The Wish Maker

by Ali Sethi

  “Good,” said Astrid, and landed the tray on the table. It displayed a long kind of bread, settled diagonally, and two different paste-like concoctions, one in beige and the other in a pale pink, inside large white bowls.

  “Baguette!” cried my mother, and broke the hard bread. She returned one half to the tray and broke the other half into three small pieces, dipped one piece into the beige paste, tore it off with her teeth and chewed. “And hummus!”

  “It’s nothing,” said Astrid with a wave of the hand. “There is leek soup after this; would you like me to bring it out or will you wait for the others?”

  “Oh, we’ll wait,” said my mother, chewing and nodding, “we’ll wait.”

  Astrid went into the kitchen.

  “Did you make this?” said my mother. She was looking at the drawing of the grapes. “Zaki, this is wonderful. You really can draw. You should draw more pictures. You really should. I should get you coloring books.” There were too many thoughts at once, and they opened up the chasm of parental knowledge, of how much she didn’t know and should have but didn’t.

  Astrid returned with the china and cutlery. She placed a plate before every chair and a bowl in every plate. “I wonder,” she said, arranging the knives. “I wonder where they are.”

  “Who?” said my mother.

  “The Americans. I told them to come down at six.”

  “We can wait.”

  “Ah, but they are here!” said Astrid, and stepped aside like a presenter on a stage.

  And there they were, the American couple: the husband wore jeans and a polo shirt, the shirt tight around the chest, which was like a wrestler’s, part flesh and part rock; and the wife wore a frilly shirt and a wide ballooning skirt. Both were blond-haired and fair-skinned, the wife slightly red around the face and neck.

  They looked at us and smiled.

  “Richard,” said the man, and held out a hand.

  “Louise,” said the wife. She almost curtsied.

  My mother shook their hands and smiled and nodded. “Pleasure, pleasure.”

  “Okay,” said Astrid, and raised her fingertips like an orchestra conductor about to start, “three soups coming up. We have leek today, is that okay for you?”

  The Americans were amenable.

  “And Zaki? Will you take soup as well?”

  “He will,” said my mother.

  “I will,” I said.

  “Good,” said Astrid doggedly, and went away.

  “First time here?” said Richard. He spoke with a squint, the corner of his mouth curled upward. He reached out a hand for the bread that remained.

  “Yes,” said my mother, “yes.”

  “Ours too,” said Louise, and smiled weakly.

  “And what do you do?” said my mother.

  She had asked Louise.

  “Oh, me!” said Louise. “Oh, I’m a teacher.” She giggled guiltily, finding it impulsive and irrelevant.

  “But that’s wonderful, Louise!” said my mother.

  Louise flapped her hand.

  “It really is! I think education is the way forward. It’s the solution to every country’s problems.”

  Louise liked the idea, though she hadn’t thought of it that way, coming from a country that didn’t have as many problems.

  “And you, Richard? What is it that you do?”

  Richard said he worked at a bank in Chicago.

  “Windy City,” said my mother with a melancholy smile.

  “That’s right,” said Richard with an owning smile. “You been?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Oh,” said Louise, and looked into her lap, as though what she’d had in mind to say no longer mattered.

  “You live in Chicago?” said my mother.

  “We do,” said Richard. “Yes.”

  “I’m from Nashville, originally,” said Louise in a breathy and sensuous drawl. “I came to Chicago to teach, a lot of underprivileged kids over there, like you said”—and she gestured graciously at the source of this suggestion—“in Chicago, you know, it’s not like Nashville.” She laughed wildly. “It’s very”—she caressed the forthcoming word with her fingers—“multicultural. Not like Nashville. Back then I used to work with Teach For America? I don’t know if you know . . .”

  “I don’t,” said my mother. “No.”

  “Oh,” said Louise. “Well.”

  They ate the last of the bread.

  “And you?” said Louise. “Where are you from?”

  “Pakistan!” cried Astrid, who had appeared with a wide and steaming bowl of the leek soup; she hurried over with it, wearing thick cloth gloves on her hands, and settled the bowl in the center of the table. “I thought,” she said, holding her hips, “I thought why not just bring the whole bowl.”

  “Why not,” said Richard.

  “Good,” said Astrid, and took the last empty chair at the table. She looked around and saw that the bread was finished. “Should I bring some more?” She made to rise.

  “No, no,” said Louise. “I’ll go.”

  “We can wait,” said my mother.

  They stayed in their chairs.

  “So!” said Astrid. “You’ve been talking?”

  “Well,” said Louise, and gestured elegantly at her new acquaintance. “We were just talking about where we came from.”

  “Ah yes,” said Astrid, and settled her elbows on the table and looked frankly now at my mother. “Pakistan.”

  “Yeah,” said Richard, and leaned in with interest.

  Louise squinted her eyes attentively.

