The Wish Maker

by Ali Sethi

  The first honk came from afar. It was a black Toyota Corolla that displayed a large, bolt-shaped dent on its bonnet and was known to belong to a lawyer friend of my mother’s.

  Barkat went to stand by the gate.

  The lawyer labored with her window, which was jammed and lowered haltingly, and asked to know if my mother was home.

  Barkat said she was home.

  And had the others arrived?

  There were no others.

  The lawyer was surprised and disappointed.

  Barkat opened the gate and the car went in.

  Soon there were two more cars, a broadish Lancer in the old model and an Alto behind it, and again questions were asked and answered and the gate was opened and the cars went in. Barkat returned to the bench to revive the game. “The ladies are coming,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Rifakat the gardener with a wobbling movement of the head. “They are ladies. These are ladies. Hah!”

  A short silence was allowed to pass.

  Barkat sighed and caressed my head, and said that it wasn’t fair to the child, and Rifakat the gardener looked away and said of course it wasn’t, and then Pheeru the sweeper put up a palm and embarked on the sayings of the Prophet regarding mothers and their virtues, and with the other hand he took the hookah even though it wasn’t his turn.

  And now another sound came, and it was another car carrying ladies who weren’t ladies, and Barkat got up to open the gate and indicated with a nod that the game was finished. The men began to gather their things: the cards were stacked and secured with a rubber band, then packed into a cracked plastic case, and the hookah was tilted and emptied. A crow came and settled hopefully on the bench, and was paid no attention, and hopped about, and finally fled as the zuhr azaan sounded from beyond the trees.

  The veranda was in turmoil. Women were standing about and talking rapidly at one another with emphasizing hand gestures and expressions, as if involved in a veranda-wide dispute. But it wasn’t a dispute, only the heat of fervid agreement; the lawyer, a short woman with shorn white hair, wearing a lawyer’s black coat over a white shalwar kameez, was standing in a circle of listeners with her forefinger raised pointedly and was saying that the date for the election had been set for October but was likely to be postponed. “You will see,” she was saying, “they will cancel at the last minute. They will do it. The misdeeds they have cited are criminal, not civil.”

  There were nods and murmurs.

  “Mala fide,” said one woman who had been listening attentively and was holding her chin in her hand. “Prima facie mala fide.”

  Another woman furrowed her brow and looked around sarcastically and said, “Which of us is surprised?”

  “I just can’t believe it,” said the woman with her chin in her hand, and directed her gaze at Naseem, who had come in to empty the ashtrays.

  “Just imagine,” said the woman.

  Naseem looked at the woman’s face, looked at her feet, then sighed and began to lift the ashtrays from the tables and stack them one atop the other on her palm.

  “I just can’t,” said the woman. “I can’t do it.”

  Naseem went away with the ashtrays.

  “Zaki,” said my mother, “you’re coming with us.”

  I said, “Where?”

  “To the streets,” said the lawyer powerfully, and this was met with a fresh round of murmurs. “We are taking to the streets because it is the only language they’ll understand.”

  I went to Samar Api’s room. She was lying in bed on her stomach and reading a magazine.

  “We’re going to the streets.”

  She looked fatigued. “Who all?”

  “Everyone.”

  She closed the magazine, sighed, pushed herself off the bed and stood up. “Wait for me,” she said, and went into the dressing room. “I have to find my shoes.”

  Outside, in the driveway, car engines were starting and car doors were slamming shut. We were going in my mother’s van: one of the women had lent us her driver, who would be useful in finding parking on Mall Road, which was going to be a challenge in the crowds we were expecting.

  “What’s happened?” I said.

  My mother said Benazir had been dismissed.

  “Illegally,” added the lawyer, who was sitting with us in the large hollow box that made up the back of the van. “We do not accept this constitution.”

  “Why was she dismissed?” I asked.

  A voice said, “Because she is a woman.”

  Another said, “That is not the only reason. She has also made mistakes.”

