The Wish Maker (15 page)

“Come, come!” cried the aunt from her chair. She was different from what Zakia had imagined. She was older; she was frail; her eyes were wide now with excitement, and the effort had stretched her face and brought out the veins in her neck.

Nargis went and sat before the woman on the carpet. And Zakia saw now that the woman, beneath the blanket that was covering her chest and knees, was sitting in a wheelchair.

“This is Zakia,” said Nargis.

Zakia smiled.

The woman saw her and smiled faintly, and gave a nod of agreement, as though she had seen many girls in her time and recognized the one that stood before her as a pleasant type. “Sit,” she said, almost scoldingly.

Zakia sat in a chair. Then Nargis described the ongoing dispute with her parents over Moeen; and the aunt listened and made tragic sounds and gave periodic shakes of the head. “Just do it,” she said at last, and put up a palm.

“How can I?” said Nargis. It came out in a sob.

“Hai
,
”
said the woman, and looked away.

“Who will let me?”

“I will,” said the woman, and it was apparent from her tone of sadness that this was unlikely.

“What do you think?”

The woman had asked Zakia.

“Oh,” said Zakia. “Oh, I think she should. I think she should do what she wants.” It came easily.

And the woman said, “Yes, yes, I think you are right. I think she should. I think you are all very right and should do what you want.”

There was a party that night at the house of a painter. Nargis wanted to go there to meet Moeen, who had arrived from Lahore and had telephoned from his friend’s house earlier in the evening.

Zakia said she wanted to stay in and read.

“Come on,” said Nargis. “You’ll meet all these people.”

And that was a part of it: she didn’t want to go unprepared.

“I don’t know any of them,” she said.

“They’re not extraordinary or anything,” said Nargis, who knew them from before. “They’re not like characters from your book. Stop worrying.”

Zakia said, “I’m not worrying.”

“You are.”

She ignored it.

“Come on,” said Nargis.

And she said, “Fine!” and was surprised to see that the anger had led her to defy herself.

Nargis went upstairs to change, and came down with her hair puffed out and curved fantastically to one side. Her lashes were long; her mouth was red. She was wrapped in a dark shawl that over-suggested a desire for physical closeness. She asked Zakia if she wanted to use her toiletries. Zakia said she didn’t. Then they went to say good night to the aunt in her room, and the woman was lying in her bed and swooned when she saw Nargis.

“We’ll be back,” said Nargis, without giving a time. “Don’t lock the front door from inside.”

The painter’s house was a short walk away from the aunt’s house. It was located on an incline, in an upward-sloping street of similarly built houses, which were distinct in their façades but had the same tin roofs and the same broad gravel driveways. Only one of the houses was lit from inside, and it gave off an intermittent trembling, which was enough to identify it as the house with the party and also indicated that the residents of the other houses had gone there tonight. A small group was gathered in the dim veranda. Nargis went past them stylishly, without looking or speaking and with a deliberate tottering of the heels, which was endangering and empowering at the same time.

“This way,” she said, as though Zakia needed to hear it, and went in through the front door.

But it was dark in the place where all the people were dancing, and the music was loud and dashed and tore. Zakia went between the dancers and was trying to follow Nargis, who walked ahead at her own pace.

“Nargis, wait!” she cried.

But Nargis had already gone across the room and was hugging a man, and they were swaying together in the embrace, and people looked but then looked away as well, as though that kind of exhibition was expected and only mildly interesting.

“Zakia,” said Nargis.

“Hello,” said Zakia.

“Hello,” said Moeen with an intent and unreleasing nod, and she saw that it was something he had to do a lot. “I’m Moeen.”

Zakia nodded and said, “Zakia,” though she was not used to it and hadn’t been to America.

“I’m going to get a drink,” said Nargis.

Moeen didn’t stop her.

They went toward the bar. The bartender was a boy of no more than sixteen or seventeen, and was wearing a shalwar kameez with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was pulling out beer bottles from a bucket underneath and popping them open.

“
Ek
beer,” said Nargis, and raised her finger.

“Only one?” said the boy in English.

Nargis looked at Zakia.

Zakia didn’t want one.

“Buss
,
ek
,
”
said Nargis, and waited.

The bottle was opened and given to her.

“Shukriya
,
”
said Nargis.