  “Well,” said my mother and sighed, and began to twirl her empty glass on the table. She told of Pakistan’s woes and troubles, the challenges it faced as a developing country, the cycles of military rule and the experiments with democracy; she spoke of poverty in the Third World and of women’s rights, the life of an activist, the struggle and the constant testing of resolve; she described the protests and the marches she had organized, and she told of the letdowns, the many failures; she sighed again and dug her spoon into the hummus and confessed to having written a rather sharp editorial, nothing less than a condemnation of the present government and its policies. “And it’s depressing,” she said, “because we were with her from the start, we had so much invested in her. But we’ve been let down. It’s the truth. We’ll have none of that, thank you very much. Astrid, will you pass me the soup?”

  Astrid passed the bowl with both her hands and said, “Amazing.” She was looking around at the other faces. “Amazing.”

  Louise was nodding.

  “Huh,” said Richard, and grunted. He took a swig of his drink and then held it up for examination. It was water.

  “Wine?” said Astrid.

  “Sure,” said Richard.

  “You know,” said Louise, and inclined her head toward my mother, “what you just said, about women and the workplace, it’s just, it’s so true!” She was shaking her head and blinking continuously. “I just . . .” And she growled and held up her clenched fists.

  Richard was looking at her. “Well,” he said.

  “No,” said Louise. “It is true.”

  Richard drank all the water in his glass and gasped.

  “It is,” said my mother quietly.

  “Yes,” said Louise. “Yes, it is.”

  “Voilà!” said Astrid, who had returned with the wine and the bread. She poured the wine, which was dark and shiny, into the glasses and paused tentatively at mine.

  “A sip,” said my mother.

  “A sip,” said Astrid, and poured enough for many.

  “To friendship!” said Astrid, and raised her glass.

  “To friendship,” said my mother.

  “Friendship,” said Louise.

  The glasses clanged.

  “Wow,” said Astrid after dinner and dessert had been consumed. The bowls of pasta and salad had emptied; two slices of the charred-looking chocolate cake were left in the large plate.

  Astrid lean
ed back in her chair and said, “Isn’t it incredible?”

  “It is,” said Louise, and looked at my mother. “You are.”

  “Oh no, please,” said my mother.

  But Louise said, “You are,” and sipped her wine confidently, for she was feeling much better about it now. “I think you’re amazing.”

  In the morning they went out with Astrid to buy the groceries. I stayed in the house with Richard, who sat outside on the patio wearing sunglasses and reading a book called Harnessing the Power of Your Thought. While he read the book he poked his mouth with a toothpick. I sat across from him and drew his portrait. Eventually he asked if he could go back inside, and suggested that we take up the drawing later, and I tore out a new page and began to draw the vines with the grapes.

  “Hello there!” said Louise. She wore a broad hat and held a bulging wicker basket. Astrid and my mother came in behind her.

  “You were right,” Astrid was saying. “They overcharged us. I didn’t notice but I should have.”

  I waved the drawings.

  “Oh, very nice,” said my mother, and walked on into the house.

  “She’s tired,” said Louise to Astrid.

  “I’m sure,” said Astrid.

  They went inside.

  “Your mother,” said Louise, who had returned with a tall clinking glass of ice in an opaque liquid, “is quite a lady.” She sat down in the chair and removed her wide hat, and in the sunlight her hair was a blond burning. “How does she do all that? I mean, do you see her, for instance, at home, at night, at dinnertime . . .” She was drinking and gesturing.

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “She’s very strong,” said Louise.

  I went on drawing.

  Astrid emerged from the kitchen and sat down beside Louise. She said she had stuffed all their shopping in the fridge without worrying about who had bought what.

  “Oh, it’s fine,” said Louise. “I was just telling Zaki how lucky he is to have a mom like that.”

  “I’m sure he knows,” said Astrid.

  And later at night I heard them again: they were sitting on the patio, out beneath the stars and the vines in the dark, drinking and talking. Astrid was saying, “It must be difficult, living alone like that, in a place like that. My God, can you imagine? And then raising the child all by yourself. It can’t be easy.”

  “Do you think she’ll find someone?” said Louise.

  “Oh, I’m sure. She’s young, she’s attractive. She has time. I’m sure she will.”

  “Oh, but I mean here,” said Louise.

  “Ah,” said Astrid. “Well, for that she will have to look a little. I don’t mean she will have to seek it out, you know. But she has to keep her eyes open. She has to be more open to the idea. If your eyes are closed you can never see who’s looking.”

  “I hate this bloody bed-and-breakfast.”

  My mother said, “Then go outside and find something to do. You’re old enough to do it.” She was standing before the bathroom mirror and trying on a hat she had bought from a stall in the Sunday market. It was small, made of dark wool and shaped like the top of a mushroom. She pulled it down below her ears and raised her chin. “You don’t need me to accompany you everywhere.”

  “You don’t accompany me everywhere.”

  But it wasn’t true. We had been together for most of every day, had gone out together to see the sights: we went to churches and cathedrals, to the empty bathhouses one afternoon, and frequently to the small outdoor restaurants, which they called cafés here, making no distinction between the two. Even then it had been difficult to go, difficult to watch the other people in groups of four and five and six and seven, talking and laughing and joining their tables in the cafés, while we sat alone at ours and ate the oily tapas in the bowls.

  “When will we go home?”

  “You know when.”

  “Ya, but I want to go now.”