  The lawyer looked around and smiled peacefully and said, “You can’t look at it like that. You can’t reduce it to a few mistakes. There is a larger issue here.” And she tried to show its contours with her hands.

  The rebuffed woman persisted with her point: “I’m just saying she shouldn’t have made so many mistakes. It is not a sin to say that. We don’t have to defend her to the hilt . . .”

  “Tell me,” said the lawyer. “Are you perfect?”

  The woman blinked and opened her mouth and released a pant of disbelief.

  But the lawyer said, “Who is perfect? Who hasn’t made mistakes here? And what are these people, the ones who have just dismissed an elected government?”

  “Chauvinists,” said Samar Api.

  “Even children know this,” said the lawyer, and looked around concludingly, then leaned back in her seat and gazed at Samar Api with admiration and gratitude.

  The van went along the canal, and the drooping willows on its banks went by in the window. The world outside consisted of the streets, blue and gray in the afternoon. Inside the van it was hot and damp. My mother looked at the window and said, “The streets are not empty. People will come.” And she nodded at the faces inside the van.

  My mother was a supporter of Benazir and had gone out to vote for her in the last election.

  “There is no need,” Daadi had said.

  But my mother had gone to the voting booths on the FC College grounds, and had stayed up that night before the TV with a pen and a notepad. In the morning it was announced that Benazir had won, and my mother had called up her friends to share the news and had then gone to the back of the house to wake Naseem.

  “Vekho ji,” said Naseem, and shook her head expressively, “dhee da kamal.”

  It was a popular version of the story, a version in which a young daughter returned from afar to avenge the murder of her father. My mother said Naseem had those views because she was a member of the avaam, the largest group of people in the country. The avaam was made up of those who didn’t have schools to attend, or hospitals to visit when they fell ill, or food to eat at mealtimes, and had lacked the ability to express their wishes until Benazir’s father had gone around the country and raised his famous slogan of “Food, Clothing and Shelter.” He told the avaam that they were oppressed by a small group of factory owners and landlords, a group whose members were contained within twenty-two families alone. Benazir’s father condemned those families and pledged to restore their wealth to the avaam; his government, when it came, seized schools and hospitals, banks and factories, and snatched the land of prosperous farmers and gave it away to peasants. But that era came to an end when the generals of the army declared martial law, arrested Benazir’s father, threw him into jail and hanged him. That was when, according to my mother, Benazir first stood up and said that she was going to fight on behalf of the avaam; and for saying it she was kept in jails and sent out of the country and apprehended when she returned. She continued to fight: she fought from jails in the desert, from marches that she led on the streets, standing on the roof of a slow-moving truck and waving at the crowds who came out to cheer for her and dance for her; and sometimes she fought from the confines of her house in Karachi, which was surrounded by policemen and where she was kept for long periods without visitors. Then news came one day of a plane crash in which the generals died, and the army announced that it was retur
ning to its headquarters. Martial law came to an end; a fresh election was announced and held, and Benazir won it.

  My mother said it was historic.

  And Naseem said, “Vekho ji, dhee da kamal.”

  But Daadi said it was just another story, a story that had been made up to fool people like Naseem and to make people like my mother feel good about themselves. She said Benazir’s father hadn’t won that first election, much to his surprise, that it was another politician from another part of the country, which had then conspired with India and seceded. And she said that Benazir’s father had done some terrible things to his opponents in his time, things only caesars and pharaohs had done to their enemies to set examples. He was like a king who has lost his mind, she said, a king who takes what he likes and spares what he likes.

  “Dacoits,” said Suri, whose in-laws had suffered in the nationalization scheme.

  “The whole family,” said Hukmi, whose in-laws weren’t rich enough to have suffered in that scheme.

  My mother said Daadi was an old-fashioned conservative whose negative thinking was untouched by the thoughts of other people. “You should ask the poor,” said my mother, “who don’t have concrete homes, who don’t have cars to take them every morning to the market. Ask them for their views and see what you get.”

  Barkat said, “The poor man is poor and the rich man is rich. That is all there is.”

