The Wish Maker

by Ali Sethi

  “They are very proper people,” he was saying. “People of high caliber.”

  He was drinking whiskey from his glass, and it was dark and undiluted. The men around him were listening.

  “All these rumors,” he was saying, and he enjoyed the word, which made him smile and gave his short black mustache a shrewd lift, “they are all rubbish.”

  Zakia said, “You should look at what’s happening in Peshawar.”

  He heard her but didn’t look at her, and she knew that she had trespassed.

  She said, “Guns and grenades are selling openly.”

  The men were looking at her.

  She said, “Lee-Enfield rifles.”

  “What do you know,” said the brigadier, and looked at her face, “about Lee-Enfield rifles?”

  She said, “I know where they’re selling.”

  There were smirks.

  And she said, “And I know that it is wrong that they are selling like that . . .”

  She wished at that moment that she was holding something. Her hands were unemployed and felt obtrusive.

  The brigadier was looking at her face, his eyes thin and his lips parted; and then he was looking at her neck and at her collarbones, which were bare, and at her blouse, which was made of a shiny white material and was covered in sequins.

  He said, “Madam, I would advise women like yourself to stay at home and observe the proper injunctions.” He said it to her toes, with a courtesy that was owed to her sex and not to her, owed to the kind of woman she could never have been; and then he was smiling and saying to the men: “I am all for Islamization. We are in need of some punishments.”

  Sami came home at the end of the month. And by then she had begun to show.

  She herself didn’t feel it, but Nargis had said it was noticeable.

  “What do you think?” she asked him.

  He was looking at her perplexedly and trying to formulate an opinion.

  She had a vision of him lying on top of her and panting. She no longer wanted to hear his answer.

  “You are,” he said. He was smiling.

  “Dinner is in the kitchen,” she said, and went into the bathroom.

  Later they were in their room again, and the lights were dim. He was lying on his back in the bed and gazing at the ceiling, his arms and legs spread out.

  She was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room and clipping her toenails with a nail cutter. She enjoyed the snap, the way the hard nail was cut and then fell off.

  He began to tell her about the new warplanes they had received from the Americans. “Multi-role fighter jets,” he said, and made the sound and flew his hand around in the air. “Bubble canopies. A sphere of glass. Nothing like it.”

  He was one of them.

  “What the hell are you so happy for!” she shouted.

  He got up from the bed.

  “Don’t fucking shout at me, you bitch!”

  She was going to be made to give birth to his child.

  She threw the nail cutter on the glass table and it cracked.

  He stared at her and then stared at the table. His mouth was clenched, his shoulders heaving up and down with his breathing. But his anger was going, and was soon gone.

  He went into the bathroom.

  “Get out!” she shouted, and her own voice was as deep and clear as a man’s. “Get out of my sight! Get out!”

  Nargis got her the interview.

  “She’s at the office,” Nargis said. “Tell them your name at the gate and they’ll take you to her.”

  She drove the car herself to Garden Town. She passed houses, slowing down to read the numbers written on the plaques outside. They were increasing. She was going in the right direction, and kept going.

  She found the black building with the bougainvillea shower hanging over its gate. It had an unusual exterior for an office, but she saw too that it made no announcements, and how there were advantages to that.

  The security guard at the gate asked for her name, took it inside, came back and told her she couldn’t bring the car in. She had to park it in the lane, and went with him into the building. It was cold inside: she was made to wait on a chair in a corridor. Then the lawyer came out of a door, and she was a short, stout woman in a black coat, wearing wide glasses on her small face. She said she had spoken to Nargis, and explained again about the case, things Zakia already knew, and led her through the air-conditioned corridor into a glasspaneled room.

  “Shabnam?” said the lawyer.

  The woman was sitting in a chair at the desk. Her back was to them. She turned her head slowly. She was wearing a shawl and it covered her head and her face.

  “Shabnam, this is Zakia. She has come here to take your interview.”

  Shabnam didn’t speak.

  The lawyer said, “You must tell her everything, achha? Tell her all the things that happened to you. She is a very good journalist.”

  An interventionist, she thought.

  The lawyer left them.

  Zakia sat in the other chair. She said, “I will write down what you tell me and I will also record it in this.” She held up the small recorder. “I won’t give it to anyone.”

  The woman looked at her, looked at the recorder. She was still holding the shawl over her mouth.

  “What happened?”

  The woman said her sister-in-law had drugged her and handed her over to a man who had kept her for three days.

  “When were you drugged?”

  The woman said, “Thursday.”

  “How were you drugged? Was it an injection?”

  “Injection. Yes.”

  She saw that she shouldn’t have asked it like that.

  “When did you come to your senses?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Zakia waited.

  “On Friday morning.”

  It was being recorded.

  “What happened after that?”

  “He misbehaved with me.”

  “Who did?”

  “Akhlaaq did.”

  “Who is Akhlaaq?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Had you known him?”

