensions and mysteries created by the positioning of hidden lights.

  “The bride can’t come right now,” said my mother. It was morning, and she was talking on the telephone to the tailor, who was altering the blouse and wanted to have another round of measurements. “This is no way. We have trusted you, and this is what you are doing. We could have gone to many other places, but we came to you. And this is what you are doing. This is no way.”

  Eventually my mother granted a time for the fitting but insisted that the tailor should come to the house with the outfit. The bride was resting and would see him briefly, and then he would go back and stitch up the blouse and deliver it on the promised date. After settling with the tailor, she spoke to the beautician, again on the phone in the veranda, where she was sitting in a white wicker chair and leaning forward and rocking slightly with apprehension: the beautician was a detached Chinese woman who first wouldn’t come to the phone, and who then gave a weak and suspicious-sounding answer, an “Okay” or a “Maybe” that confirmed only the possibility of an appointment. And then there was a quarrel with the caterers, who had not included Diet Coke and Diet 7UP in the revised order: my mother threatened to cancel the order; they insisted it was right; she threatened to expose them in the magazine she owned; and they backed off slowly, coming round to the need for an apology, which she accepted in the end.

  “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she said. She meant organizing the wedding, and organizing it single-handedly, for though the funds and the resources had come in from all quarters of the family, there was a feeling, aired more and more now, that the toil and the drudgery had been left disproportionately to my mother. “I resent it,” she said, and gave a short, curt nod. “I do.”

  Then she sighed and sank back into the chair and covered her eyes with her hands, as if to say that she was overworked and undervalued and thus allowed to say unreasonable things from time to time. And when later in the day the wedding cards arrived in a mound from the printer’s and were found to be satisfactory, she did say, “One does it for the children,” in a way that affirmed her organizing role, her skills and her patience, as well as the vague parental function she was serving, and recast the whole thing in a positive light.

  “Look at this,” she said, and trailed a proud finger along the first line of the invitation card:

  You are cordially invited to the wedding of Samar.

  “What do you think?”

  I said it was nice.

  And it was more than that: it was valid and it was true, the granting of a wish-made send-off to Samar Api, who was my first cousin, once removed, and for whom, after years of separation, I had now come back to do the rites.

  I had returned to Lahore for the first time since leaving for university. And it was of university that I was still thinking. Over there, in Massachusetts, it was winter break now, the end of the autumn term, and that life—of snow and wind, of blocked, frozen streets and the retreat into heated buildings, the snow continuing to descend outside—that life went on as an imagined progression of familiar feelings: taking the shuttle on time to class in the morning, then from class to the dining halls and back in time for class. And at night: the sofa before the fire in the common room, a place that became noisy and rushed on the weekend with music and dancing and a crowded slippery bar area, and then the culminating solace of a bedroom. That was my memory of it, newly formed. And with it I was filling up the present, knowing too that the halls were locked, the fire dead, the campus emptied and shut down.

  That was there, and I was here now, at home.

  But home too was changed. The airport was new, and the roads were new; the billboards and buildings on the way from the airport, many had come up in these last two years alone and pointed again and again to the ongoing nature of things. There was an added estrangement from the known: the drive home was too short, the bridge too small, the trees not high enough on the canal, while in the house there was an odd shrunken aspect to things that made them less than what they once had been: the bed in my room was just a bed, narrow and hard, and the pillow was incongruously large, the room itself just a room with patching walls that would curl with moisture in the summer. The veranda was no longer an avenue, and all day the kitchen had a smell.

  “What smell?” said my mother.

  The smell of frying oil and onions and ginger and garlic.

  “Drink lots of water,” said my mother.

  It had a taste.

  “There is no taste in water.”

  “There is.”

  “Then get your own. Go to the market and get your own. Put your own things in the fridge. Make your own food.”

  I got my things from the market and took them to the fridge. And it was full: the raw vegetables were in the bottom compartment, the saalan dishes and the chutneys and condiments on the upper shelves, the preferences of different people stacked precariously and collectively for now to make room for the bride’s requirements, which were on the final shelf: a small jug of freshly squeezed orange juice and a few cans of Slim-Fast, and some empty space for other things.

  “Grilled things,” said my mother. “Dieting things. But sometimes she wants sweet things. You never know.”

  My mother was staying indoors. The books and magazines and newspapers in her room, once stacked on the floor and left to accumulate, had been organized and placed on shelves on the walls. There were lamps on all the tables now and no overhead lights: she had read about the adverse effects of bare lightbulbs, and said that she had always felt it as an influence on her temperament but had never had the sense to sit down and identify the problem. She believed in identification: she spent the last few hours of every night researching health-related topics on the Internet. And in the morning she was slow to rise and shift to the sitting area, where she lay again on the sofa and read newspapers, not one by one in quick succession, the way she had before rushing to work, but slowly, and with genuine involvement, lingering over things that had once been irrelevant. Over the course of the morning she drank down the tea in the teapot and sent it many times to be reheated. And she kept the TV alive. She watched it for the news but also for the cooking shows, the talk shows, for
Indian shows in which young people stood on stages and sang old film songs with live orchestras behind them, and were then judged by panelists. My mother had favorites whose progress she followed until the end: she noted their singing skills but also their expressions, their dressing habits, their postures and physiques. She knew about physical fitness and sat through the late-morning exercise shows with the fast-paced music in the background. Sometimes she tried to repeat the moves, and the curtains were drawn. Then she showered and went to the office in her new car with the new driver, and Naseem came in to clean the room and afterward sat on the sofa and watched the TV channels. In the evening my mother returned with Zarmina and Rubab, two new girls who were working with her on the magazine, which had expanded, and required a division between the management of content and revenue: Zarmina commissioned the pieces and subbed the English and sent the files on a CD to the Urdu department, which translated everything for the Urdu version of the magazine; and Rubab sat in a rotating chair at a desk and spoke on the phone to advertisers, making statements about sales and target audience and about the quality of the product, which was made with the “bouquet” approach and offered a wide range of things to read and things to look at. The last issue of Women’s Journal had reports on rape and domestic violence, and an interview with the victim of an acid attack who was now seeking treatment in Europe; a long piece on literacy among the women of Pakistan, with pictures of peasant women squatting outside schools in the Sindh Desert, their arms stacked with bangles, and with accompanying pie charts in desert colors that gave percentages and years and the comparative costs of primary education in the four provinces; and a four-page spread on the global community of Muslim women who had in their own ways resisted the recent American invasion of Iraq, a piece written in an admiring and accessible tone by a Pakistani student at the University of Birmingham, UK. The last quarter of the magazine was devoted to Society, to photos of people at tea parties and dinner parties, weddings and milaads, the pictures brightened on a computer and accompanied by the names of the subjects, many of whom called in afterward to thank the Women’s Journal team and to give information about upcoming events, the corporate balls and fashion shows that had begun to occur frantically among the people who, in one of the earlier articles in the “Issues” section, had been described as “the new crop of disconnected elites that has come up in Karachi and Lahore.”