The Wish Maker

by Ali Sethi

  Hania Apa sighed.

  “I’ll get it,” said Zakia.

  “No, no,” said Hania Apa, and flapped a lazy hand as if to dispel a fly.

  “It’ll take a minute!” Zakia cried from the kitchen.

  She stood on a stool and slowly twirled the bulb into place. And beneath her the conversation continued: this army, they were saying, it would bring about the end of this country, there was nothing in the papers, just blank slots now and lines of print blackened out by markers.

  “Bataaein na phir!” cried Zakia from the stool, and aimed her importunate look at the poet. “Inqilaab kab aa raha hai?”

  So tell us: when is the revolution coming?

  And the poet looked blankly at the faces around him, held up his glass and shook it contemplatingly, and motioned with an open palm toward the sprightly girl on the stool with the lightbulb in her hand and said, “Bhai inqilaab tau tum lao gi.”

  It is you, my dear, who will bring the revolution.

  He said, “Let’s get married!”

  And it was not how she had wanted him to say it.

  But she said, “I’ll think about it.”

  They went to buy her an outfit. She was going to meet his mother and his sisters at his house, and he said it had to be right. They went to a shop in Liberty Market, and she was made to accept, after some pleading, a pink georgette shalwar kameez with short tassels on the shoulders. The next day they drove in his car to his house and it was strangely momentous. He got out of the car and opened the gate, which dragged noisily, then came back to the car and drove it toward the house. The driveway was cracked. The lawn was unmown and bordered by marigolds. And she saw the lone tree on its edge, with a dark, twisting bark and smooth, shining leaves. “What’s that?” she said.

  “It’s called something,” he said. “Nice little flowers. Sweet-smelling. My mother planted it.”

  They went through the veranda, which showed their blurred reflections walking on its floor.

  The room was choked. The smell was frantic, recent, undecided between rose and varnish—she identified the cylinder of air-freshener on the mantelpiece, next to medicines and framed photographs and a telephone, the accoutrements of middle age.

  The mother rose from her bed and came forward to formalize the introduction: she held Zakia’s face, kissed her forehead and said, “Mashallah.” Then she led them to the sofa and the chairs, and Zakia noted that the dark wood was polished and the silk upholstery was opal.

  Tea came with the maidservant, a woman called Naseem, who settled the tray on the long, slender table and sat herself on the carpet. She looked at Zakia from time to time and grinned and blushed.

  Then the sisters, Suri and Hukmi—she knew them instantly; he had described them so well she wanted to laugh—came in from the adjacent room. They were married and had been waiting. She stood up for them, and they were pleased. Their glances were furtive, glances of confirmation. She could sense their anticipation.

  Sami talked incessantly. She saw that they relied on him. The mother was nodding to the things he was saying and the sisters were proudly withdrawn. He was the man of the house now (his father had died two years before of a heart attack) and Zakia was going to be his wife.

  She returned to Karachi with her impressions, and revived them daily for deliberation, nearing and nearing her decision, which was already made.

  He proposed again.

  “What about the airplanes?” She hadn’t prepared the question.

  “What about them?”

  “You’ll be away.”

  He said he thought she had always known that.

  “But it’s going to be difficult for me.” She wanted more.

  He said he would come home to see her whenever it was possible.

  And it was enough. She said, “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  She told Papu and Mabi. And they didn’t resist. Shazreh had gone by then to live with her husband in Canada, and the general manager’s suite on the fourth floor of the Beach Fantasy Hotel had about it the air of desertion. Papu asked about the boy’s profession. She said he was in the air force. Papu gave a grunt, as though it was both outlandish and predictable. Mabi said she didn’t have the money or the patience to put up another wedding.

  “You don’t have to,” said Zakia.

  But Sami’s mother wanted to do it the old-fashioned way, the proper way: she wanted to take a flight to Karachi and ask for their daughter’s hand in marriage.

  “It matters to her,” said Sami on the telephone, and she heard the indignation behind his pleading. “Please. You must do something.”

  She went into the lounge and made the announcement: the boy and his family were coming, and Papu and Mabi would host them. She didn’t give them time to object.

  The day arrived. She went downstairs to the lobby, alone but dogged in her singleness. She was parenting herself. It was gloomy and enjoyable. Her outfit was her own. Not having to buy a new one, not having anyone to fuss over the details, she was newly content with her appearance.

  She saw them: Sami, his mother, his sisters, the maidservant and another woman too, his aunt, his mother’s younger sister. The greetings were practiced, and the aunt’s warmth was additional. She felt both encompassed and protected. They followed her into the elevator. It was small. And abruptly she was seized by a panic: upstairs, her parents, the waiting awkwardness, the conversation.

  But it happened. The guests were impressed with her parents, impressed to find the lounge and the kitchenette and the balcony above the sea, a life of containments. And Papu and Mabi were enabled to descend: Papu was casual and quizzing, and made Sami nervous, and Mabi in her sari was alive to her own novelty, which the women found fittingly unapproachable.