  The woman was silent. Her eyes had blurred.

  “Did you know him from before?”

  “I did not know him. He saw me, then she gave me to him. I don’t know what happened.”

  Zakia said, “Where did he keep you?”

  “In a room.”

  “What happened there?”

  The woman sobbed and said, “I don’t know. Do not ask me. Do not ask me.” Her voice had splintered, and she sniffled and dabbed her eyes with the shawl, which briefly exposed her face, the mouth stained purple and the nose with a stud in it. “I won’t go back,” she said, and drew the shawl again over her face.

  “Where?”

  “Don’t send me back to them.”

  “Who?”

  “My people. If I am sent back to them, I will die.”

  “You don’t want to go to your parents?”

  “I will die.”

  “What about the police?”

  “I will not go back.”

  “Have you been to the police?”

  “They will kill me. I will kill myself.”

  “When did you go?”

  “They have taken me everywhere. I have gone everywhere. I can’t go back now.”

  Zakia stopped the recorder, pulled up her chair and said, “Where will you stay? Have you thought about that?”

  And the woman didn’t look at her, and kept her shawl over her mouth, and said, without the tears and without the earlier expression in her voice, that her people were waiting and she couldn’t be made to go back.

  She went to see Nargis afterward. And Nargis was in her room, the same room upstairs, with the air conditioner now fitted into the wall and covered in plastic. It would stay like that until the summer heat returned.

  “So?” said Nargis. She was sitting on her bed with her legs folded beneath her as she alw
ays did.

  Zakia said, “Nothing. She wouldn’t say anything.”

  Nargis said, “Did you ask questions?”

  “I did.”

  “What did she say?”

  “The same thing again and again. She said she didn’t want to go back.”

  Nargis looked at her intently, then looked away and said, “She’s going to have an abortion. That’s what they’re trying to tell her. She’s never been to a clinic. She says she’ll kill herself.”

  “That’s what she said,” said Zakia.

  She thought of the recorder in her handbag.

  “Are you going to write about it?” said Nargis.

  “I don’t think I can.”

  Nargis understood.

  Zakia said, “What do you do?”

  “I don’t know. You do something. I don’t know what.”

  Zakia thought of taking out the recorder and showing it to Nargis.

  “Sometimes,” said Nargis, “I feel like it’s all in my head.” She was looking at the wall and not at Zakia. “I see something, and I think I want to do something about it, and then I can’t do it because nothing has happened and it’s all been in my head.”

  Zakia said, “I know.”

  “Talk of other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “How’s Sami?” said Nargis. She closed her eyes and pinched the skin at her brow.

  “We fought. He’s gone back. He’ll come back next month. How’s Moeen?”

  “The same,” said Nargis. “Selling his father’s carpets.”

  A maidservant came into the room. She was carrying a tray. She settled it on the bedside table, removed the tea cozy from the teapot and went away. Nargis watched her perform the task, watched her go away and said, “Did you see that? She doesn’t see it like that. She thinks it’s just the serving of tea, just something she does three or four times a day. I gave her money, I enrolled her child in a school, I told her to go home and make handicrafts. But she came back to me for more money. And the other servants in this house detest her for taking that money and they detest me for giving it to her.” Nargis had grown excited and was rocking herself on the bed.

  Zakia saw that it was what she did in this room.

  Nargis indicated the tea tray and said, “This is what we should be doing. We should be drinking tea.”

  They were able to laugh at that.

  Then Nargis told her about another case: a blind girl had been raped by two men and had taken her case to a court of law, and was charged there with adultery because she had confessed to sexual intercourse while failing to provide the evidence that was required to prove a charge of rape. “So the men who raped her are free. But she has confessed. So she has to fight another case.”

  Zakia said, “What can you do?”

  And Nargis said, “They want to protest. Some women will go out with banners and things and stand on the street. They won’t show it on TV or anything. But it’ll be out in the street.”

  Zakia said, “Are you going?”

  “I am.”

  “I’ll come.”

  But the pictures from that protest were printed in the newspaper. And Zakia was in the enlarged picture: she stood on the side of the street and held a stick in her hand, which was held on the other end by a policewoman, while another policewoman stood behind Zakia and held her collar and pulled her hair. Zakia’s eyes were shut in the picture, and her mouth was open in a wail or a scream or what may even have passed for a kind of loud laugh. The caption beneath her said: Woman activist struggles with representatives of the state.

  Her sisters-in-law saw it and showed it to her mother-in-law. And she went into Zakia’s room and shouted with her raised hand carving up the air. What kind of family did Zakia think she was from? What kind of mother was she going to make? Had she thought about the child she was carrying in her womb? Had she thought about her husband?

  “What have we done?” cried the mother-in-law. “To earn this shame? What have we done?”

  She heard it for some minutes and then she shouted, “I will do what I want! I will decide! Not you! Not your son! I will decide!”

