The Wish Maker

by Ali Sethi

  “Stop it,” said my mother. She had entered the room and was holding a sheaf of envelopes. “You’ll ruin the outfit.” She dropped the envelopes into Samar Api’s lap and began to count on her fingers: “Five thousand from Mrs. Khokhar, ten from Mrs. Zaidi and a crystal decanter from the Shahs. That’s fifteen plus a gift. Write it down.”

  “My blouse is too tight,” said Samar Api.

  “O God,” said my mother.

  “And the foundation is coming off.”

  “I knew this would happen.”

  “I can’t go outside like this.”

  “Typical.”

  “I can’t.”

  My mother was still. She shot me a wounded look and marched out of the room. I watched her from the window as she returned to the lawn, pulling her mouth into a smile for the guests.

  “Did you bring it?”

  “Here,” I said, and produced a flask from my pocket.

  Samar Api held it, looked at it, then threw back her head and drank from it. The taste was stronger than she expected; she made a gagging, fishlike face and fumbled under the bed for her cigarettes.

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me that.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Don’t.” She paused to light a Marlboro, squinting against the smoke. She drank from the flask again, prepared for the taste, her eyes closed in advance. “Do you think she’s angry?”

  “Come on,” I said, and took the flask from her hand. “You know what she’s like.”

  “I know but still—”

  “No—”

  “No, I know . . .”

  We were quiet. The room became vacant and was taken up by the sounds from outside.

  “Is he here yet?” she asked.

  “Any minute,” I said, watching the window. “Any minute now.”

  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 Indian Army had responded vigorously to Pakistani infiltration of irregular forces into Kashmir. With a double pincer on Badori Bulge, the Indians had captured the strategic Haji Pir Pass. Core areas in Azad Kashmir, including the towns of Muzaffarabad and Mirpur, lay threatened. The only way out of this critical situation was to launch a diversionary maneuver.

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

  Operation “Grand Slam” was thus launched in the early hours of 1 September 1965. Audacious as the plan was, it took the Indians by complete surprise.

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

  A Pak Army force consisting of an infantry division and two armored regiments, along with extensive artillery support, started the attack on Indian positions.

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

  Outnumbered and outgunned, Brig. Man Mohan Singh, Commander 191 Infantry Brigade, was faced with a critical situation.

  The plane was shuddering.

  And he frantically called for air support.

  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.

  My mother stood above the tray and appeared to hear the headlines, while Naseem responded to the English with expressions of growing alarm, although it was not a language she spoke or even understood. Afterward she went into the next room and woke Samar Api, whose school day started an hour after mine.

  My school was dull. It had twenty classrooms and a canteen, a play area with a small sandpit for the kindergarten, and a barren sports field for the older classes. Every big wall carried a picture of Allama Iqbal, the national poet, who always wore a shawl and struck the same pensive pose in profile, and a plaque that bore the school motto, which was Cogito, ergo sum. It was never translated for our benefit but was always among the questions we were made to answer when a special visitor came to the school.

  “What is the motto of our school?”

  “The motto of our school is cogitoergosum.”

  “What is an object?”

  “An object is a nonliving thing.”

  “What is an organism?”

  “An organism is a living thing.”

  “What is a valley?”

  “A valley is a low land between two mountains.”

  In the first year we were made to read an essay on Aziz Bhatti Shaheed. It was the first essay in a book called English for Class One Students, authored by one Brigadier (Retd.) Arif Ahsan. The cover showed a group of children playing under a banyan tree. The banyan tree was large and spreading; the children were fair-skinned and wore shalwar kameezes and not the uniforms that we had to wear, and were smiling and laughing and running around in the shade of the tree as if in a state of unsurpassable satisfaction. The first page of the book was blank but for a dedication. Brigadier (Retd.) Arif Ahsan had written: This book is dedicated to the memory of my late father, Syed Ahsanullah, who instilled in me the very love of English that has culminated in the publication of this book.

  It should have been “the very lovely love of English” or “the very nice love of English,” and not “the very love of English.” Brigadier (Retd.) Arif Ahsan had left out an adjective on the first page of a book called English for Class One Students.

  But there was going to be a test on the essay. It said:

  Aziz Bhatti Shaheed was a major in the Pakistan Army. In the 1965 war against India he gave the supreme sacrifice of his life when an AP shell from the enemy tank struck him on the shoulder, killing him instantaneously.

  I underlined “instantaneously.” It was a long word, and was made up of small parts that were easier to say alone.

  “Miss!” someone shouted. “Zaki Shirazi’s father was in the air force!”

  “Yes, Miss!” cried someone else. “Miss, he died in a plane crash, Miss!”

  Now Miss, who was long and sharp and sheathed today in pink, looked up from the book on her desk and said, “Zaki Shirazi, stand up.”

  The legs of the chair made a scraping sound.

  “Which war did your father die in?”

  “No war, Miss. Accident.”

  “Oh,” said Miss, disappointed. “Zaki Shirazi, sit down.”

  And I sat down and began to murmur the words in a desperate chant:

  Killing him instantaneously. Killing him instantaneously. Killing him instantaneously . . .

  At two o’clock the bell rang, sounding release, and the corridors became filled with commotion. The parents of children and their drivers were standing beyond the gate; there had been kidnappings at other schools and demands for ransom, and in response the school administration had decided to restrict the flow of movement: the children and their claimants were separated by the thick iron bars of the gate, and the waves and shouts of identification were verified by an old white-haired man who sat on a stool inside and kept his hand on the bolt. He heard a shout, pointed to the shouter, pointed to the child, considered their connection, then unbolted the gate and held it open and shut it again. I went with Naseem past the ice-lolly man, past the man roasting channa in a pit of sand on a cart, and then along the row of parked cars and motorcycles. Daadi sat in the back of her Suzuki with her window down for ventilation, a handkerchief pressed to her nose and mouth for protection against the fumes, and Samar Api sat beside her in the checkered school uniform, which was creased and dusty now, and stained permanently at the hem and near the sleeves with small spots of ink.<
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  “Samar Api, give the masala, please.”

  She was eating a chhalli and had kept the packet of masala with the lime and the other chhallis in her lap.

  “Say please.”

  “I already said it.”

  “So say it again.”

  “Please.”

  “Say thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Say ‘Samar Api, you’re my favorite cousin.’ ”

  “Samar Api, you’re my favorite cousin.”

  She hesitated.

  “Samar Api.”

  “Wait!” She dipped a halved lime into the dusty red powder, stroked it lengthwise along her corn cob, licked the lime, shut her eyes and smacked her lips, and stroked it again along the corn.

  “Daadi!”

  Daadi saw.

  “So he should take it himself,” said Samar Api, and lifted the things from her lap and thrust them aside, and then looked away, implying with her manner that it had all been a game or a joke and had earned a disproportionate response.

  “Sorry,” I said, eating.

  But she wasn’t in the mood.

  We went onto the canal, where the traffic had collected in bundles. The small spaces that opened up continually on the dusty side-track were negotiable but required daring. Our driver then was called Barkat, a shy old man who kept his skull in a damp coil of cotton in the heat as well as in the cold. He disliked confrontations and allowed other vehicles to get out of the way.

  “He is careful,” said Daadi.

  But his caution created a feeling of restlessness in Naseem, who knew the traffic laws and admired the audacity of those who broke them.

  “You are not driving a donkey cart,” she said.

  The light ahead was green, and a space had opened up behind a decorated wagon.

  Barkat was driving and said nothing.

  “Go,” said Naseem.

  Barkat said nothing.

  “Go on,” said Naseem, and made pushing movements with her palms.