  And at school there were other views. One day a boy in my class called Atif Ali Khan went up to the blackboard and drew a long, flat stick, attached a pair of circles to it, drew crisscrossing lines inside the circles, then made a handlebar at one end of the stick and a triangular seat at the other end. It was a bicycle, the symbol of the opposition party. The boy sitting on the triangular seat was shedding large, curvaceous tears.

  Atif Ali Khan pointed to the boy he had drawn and cried, “Zaki Shirazi!”

  And the class roared.

  “You tell him,” said my mother, “tell him that your arrow will puncture the tires of his cycle.”

  The arrow was the symbol of Benazir.

  Atif Ali Khan screwed up one eye and said that a cycle could easily trample an arrow.

  I drew the arrow on the blackboard and wrote his name under it.

  He told the teacher, who struck my hand with a ruler and sent me to stand outside the classroom. And at lunch break he found me near the bushes behind the canteen and punched me in the stomach and on the face, and said that I couldn’t do anything except draw arrows because my father was dead.

  “You can’t let it get to you,” said my mother. “You can’t. Look at Benazir. She was so young when her father died. But she learned. You have to learn. It isn’t easy for anyone.”

  Now she led the van contingent in a well-formed line along the service lane. We walked past the vehicles on the main road, which were waiting for the signal to change; past cars and motorcycles and rickshas, whirring and trembling in the enforced stillness, the passengers in the buses looking portentously out of the high windows, their faces gleaming with sweat; and then past shops on the other side of the street, shops for toys and electronics and shops for sporting goods with stalls set up outside, the merchandise hanging from strings and swirling and unswirling in an endless mime of bereavement. The men in the shops followed our movements with their eyes, and the old men sitting under trees on the footpath with colorful powders and bottles spread out on sheets before them turned their heads and stared.

  We kept walking.

  “It’s over here,” said my mother, and led us toward a small gathering of people who were holding flags and posters of Benazir. They were standing on the footpath and facing the road, the men and women in shalwar kameezes and the children in jeans and trousers and brightly colored shirts and T-shirts, some wearing perforated rubber sandals that displayed the caked dust on their feet. They were receiving instructions in Punjabi from a large, loose-limbed woman whose swinging gestures repeatedly caused the dupatta to fall off her head.

  “The jiyalas are here,” said the lawyer, and nodded comically.

  There were smiles and glances of recognition in our contingent.

  My mother said, “You can’t compete with the jiyalas.”

  “Oh no,” said the lawyer, and put up a palm of unventuring good sense.

  “Not with them. Bhai, they are diehards. What they have seen and suffered you and I can’t even begin to imagine.”

  This led to sighs of astonishment. Someone lit a cigarette and was requested to pass around the lighter. Bags and briefcases were opening now, and scrolls and banners were emerging. The writing on the cloth was in English and Urdu, the letters painted in black and shaded with red and green dimensions. The woman who was instructing the jiyalas came by and spoke to the lawyer. “Is this any way?” she was saying. “Do they think they can end it all just like that? Who will let them? Will we let them?” Her knuckles were pressed into the flesh on her hips and her tone was loudly belligerent.

  More people were arriving. They were dressed like us and spoke in a mixture of Urdu and English, the men commending the women for coming and the women pointing repeatedly across the footpath to the jiyalas, who were still waving their flags and posters at the traffic on the main road.

  “This way!” cried the jiyalan. The crowd followed her across the footpath. She began to march and waved at a small, smiling boy, who stopped smiling at once, contorted his features, plunged a fist into the air and shouted, “Ya Allah! Ya Rasul!”

  And the jiyalan pressed her palms into her ears and cried, “Benazir Beqasur!”

  Ya Allah! Ya Rasul!

  Benazir Beqasur!

  O God! O Prophet!

  Benazir is innocent!

  The jiyalas waved their flags and shouted. And their followers shouted behind them: “Pakistan ki Zanjeer! Benazir Benazir!”

  The chain that binds Pakistan!

