The Wish Maker

by Ali Sethi

  My mother came down the steps and was grabbed by waiting policewomen.

  “My children!” she cried.

  They tugged at her clothes and at her hair, and held her down.

  “Where are my children!”

  “Inside,” said the overseeing policewoman, who was waiting inside the women’s van.

  At the police station we were made to form a queue that led into the office of the SHO, a large man who sat under a framed portrait of the Quaid-e-Azam, the founder of the nation, and spoke from under a short mustache in a steady, unhurried tone: he asked the men for their names and occupations, asked the women for the names and occupations of their husbands, and wrote this information in the carefully partitioned columns of his ledger. Then the registered detainee was led out of the office, which was lit by a single lightbulb hanging tentatively from a long, nibbled wire, and down the corridor into another room, one of two separate rooms for men and women. A door was opened and shut, a bolt clanged, and the SHO went on writing in his ledger.

  The light in the office went off.

  He shouted.

  Feet went down the outside steps, down into the courtyard and then past the gate of the police station, where queries were shouted and more men were sent out to investigate, while upstairs, in the small, hot office, crowded with bodies and breathing, the waiting in the dark became oddly loaded.

  Someone coughed.

  The SHO, invisible in the dark, said nothing.

  A man’s voice was talking.

  The SHO slapped his hand on the desk and the voice was silenced.

  The silence stayed.

  The light returned.

  The SHO picked up his pen and began to write inside his ledger. Above him the lightbulb flickered but went on burning. The ceiling fan groaned and caught, and then sped up, and the room was filled with stirring.

  On the desk was a mug that said I LOVE MY COUNTRY and a family of pens was trying to escape from it, each leaning hopefully over the rim.

  It was my mother’s turn.

  The SHO asked for her husband’s name.

  She gave her editor’s name.

  The SHO smiled and looked up at her face. The corners of his mustache were unaffected by the smile, and his eyes were searching and then disparaging; he tapped his pen on the open page, looked at the women behind her, at the men behind the women, and saw them all at once, the thoughts they had in their heads and the words that were waiting on their tongues, things he knew to be empty and inflated and knew just from the way they stood. His own mind was made up, and he wrote neatly in the ledger: the name, the occupation and the punishment awarded.

  “Next,” he said.

  My mother was led out of the office and down the corridor toward a large, dim room where the registered women were being sent.

  A policewoman stopped us outside.

  My mother said, “Why?”

  The policewoman said the room was for ladies only.

  “He is a child,” said my mother.

  The policewoman looked at me, blinked wearily and looked away.

  We went inside. The room had only wicker cots that were arranged in rows and gave it the appearance of a ward. Two naked lightbulbs hung from wires and burned, and the only window looked out onto a brick wall. The walls were patching.

  My mother sat on a cot with Auntie Nargis, a tall, slim journalist whose son was at school with me.

  “So?” said my mother.

  Auntie Nargis raised both her eyebrows and attempted to sigh. But the sigh became a laugh that died before it was formed. She said, “I don’t know,” and looked around the room persistingly.

  “Sit,” said my mother, and patted a place by her side on the cot. It sent up a puff of dust.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “No, thanks,” said Samar Api.

  Women kept coming into the room, and the cots became filled. The hum was loud and echoed from the walls. The women were now speculating about their prospects: someone was saying that it was best to bribe a sympathetic policewoman and find out if the SHO had made any calls. But another woman advised against it, and said that her husband, a business-man, had been alerted and was going to send someone soon. The suggestions were accumulating but there was no way of knowing whether someone would come or not, or whether they were going to serve food in the cell before morning: a woman made a face and said that she was hungry; another criticized her for saying it; an argument began between the two and quickly spread and grew loud and heated in the small, hollow room. After a while it tired itself out: there was still no news. A woman started humming and was joined by two others, a slow, mournful tune that grew into a song. The others lay on their cots and heard the song, and later sang in the same sad style, securing the mood of resignation. Then another sound started: a man was shouting, was crying out repeatedly from somewhere; his cries came at a steady, unrelenting pace and then faded into yelps. An attempt at identifying the voice quickly failed; it was coming from one of the cells downstairs, which were reserved for ordinary criminals, people who came into the police station for things like murder and theft. The women, enclosed by the walls of the better room, listened to the unknown man’s cries in silence, and were soon unable to speak at all, knowing that for them there was just the wait.

  The door had opened. A policewoman was calling out a name. The surprised woman stood up and was quietly led out of the room. After some minutes she returned: she had come to fetch her bag; her husband had arrived and she was leaving; the SHO was receiving people in his office and they were all going to be released. The speculation started up again; someone lit a cigarette and was made to pass around the packet, and the growing excitement was physical and a song was started to contain it, an anthem of deliverance with fiery, prophesying lyrics. The women sang it together, and at the end clapped their hands loudly and hooted, and the suddenness of their enthusiasm frightened a gecko and caused it to scurry across the ceiling.

