The Wish Maker (19 page)

“What do you want to do?” he said.

They were driving in his car with their windows down. It had rained, and the water from puddles shot up and splashed beneath the tires.

“I want to go to places,” she said. “I want to see things.”

They went first to the shrine of Daata Saab, an eleventh-century Sufi who was believed to be the grantor of Lahore’s many wishes. The courtyard was open. She left her shoes at the entrance and felt the stone under her feet, warmed at midday by the mild winter sun. A thousand years! She was expecting a ruin but had found a dwelling: there were people in the long corridors on the sides, huddled against walls and stretched out on straw mats, some asleep, others awake, still others in a median state. He led her through the courtyard to the grave, which was located within the shade of a marble enclave and was guarded by a brood of squatting pigeons. They seemed vaguely aware of intrusion. She raised her hands in prayer and tried not to look at the pigeons, then closed her eyes to show that she was lost.

And there were shrines that came alive only at night. One Thursday after sundown they went in Sami’s car to the tomb of Shah Hussein, which lay behind many sodden lanes in a place called Baghbanpura. The saint, she knew, was buried next to his lover, a Hindu boy called Madho Lal. There was a graveyard before the tomb, with old, twisting trees that grew between the graves. A fire burned in a corner; a man was singing to the flames; another sat beside him and struck a drum from time to time. They went toward the grave but it was locked for the night; a shawl-wearing man, the custodian, led them in silence to another grave at the back of the compound, and it was the grave of the saint’s sister, smaller but lit brightly with round electric lights that hung from strings on the walls. The custodian waited for them outside the chamber, was pleased to be paid, and told them to come back in a week’s time for the saint’s death anniversary. Then the courtyard was filled with noise and crowded with bodies; a woman was standing in a clearing with her hands on her knees and spinning her hair rapidly to a drummer’s beat. Hanging on the air was the aroma of hashish, which was thick and sweet, and reminded Zakia of the other shrine smell, the compound stench of feet and roses and perspiration. She kept her head above the noise and kept looking at the things around her. Here too the colors and the sounds, brought out to commemorate the dead, were accompanied by the sight of useless limbs, of pustules and sores on the arms and legs of the living. But she could observe it only with an outsider’s apprehension, an unease that came from an encompassing awareness of herself, the formality of her clothes, her shoes, the hair she had tied up in a pointless ponytail, the absurdity of being even slightly mindful in a place where others appeared not to care. She looked away and kept walking. And it fed the same experience, which was one of growing familiarity within a romance.

He showed her the fort and the dungeons underneath. They were dank and broken, littered with rubble. (She had envisioned complex torture chambers.) Other parts were suddenly grand: they sat cross-legged on the broad steps built for royal elephants and wandered into the royal gardens where queens and princesses had once frolicked, past their ghostly quarters to the narrow, octagonal pools where they had bathed. At the Shalimar Gardens she put her foot in a waterless pool and made a face.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“There’s no water.”

He summoned a chowkidaar and paid him. The man was quick; he placed a hand on his heart and went to see about the water. And when it came she splashed her feet in the fountain frivolously, and didn’t laugh or say that she was happy.

She bought a map. It was a jumble of locations and place names. She decided she needed people to bring it alive.

But Sami’s friends knew only one another. Even when they converged it was to sprint competitively in a park, or to gather around a table with beers and cards and talk of their days in Risalpur, the things they had done and said and the punishments they had been awarded. (There was a special kind of punishment that involved walking to the hostel with a parachute attached to the shoulders. It was intended, like the other punishments they had described, to humiliate.) They had nicknames that corresponded to their speeds: Scooter, Machhar, Cheetah, Fokker, Turtle. Around her they were gruff and uncommunicative. She felt like an obstacle.

“Where are we going?”

“Turtle’s house. Some boys getting together.”

She appeared to think about it and said, “Why do we always have to go to Turtle’s house?” She had allowed her irritation to show.

“You don’t like Turtle’s house?”

She wanted to slap his face.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said.

He said, “Oh,” and sat down next to her, waiting for her to explain what she meant.

She complained to Nargis.

And Nargis offered to introduce her to her own friends.