  And she went on in the mirror with the hat.

  “I’m going out,” I said. I was leaving the room.

  “Wait,” she said. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Zaki, you have to tell me where you’re going.” She had abandoned the hat. “I can’t let you go on your own.”

  “You just said I could.”

  She was trapped. “Then take directions from Astrid. And don’t go far. Stay in the street. I don’t want you getting lost here.”

  Astrid only gave directions to the main street below, where a few shops stood facing the stream. She said not to go beyond the shops; beyond there was only a neighborhood, and then more alleys that led to houses. The bigger markets were on the other side and farther up the hill.

  “Wait for your mother,” she suggested. “She will take you in the evening.”

  But I had to leave the house, had to leave the odd confinement of the patio and the upstairs rooms, and I left now promising to return before long. Outside, in the sun, the cobblestone street shone; the walls of the houses were high and white and unknown, their painted windows shut. And at once the memory, brought on by the isolation, of home took root: the house appeared beyond the gate, and the car parked in the shade in the driveway, leading up to the cool of the veranda and then past into the rooms: Naseem and Barkat in their rooms, and Daadi in her own room, and Samar Api in hers.

  I took out the coins from my pocket and counted. They were enough. And there was time.

  I ran down the street, the coins slashing.

  It was a dark green box for storing jewelry. Samar Api had no jewelry to store, but she had drawers in which she kept things, pens and badges and lockets, and later she would also have jewels. The lid was domed, smooth to the touch, and lifted heavily; the inside was lined a deep red.

  “How much?”

  The girl at the till was sullen. She was punching the price into her machine and listening at the same time to a woman’s voice that was shouting in the Spanish language from behind a curtain.

  The girl pointed to the sum on the small rectangular screen.

  I gave her my coins, and they added up. The machine coughed lengthily and opened. The girl stacked the coins inside their separate slots, tore out the receipt and went marching behind the curtain to address the shouts.

  “Zaki!” It was my mother. “Thank God, Zaki!” She had entered the shop.

  “I’ve been looking all over and I told you not to go far.” She was standing here, wanting to have an argument.

  I said, “Sorry.” I wanted to leave the shop.

  “But why did you do that?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You can’t just say sorry, Zaki. You have to understand.”

  “Sorry!”

  And now she saw the box, saw that I had bought it, but it was too late to ask and revive a mood she had destroyed.

  “Where are you going?” she cried.

  But I had already left the shop.

  A church. She wanted to see a church.

  “You can go.”

  “You won’t come?”

  “No.”

  She said, “Zaki, please. Come with me.” And she had surrendered.

  But I said, “I’m fine here. You can go.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t go anywhere.”

  I watched her walk away down the pebbles and into the dark mouth of the church. I was sitting on a bench under a tree in the courtyard. From here the hills seemed far; the Alhambra castle was a small clay object. A bare-chested man with a tattoo of the sun on his back was sitting ahead on the ledge and playing a guitar. The tune was romantic, anguished. He was playing it to the separated hills.

  “Zaki, I want you to meet someone.”

  She had returned from the church with a man, a tall, tanned man with Chinese eyes. His clothes were white, a translucent shirt rolled up to the elbows and white trousers rolled up to the knees.

  “Zaki,” she said. “Say hello to Karim.”


  She was smiling terrifically.

  “Hello,” said Karim.

  I didn’t shake his hand.

  “Karim is from Malaysia,” said my mother, and then looked at Karim, who stood with his arms crossed at his chest, his white shirt trembling in the breeze. He was looking out into the sunlight like a man on the deck of a ship in a cigarette ad.

  “I was telling Karim that you like to draw. Karim’s an artist.”

  Karim responded to this in no way at all. He was accustomed to having it said about him.

  “You draw?” I said.

  “I don’t, actually,” he said, and his hands went into the pockets of his trousers. “I do other kinds of art. I make things, you know, with my hands.” And he looked at my mother and grinned.

  We sat there in the sun, on the shadeless bench behind the ongoing guitar music. Karim was telling my mother about his life in Malaysia, in a place called Kayel, where he knew many other artists and musicians; he said the arts were generally progressive but had suffered a break in a link: his hand sawed off a part of the air.

  “We’re colonized,” he said. “In the end we’re excluded from our histories.”

  “Absolutely,” said my mother.

  Karim was frowning at his fingernails.

  “You know,” said my mother, and she was crossing and uncrossing her ankles, “we’re staying at a bed-and-breakfast here, in the Arab Quarter, and I was telling them, our hosts, or host rather, an Armenian woman, she has two other guests staying with her. But I was telling them the other day about the amount of red tape we have to deal with, just to get the small things done. And they wouldn’t believe me! They would not believe me.”

  “Oh, it’s unparalleled,” said Karim.

  “Still,” said my mother, “I’m sure Malaysia is a good two steps ahead of where we are.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” said Karim.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Believe me. Things are pretty bad there right now. We have every kind of crisis and a head of state who’s buying up property in the West.”

  “Look at it this way,” said Karim, and leaned in to explain. “If it weren’t for the system, if the system itself weren’t as bad as it is right now, there would be no women like you to take it on.”