  “Samar Api,” I said, and pointed to the retreating lizard.

  “O God,” said Samar Api.

  It was late at night when my mother’s name was called. The room had almost emptied; the two other women were asleep on their cots. We were escorted out of the room by a policewoman and led back into the SHO’s office, where the editor of my mother’s newspaper was filling out a form. The editor wore a suit and a tie but looked tired and defeated; the SHO sat across from him with his feet up on the desk. His hands were behind his head and his eyes were shut.

  “Thank you,” said the editor, and stood up.

  The SHO opened his eyes.

  The editor was holding out the form.

  The SHO received the form and dropped it under his desk.

  “Thank you very much,” said the editor again.

  The SHO closed his eyes.

  We followed the editor out of the office, down the stairs and into the courtyard, which was empty, the shadows yearning in the moonlight. The recessed cells in the corridors were black. A policeman was asleep in a chair with a long, slim rifle propped vertically between his legs. His head was turned to one side and his mouth was open. There was a movement, the dart of a cat behind a bin, and the tin it toppled was tantalizing until it came to rest. The policeman grunted, sat up. There was a pause. And slumber was restored.

  On the gravel path the footsteps scraped and scraped.

  “Where is your car?” said the editor. He had led us outside the police station and was standing beside his car in the darkness, the road empty and receding.

  My mother said it was parked in a service lane nearby.

  “I’ll drive you there,” said the editor, and jangled his keys.

  “We can walk,” said my mother.

  The shadows separated.

  “Don’t come back to work!” the editor shouted.

  My mother kept walking.

  At home Barkat was waiting. He came outside, squinted into the headlights, his face swollen with sleep, then identified the van and o
pened the gate.

  The van went in. My mother parked it and said, “Go to your rooms.”

  Someone was standing in the driveway.

  “Go now,” said my mother.

  We went away but stopped in the veranda to listen.

  Daadi said, “I know where you went.” She was standing on the steps outside her room with a tasbih in her hand, working its beads through her fingers. Her head was covered.

  My mother said, “I don’t have to tell you.”

  “No,” said Daadi, and her voice was calm. “You don’t. I already know. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  From the lawn came the sound of crickets shrieking in the darkness. It rang in the driveway, and bounced off the walls of the house, a rendering in the dark.

  Daadi said, “How dare you?”

  And my mother said, “How dare you talk to me like that?” Her voice was low and quick, her breathing heavy and rushed.

  Daadi said, “I know what you think. You think that you can do what you like. But you can’t. You still live in my house. You live off my money.”

  My mother didn’t speak. The shrieking of crickets went on occupying the silence.

  “I want you to leave,” said Daadi. “I want you to pack your things and get out of my house. There is no room for you here and there never was. I should have known it in the beginning. And I should have sent you back to where you came from.”

  4

  Zakia Hussein had come from Karachi, and grew up there with her younger sister in the white-walled surroundings of the Beach Fantasy Hotel. Her father, Papu, was the general manager of the hotel, and her mother, Mabi, was the hostess at the Chinese restaurant with the revolving doors on the sixth floor.

  Hotels did good business in those days. Karachi was a busy port city, a place for entering the rest of the East, and the passengers of vessels and air-liners were likely to dismount and go into the city center: the streets were broad, the buildings variously styled, the churches and halls, built by British administrators, sharply steepled or domed in the Italian way. There were things to do in the daytime, markets to see and walks to take on the beach; and at night there were dance halls and cabarets where the dancers were Egyptian and Lebanese but also Czech and Russian. It was said then that Karachi was the future of the East, a dream in the making, and needed only more of what it already had to eliminate the margins and have that vision of its successes become its totality.

  Among the leading hotels was the Palace, stout and high-domed, and the Imperial, where the cabaret dancers were known for removing their tops and came by later at the tables. The Metropole was located near the offices of newspapers and was frequented by journalists in the evening. Duke Ellington had performed there with his jazz band, and had discovered, during one of his rehearsals, the astounding skills of a local saxophonist, with whom he then played in a freewheeling jam session that brought the house down.