“Welcome,” said the boy.

“My God!” cried a voice.

They turned to look. It had come from a man who was standing in the center of the room with his hands now on his mouth, his back hunched with shock or pain, the posture of a comic in a black-and-white film of physical accidents and situations. He was wearing a bright shirt with the front few buttons undone. The people standing behind him were watching and smiling.

“My dear,” said Nargis, and went toward him with her beer bottle.

And he said, “
You
are late!” and pointed his finger at her face.

So he was the painter and he owned the house. He took them into a corner and sat with them, and began to chat with Nargis, touching her on the arm and on the knee, which she didn’t seem to mind because it wasn’t that kind of touching.

“I love your house,” said Nargis.

“I love it too,” said the painter, and withdrew as if into an alcove.

Nargis laughed. “Tell me,” she said, “what are you making these days?”

He said he was making sculptures with a special kind of wood that was found only here, in the mountains. He went back to Karachi to exhibit his work but his studio was at the back of the house. Zakia knew from the busy way in which his routines and plans were recounted that he took these things seriously, and it was strange but also heartening, since it was art he was talking about.

“I like your bartender,” said Nargis tartly.

“I like him too,” said the painter.

“You’re bad.”

“I’m not.”

“He spoke to me in English just now.”

And the painter said, “I know,” and smiled broadly, as though this was good of him but also very clever.

Nargis talked to the painter and then to someone else. And then she danced with Moeen, and they danced with the blundering intensity of new lovers. Zakia wasn’t dancing. She was sitting in a chair in a darkened corner and listening first to a conversation between a man and a woman, who may or may not have been a couple, and then to the instructions that were delivered hurriedly in English by the painter to the trainee bartender, who heard them and nodded and went away. After that there was only the music, and it was the same. Zakia was tired beyond tiredness, experiencing a state of weightlessness in which the senses were remarkably active. The bartender came back with more bottles. She wanted to go home and sleep. Her thoughts went back to her own room at home, and then to her parents, and then she remembered that she had to call them.

She panicked.

She found the painter, and he said she could use the phone in his bedroom and pointed her to it; she went in and didn’t switch on the light and sat down on the bed, which was hard, and dialed the code and then the number and waited.

She had nothing to say for herself.

“Hello?” It was Mabi.

“I’ve reached,” said Zakia.

“Hello, Zakia?”

“Yes, it’s me, I’m here, I’ve reached.”

There was a pause. Then Mabi said, “What time do you think it is now?”

And Zakia said, “I don’t know. Ten?”

“It’s not ten,” said Mabi. “It is eleven thirty at night. What kind of family do you think you’re from?”

Zakia said, “I wanted to call earlier . . .”

“
Don’t
talk to me,” said Mabi, and hung up the phone.

She held on to hers. The line was dead, the tone flat and mocking.

“Was that your mother?”

She turned.

“Was that your mother?” And the second time he said it she saw his silhouette in the light of the doorway. She didn’t recognize the voice, didn’t think it was right, and she switched on the lamp.

He was there. And he was still. His face was fair, his eyes small and black, his body slim and tall enough to touch the door frame. He was wearing a maroon checked shirt with the front hanging out over his trousers. And he was holding a beer bottle in his hand.

“I don’t know you,” she said, and began to get up to go.

A ghost had gone from the empty bed and had left her crying. And she had been crying from before, crying because she was alone, and the going-away was how it ended, in another departure. But it was not a dream, and she removed the covers and got up now and went into the bathroom. Nargis had gone in the morning. That was the thing she had seen—her bathrobed back going out of the room. She washed her face in the sink, gargled noisily, then spat out the water and wiped her mouth with a towel. The feeling was with her still. She went back into the room and flung aside the curtains, and in the light her thoughts were settling. The feeling wasn’t real, she knew it was from the dream, and she remembered now that it had involved him, and in the kinds of circumstances that occur frequently in dreams. He had been himself but like someone she had always known. They had gone back to Karachi in the car and there her parents had rejected him. Then she was in her room and writing letters to him, and he was a dog in a cage and never responded to her letters. It should have made her laugh. It didn’t. Instead she felt relief, sudden and overwhelming, to know that her dreams were hers and weren’t being played out before other people while she was having them in all their pressing vividness.