  Is Benazir Benazir!

  On the main road the traffic continued. The lights of cars and shops had come alive in the gloom, and the street lamps flickered and then came on all at once. The roads, just blue, were revealed in electric colors, in black, yellow, red and white. The shopkeepers came out and stood on their steps to see.

  Girti Hui Deewaron Ko

  Ek Dhakka Aur Do!

  To these falling walls

  Give one final push!

  Policemen and policewomen were now moving silently ahead of the procession, escorting it past the shops, then across the street to where the cinema billboard was, and down to the steps of the Provincial Assembly building. There the procession came to a halt: the jiyalas stood on the steps of the building and shouted some more slogans, and the jiyalan went down to the last step and gave a violent ultimatum to the president, who wasn’t there and couldn’t respond, and then named and thanked various other people who had worked for the Benazir government and had extended their support in different ways to the jiyalan and her neighbors, who were here today to represent the residents of Bhaati Gate. The jiyalan made these announcements and was joined on the last step by the jiyalas, who had folded their flags and were ready to leave and now departed, leaving their inspired followers, the men in suits and ties and the women with the Urdu and English banners, to stand on the broad steps of the building with their statements stretched visibly in the borrowed glow of the night.

  A man went down the steps, turned around, stood facing the men and women who remained and waved his hands and arms in a downward direction.

  The bodies sank. The voices settled into a hum and then into silence.

  The man raised a loudspeaker to his mouth and said, “Brothers and sisters . . .”

  The loudspeaker shrieked. He held it away and looked inquiringly into its wide, circular mouth. He was a tall, thin man with hunched shoulders, a man who wore his forty-odd years like a dying youth.

  “My friends,” he said.

  The loudspeaker didn’t shriek.

  “First of all I would like to thank you.

  �
�For coming here tonight.

  “And for showing your support.”

  His voice was low and dim.

  “For a leader we have elected.

  “And a leader we will not see.

  “Dismissed.

  “By this puppet president.

  “And this interfering army.”

  There was applause from the seated audience. The police were standing near the doors of the building and gave no sign of stimulation.

  The man was strengthened and said, “We have come here to say that we will not be intimidated,” and at once the applause returned.

  From the road a passing car beeped encouragement.

  The speaker smiled at the car and raised his loudspeaker like a mug of beer and said, “Thank you, thank you!”

  A boy stuck his head out of the front window and cried, “Long life to you, my friend!”

  The speaker nodded and said, “Thank you.”

  “Long life!”

  “And to you!”

  “One two ka four!”

  The speaker was amused.

  “Four two ka one!”

  The speaker was nodding.

  “O Mister Gentle Man!”

  “That’s enough,” said the speaker.

  “O egghead!”

  “That’s enough!”

  “Your mama loves it!”

  “You have no shame?”

  “Khotay da lun!”

  The speaker was enraged. But the car, having roused his rage, had gone. And he was left with the loudspeaker still in his hand, the audience waiting for him to resume, the night vast and indifferent and surrounding.

  He raised the loudspeaker to his mouth and began to speak with delayed passion: he spoke of the week’s various connected occurrences and exposed them as part of an old conspiracy; and from there he went into the past, to the birth of the nation and beyond into the War of Independence. The seated audience was listening. The policemen and policewomen were standing on the steps and listening. But the speaker was sinking further and further into the past, and its depths were growing, and he had now lost control of the sequence and was repeating his words. A murmur caught and grew among the listeners. A few policemen came down the steps and stood with their batons. But the speaker was still speaking, and was trying now to revive the slogans, whose vitality gave no sign of returning. A policeman went up to him and touched him on the shoulder. But the speaker was trapped in his passion and spat at the recoiling policeman, who touched the spittle on his cheek, smelled it, rubbed it on his thigh, then swung his baton and struck the speaker’s back, his arms, his hands, and struck them until the loudspeaker had dropped and the people in the audience were running up and down the steps. There were screams. Two police vans had pulled up to the building and were opening.