  The wedding: a marquee on the golf course, the trickle of unknown guests, the gifts, mostly cash in envelopes. Mabi was counting. The bride and groom remained on a sofa on an elevated ramp, and the photographer’s flash was incessant. But she had to smile, facing the future, which was bright.

  She moved to Lahore and into the house. The things in her trousseau came up a few days later in a van. They were given two rooms: Sami’s old bedroom and a sitting room, a part of the veranda that was now enclosed by walls and a panel of windows. Sami’s bedroom was dusted and painted and made marital by the induction of a large, low bed. And the sitting room absorbed the rest of her trousseau: a Chinese screen that folded, a teak cabinet, a china set, another set of six large plates and six small plates and six bowls, a silver tea set (it went into the cabinet) and a set of silver knives and forks and spoons.

  She bought a telephone and placed it on the bedside table.

  She called Nargis, who was now a journalist and was busy with work.

  She called Sami, who said it was inappropriate.

  She called her mother, who was alarmed and suspicious, and said that it was an unnecessary expense.

  “How are you?” said Zakia, meaning it.

  And Mabi said, “We’re fine, we’re fine.”

  They were more responsive when she told them she was pregnant. Mabi took a flight and came to Lahore for the weekend. She brought herbs for nausea, and a book of advice for first-time mothers, authored by two Americans, a gynecologist husband and artist wife who were pictured on the back, grinning and casual and confident of conversions. Mabi herself was metallic in her new surroundings. She slept in the sitting room, and was up at dawn, drawn by habit into the kitchen, which she said was disorganized and potentially harmful. There were too many people in this house, she said, too much noise with the coming and going of relatives. It must be difficult for Zakia, who was raised in peace and quiet.

  It was true that the sounds were constant: Suri’s son, Isa, was three years old, a perpetual presence in the veranda on his tricycle; and Hukmi’s boy, Moosa, had just witnessed his first birthday, a confusion of balloons and people that happened without warning on the lawn and left it plundered. Naseem, the maidservant, was made to clear the mess, and co
mplained in passing to Zakia, who was already aware of intrusion (Nargis had pointed it out) and added to these complaints her own. But they were relayed to Sami’s mother, who took umbrage and complained to Sami.

  He said he didn’t want to get involved.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” said Zakia.

  “It does,” he said.

  So Zakia complained instead to Sami’s aunt, Chhoti, who lived with her husband in Barampur and had sent her only child, a girl, to live with her sister in Lahore. The girl was three years old, and after fighting with her minders she fled always to Zakia’s room, where she settled just as quickly into a new object of interest, the tears drying forgetfully on her face. And Chhoti was appreciative. She sat with Zakia and talked to Zakia, made inquiries about the pregnancy and offered to find a nanny.

  Zakia said there was no need. And that was how she felt: subjected to excessive concern. In the morning Sami’s mother sent a glass of milk and food cooked in ghee. It was sickening. And the illustrations in the book were unhelpful: the section titled “Watch Your Back!” continued to amuse with irrelevant diagnoses of pains and aches she didn’t yet feel. Sami was away, and she was alone, surrounded and bored.

  The food kept coming to her room.

  “I don’t want it,” she said.

  Naseem took it away.

  The next day there was no food.

  Sami said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You shouldn’t have upset my mother like that.”

  “But what did I do?”

  “She sends you things only because she cares for you. You shouldn’t have thrown it in her face like that.”

  She said, “You’ve gone mad.”

  She wasn’t going to apologize.

  That week the money, which came from the rental of a property they owned in Anarkali, was difficult for Zakia to obtain. She was surprised. And then she saw the message in the refusal.

  She called Nargis.

  “So do something,” said Nargis.

  “What can I bloody do? She has the money, and she doesn’t want to give it to me. What can I do?”

  Nargis said, “A job.”

  Zakia said, “Nargis, I’m pregnant.”

  “You’ll get leave.”

  “When?”

  “When you’re about to give birth.”

  “What’ll I do?”

  And Nargis said there were still many things that a young and educated woman could do.

  The meeting with the editor occurred. He sent her to the features desk for a test, which required her to condense a lengthy article about a flower show into three paragraphs. She was new to typing but she managed, using only the forefinger of each hand, and the result was awkward, a stunted piece that began languidly and came to a squatting end. They liked it. Her first assignment was a review. She went to an art gallery with her photographer and interviewed a calligrapher, a distracted old man in a beret who claimed to have solved the dilemma of representation in Islamic art: his Quranic verses were swirled into human silhouettes, each in a pose of theatrical self-discovery—there was the dance of joy, the scream of anguish and cross-legged meditation in the shade of a tree. Her review was restrained and respecting; the title was “Man Made” and appeared in large black letters at the top of the page. Sami was dumbfounded. His mother and sisters were quietly impressed. And Papu called her from Karachi and gave advice about paragraphing.