  Removed from the sights and sounds of that world was the Beach Fantasy Hotel. Drivers heading out from the city center were required to navigate; and on the way the road began to crack and the buildings deteriorated. This was a greater Karachi area of plain, ugly buildings, with black windows that shone in the sun and stayed lightless at night, and where many people appeared not to live in buildings but instead on the streets. There were tents now in sight, and suddenly more people, women talking and walking and children playing barefoot on the pavements and old men who stared at the cars that went past, as if seeing in those rushed visions a reminder of things they had known and lost, or were promised and had yet to receive. The Beach Fantasy Hotel was located a little beyond this world in an area secluded by the high walls of buildings on one side and open on the other side to the sea. At once the breeze, warm and tinged with salt, brought on the memory, formed sometimes without experience, of a languid romance in the tropics; and the hotel, with its low white walls and its rose garden at the front and the line of turbaned bearers standing near the entrance, seemed to welcome and extend this impression past the doors and into the lobby, where a man sat playing old familiar tunes on a piano. The general manager, a small, well-dressed man who spoke a kind of theater English, was there to receive his foreign guests and snapped his fingers at the bearers, who wore their extraordinary costumes everywhere. The manager said that tips were allowed but not encouraged; the staff at the Beach Fantasy were better paid than the staff at other hotels and became spoiled by fluctuating expectations. It was one of those things he said, personal as well as professional, that revealed his reliability to his guests, who came to know him and his wife, Mabi, and their two girls in the course of the visit, and later sent postcards and thank-you notes that were displayed on a small, square table in the reception area for new guests to see when they arrived. Again Papu was standing in the lobby, his hair combed above his small, fine face and gleaming with wet, and his manner was sure and readying, that of a man who seemed to reside permanently in morning.

  But he hardly slept. It was his habit, after he returned from work in the evening, to take his book and go out onto the slender balcony that was attached to their three-bedroom suite. There he sat in a chair and read under a single bright light, and later ate his dinner; and he stayed there in the breeze with the sound of the waves behind him because it soothed his mind. He dreaded the night because that was when most sounds stopped. He went inside, brushed his teeth, changed into his nightclothes and went to lie down next to Mabi on their bed. But he turned from side to side. Mabi didn’t notice it and slept with her arm thrown over her face. She didn’t groan when Papu turned, didn’t open her eyes or ask questions when he got up and went outside. Her sleep was a form of protest, a refusal to share in his miseries, which she said he had brought upon himself.

  In the morning, when his daughters saw him on their way to school, his eyes were swollen as if from excessive crying. But they knew he never cried, and knew that he would go now for his run along the beach, running with his fists drawn up like a boxer’s, after which his face was properly exhausted and needed only a cold shower to become refreshed.

  “Discipline,” said Papu. “It’s all a man has.” He said it without pride.

  Mabi said, “It’s all you’ll ever have.”

  She had told the girls that their father was a refugee, which was a person without a home.

  Zakia said, “We live in a home.”

  But Mabi said that a small suite in a Parsi-owned hotel did not amount to a home. “Forget houses,” she said. “We don’t even live in a country of our own.”

  Zakia appeared to understand but didn’t. At school she learned every day about the country they called their own, the country with the sea and the desert and with the mountains in the north, where the second-highest peak in the world was; the country that contained so many languages and ways of dressing in clothes, where Sindhis wore ajraks and the Baloch wore turbans, where Pathans herded mountain goats and wore hats that looked like pies placed on their heads, and where Punjabis, most memorably, carried pots on their hips and moved swayingly through mustard fields. She was sure this country existed. She just didn’t see herself in it, or her father in his suit, her mother in her cotton sari, or even, for that matter, Sister Andrews, who taught them English at school and wore a cross and a wimple, and the girl called Edna, who was darker than the other girls and lived in the Goan colony, and the sharp-nosed Parsi lady who owned the hotel and wore large, amphibian glasses and came by every Sunday afternoon with her friends and sat beside the pool and played cards. Then there was the other half of the country, the half that lay on the other side of India, the part where people ate rice and where, she knew, there was presently a tension.

  “They want their own country,” Mabi had said after reading the newspaper. “They are asking for it.”

  Papu said, “They won’t get it.”

  Mabi said, “It’s ridiculous.”

  And it was one of those moments when, by belittling the desires of other people, they had happened to agree
with each other.

  Otherwise they themselves were those people, the ones with the desires, the ones who felt belittled and ridiculous. It was almost physical, that feeling, when Papu spoke of the things he had left behind in Kanpur, his home, which was now a part of India. He said he had lived in the best house in the best lane of a mohalla, a neighborhood, with his father and mother and brothers, and had studied at the best university. But his father had died, and his mother had announced that they were going to move to Pakistan. She wanted to send Papu first, and Papu, being the eldest and the only married son, had felt it his duty to abide by her wishes. He left most of his things, his books and medals, his best clothes and shawls, his gold and silver tilla-worked shoes, in his room in a tin trunk. His gold-plated watch he left with his mother, who promised to keep it until he returned. He always thought he would return. It was inconceivable then that he wouldn’t.