  When Sami came back the incident was already three weeks old. She was speaking to her mother-in-law again but in a new way, a way in which they understood and accepted and finally refused each other.

  “Why did you do that?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, because she had decided that it was easier that way, easier on her and on those who were attached now to her life. “I should have told you. I will the next time.”

  He said, “What about the name?”

  She said, “Your mother’s already decided. If it’s a girl she wants to call her Samia.”

  They were driving back from Nargis’s house at night. It was late, and the Gulberg roads were empty.

  He said, “What if it’s a boy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I like Imran. I like Imaad. I like names that begin with I. But your mother wants Moazzam.”

  He said, “We’ll name him after you.”

  “What?”

  “Zaki,” he said. “It’s a nice name. Means ‘pure.’ I checked in a book.”

  She took maternity leave because her doctor advised it. She was expected now to go and stay with her parents in Karachi for some months. But she didn’t want to go there until the very end. So she stayed in Lahore and spent her mornings on the phone with Nargis: they discussed her sickness, the signs and the cures, the dilemma of keeping a nanny. A new room was required and had to be attached to the bedroom. An architect was summoned and drew up the plan for an appendage that would occupy the small space at the back of the house. It was a permanent attachment. And she was going to usher it into the world! The cot and the toys they had already bought, and Sami’s mother had begun to preside over the wait with her silent, steady involvement: she paid for their things, paid for the doctor, the architect, the construction of the nursery—it was a strain, she said, but she had saved all along, had tended her property and leased it out and opened a bank account that earned interest. They were things Zakia still had to understand, earning five thousand rupees a month, an amount that paid only for the petrol in her van. The awareness of that dependence compounded the sense of responsibility, increased the panic and the preparation. She stood before the mirror and watched herself for changes. Her body was obviously distorted. But that was temporary, normal. The aspect of estrangement persisted, and fed the feeling of a lag between herself and the woman she was on her way to becoming. She stayed more and more in the house. Sami came to visit and put his ear to her mounding belly and was waiting for a kick, which came at last but left him disconcerted, like a rebuke.

  He bought her a stereo. “For company,” he said. “It’ll keep you cheered up.”

  “I’m not depressed.”

  “Even so.”

  It was bought from an electronics shop on Hall Road, a secondhand Sanyo: the rounded netting of the speakers gave the impression of an insect. It stared all day and night from its place on the floor. Finally she bought an audio tape—Evergreen Hits of Madam Noor Jehan—and the device was roused: first she played it only in the mornings, then in the afternoons and evenings as well. The songs gave rise to a progression, a way of listening that was also a way of being: she played the tragic ones at dusk out of a need for correspondence, and the lively, uplifting ones in the morning to start the day.

  She missed the phone when it rang at first—she was in the bathroom and the stereo was playing—but then she caught the ring, muffled and pressing in the music, and she trundled out of the bathroom with a hand on her back, her belly high and humorous, her bare feet making flat slaps on the floor.

  “Hello?”

  They wanted to know if they were speaking to Mrs. Shirazi.

  It was odd to be addressed in this way, and on the telephone, which made it even more impersonal.

  “Yes,” she said, and had the fleeting vision of a bank.

&nbs
p; The voice wanted to confirm it was speaking to Mrs. Shirazi.

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “I am Mrs. Shirazi.”

  They were calling from the air base. There had been an accident. “What?” she said.

  There had been an accident. The plane had gone down with her husband.

  She listened to the things the man was now saying about the funeral and her forthcoming pension, and she sat down on the bed.

  “Are you sure?” When she said it her hand went to her mouth.

  She left the phone in the room and went out to the veranda. She was walking. It was amazing and wrong that she could. She walked barefoot in the shadows and emerged into the heat of the lawn, where everything was bright. She stepped across the grass, which was dry under her feet, the soil beneath it cool and moist.

  She held the bark of the tree and spat.

  Her spittle hung in a thread. She wasn’t going to vomit, and ran a sleeve across her mouth to dry it.

  Her thoughts were distinct.

  She wasn’t crying.

  She thought of the things she would have to tell her unborn child.

  She was crying.

  But she stopped herself. She had to go inside and tell his mother that he was dead. That was the first thing she had to do, bearing witness for the sake of another person, a thing for which she was unprepared. But she had to leave herself.

  Two months later, in the curtained ward of a Karachi hospital she gave birth to me: I was born into a world of prior absences that became lacks in my childhood. My father was dead from the start and my mother seemed always to be going away, her feet in shoes on the veranda floor and the back of her van as it went out of the gate. There were hours to pass in the day, and days to spend, but always a wait for the promised return of what was mine to me.

  A grandmother fights and a mother demands her rights:

  “You are late,” said Daadi.

  “I was working,” said my mother.

  “I called the office. They said you had left.”

  “I was working.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying to you. I don’t need to lie to you.”

  “Some sense, some consideration. I worried all day . . .”