  The work grew. She was asked to sub the letters and the news pages. The material was exhausting: every morning she searched the incoming articles for mistakes, for excesses and slights against the generals. The newspapers had been warned, and had warned their staff in turn: she had to look out for references to the executed prime minister, to his daughter, who had inherited the party and was leading a muted campaign. She had to kill the adjectives and neutralize the verbs. Critiques of the Islamization program (“Leave It to Allah: God’s Mandate to Ward Off the Threat of Democracy”) were scrapped or converted into reports: “New Legislation on Blasphemy Passed,” “Adultery Made Crime,” “Textbooks to Be Revised in Accordance with Spirit of Islam,” “New Compulsory Subjects to Be Taught in Schools.”

  She was summoned to the editor’s room. She was returning from her lunch break. The office was empty, lulled by the ongoing drone of the printer. A peon was waiting at her desk. She followed him past the abandoned cubicles, starting to dread the summons and expecting an additional assignment for the weekend.

  The editor was on the telephone. He saw her and raised a finger. He was listening to the telephone, and saying only, “Yes, she will, I will see to it personally, rest assured it will not happen again.”

  She took a chair at the desk and waited. She saw that his face was sweating.

  He hung up the phone.

  “That was the governor,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “The governor of this province,” he said, in case she hadn’t heard. Then he flung the Lahore edition across the desk and said, “Page five.” His face was cobwebbed in the fingers of his hands.

  She opened the page.

  And he said, “You let this pass?”

  She had seen it. The Islamabad correspondent had sent it in the previous night, a story on the flow of weapons in the north, remainders from the war that was now being fought in Afghanistan. There was mention of CIA operatives, the Reagan administration and their unnamed liaisons in the Pakistani military. She had checked the spellings as well as the names of locations, and changed the heading from “The Case of the Invisible Soldiers” to a tighter and more enjoyable “Open Arms.”

  “It came in late,” she said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “But I fixed it.”

  “You are warned.”

  She went home and called Nargis. And Nargis converted the anxiety into outrage: Zakia had done the right thing. She was doing more than her job; she was doing a service. They went in Nargis’s car to Hania Apa’s house. And there the article was already a sensation, and Zakia was commended again and again for upholding the spirit of dissent in a time of censorship and for making what they were calling an intervention.

  She had become an interventionist, a journalist who took risks and gave thrills.

  She began to see the ways of intervening. She wrote a perplexed report on the country’s banned sportswomen, expressing surprise at their desire to exhibit their sporting skills. That sustained note of surprise was ironic, an intervention. But it wasn’t noticed. She had to take on a bigger subject. She commissioned a profile of the cleric who appeared on television in the evenings and advocated a ban on women in the workplace. The profile was unquestioning and even reverential, but came with a retrospective on the changing face of the professional woman: the beehived stewardess of the sixties with her short kameez and high heels; the bell-bottomed film star of the seventies; and the respectable and head-covering newsreader of today, who saved her smile and her hairstyle for her family. Home Is Where the Heart Is Indeed.

  “Clever girl,” said the first-class portraitist.

  And her friend with the eyebrows agreed.

  In December she went with Nargis to attend a dinner party at the house of a socialite. It was a large, complicated house, with a long driveway and a small, enclosed garden, and had high pillars outside and old-fashioned windows fitted into the brick walls. It was a new style that aspired to oldness. The socialite was standing behind her door with an empty tray in her hands, a small woman with bright green eyes. “He’s here!” she whispered excitedly, as if announcing a feat.

  He was an intellectual who was visiting from America. He taught there now at a liberal arts college, but had lived for many years in Pakistan, and then in Algeria, where he had opposed the French, and later in America, where he was tried in court and acquitted for allegedly planning to kidnap the man who had caused the Vietnam War. But the man they met now was slim and wore a black turtleneck and had thick white hair, and s
miled and bowed slightly when Zakia was introduced to him.

  She saw that one of his eyes was odd.

  “How do you do?” he said.

  She smiled.

  “And what do you do?”

  “I’m a journalist,” she said, without the old trepidation.

  “Ah!” he cried, and held out his arms, as though it was providential.

  They conversed.

  “I was in the north recently,” he said.

  “Really,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, and explained that he had gone there to research a paper he was writing. He had found the bazaars of Peshawar filled with Lee-Enfield rifles and AK-47s and American M1s that were selling openly at the stalls. The locals were like children with toys. But these were not toys, he said, these were dangerous, unprecedented in their quantities, and nothing was being done to stop their passage into the settled areas.

  “Smuggled,” she said, because she recalled it from the report she had subbed.

  “The agencies,” he said.

  “They are seeing to it.”

  “They are funding it, they are actively funding it, make no mistake.”

  “Proxy war,” she said.

  And he said, “The blowback will be costly. Not just for us but for the whole world.”

  She was nodding.

  He shook his head and sipped his drink, and pressed his lips together until they vanished.

  Zakia said, “And for what are we doing all this? For what? For Uncle Sam?”

  The man stepped back as if to shield himself from her. He was laughing. “There are three A’s for Pakistan,” he said. “Army, Allah, America.”

  “And avaam!” she cried indignantly.

  “And avaam,” he conceded, humbled by her insistence on having it included, “and avaam.”

  Later in the night she was standing next to another man, a retired brigadier who was talking about the military.