Nargis’s friends were the people who met in the evenings at the house of a woman called Hania Apa, a middle-aged woman of medium height who kept her hair in a mannish crop and didn’t wear dupattas or shawls. Instead she wore the frayed handloom kurtas that Zakia associated with male politicians, and the sleeveless sadri jackets that were favored by Punjabi ministers. She hadn’t married, and lived alone in a two-bedroom flat with no help—she didn’t believe in servants—and drove her own car to the arts college, where she ran the art history department on a tight, unsubsidized budget. Her circular drawing room was like a museum, and had shelves on all the walls and hanging tapestries and oddly placed pots and metal artifacts that were deliberately left unpolished. The books on the shelves were about women and countries and diseases, and often had short confrontational titles that were easy to remember and repeat. Hania Apa enjoyed Nargis and watched her with amused interest. She wasn’t warm or welcoming when Zakia first went to her house.

“This is my friend Zakia,” Nargis had said.

And Hania Apa had shaken her hand.

She was a chain smoker, and smoked so many cigarettes on that first night that the windows had to be opened and the fan switched on to relieve the asthmatic woman who was sitting on one of the colorful floor cushions. There was drinking and talking, then eating and talking, then drinking and talking again.

“Did you like it?” said Nargis afterward.

And Zakia said that it was interesting, which was what she had heard most people say that night about the things they were discussing.

She wanted to go again, and went.

“Not coming to Turtle’s?” His voice was like a child’s on the phone.

“No,” she said, the way Nargis would say it.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

“We’ll see,” she said.

She hung up the phone and went into the drawing room to lay out the bottles and the glasses.

After nine o’clock the bell was ringing at expected intervals. Hania Apa was in her chair, her frank feet settled on a low ottoman, her hands clasped in brazen laxity behind her head. (Already there were blooms of sweat in the armpits, and Zakia switched on the fan.) Two women were sitting on the sofa and were listening appreciatively to Hania Apa’s take on a law that was going to be passed within the month. A bald, slender man arrived, nodded at the seated women and bent over the table to pour whiskey in a glass. The doorbell rang again; Zakia went to see but Nargis was already at the door, and it was Moeen, and Zakia had a view of herself in which she was here without Sami; she saw that the ice bucket was empty and went into the kitchen to get more, and on the way she had a quick mental argument with Sami about consideration for people’s needs.

Dinner appeared: it was biryani that came in plastic bags from the market. Some guests stood around the dining table with plates, chewing and swallowing as they spoke, and others returned to sofas and chairs and to the cushions on the floor, large ones with tiny round mirrors embedded in the fabric. A large woman whose cleavage was emphasized by a low necklace was arguing with a small, enervated woman about the state of women’s education in the country. The fat woman was saying that the private sector was the solution; the thin woman was shaking her head. Someone asked Zakia for the bathroom; she pointed it out; then a woman on the sofa looked her up and down, almost lewdly, and said, “Pretty girl.”

Zakia blushed.

“Believe every word she says!” cried a neighboring woman with wildly arching eyebrows. “She’s a first-class portraitist, you know?”

And the first-class portraitist continued to look admiringly at Zakia, as though she perfectly expected to hear such things said about herself and was glad to have Zakia hear them too.

It was almost midnight when the doorbell rang again. The guests looked at one another, looked at Hania Apa, who rose with excitement and went to the door. The pause was brief and expectant. And then Hania Apa reappeared, and was holding his hand.

The guests stood up.

He was younger in the pictures. Zakia recalled the headlines from the time when he was arrested for conspiring against the government, and again, when he was awarded a prize by the Russians (and not the Nobel Prize, which they didn’t give to communists), and recently too, when the military had blocked him out and he had had to leave the country. Still he was present in conversations, in songs penned by him and sung by others. They said he was the greatest Urdu poet of the century.

He settled with a halting effort into the chair.

“Something to eat?” said Hania Apa, who was stooping and held his hand in a devotional clasp.

The poet touched his belly and said that the doctor wasn’t allowing him too much these days.

“Something to drink?”

He assented with a chuckle.

The conversation returned to its usual precincts. And at every turn now the poet was implored to supply a verse. The lines faltered in his phlegmy voice but were known, it seemed, to every person in the room; there was a mayhem of contributions when he paused or forgot. One poem in particular was summoned again and again. It was a love poem, but the love it described was strained and wearied. The opening verse was a supplication: my love, it said, do not ask me, it said, for that earlier, pristine love. From there it moved to memories of that first love, to the eyes of the beloved (a verse she particularly liked) and their unrivaled place in the world. But the gaze wanders, the gaze returns; and the eyes are not the same. It was this, the banishment, willfully breaking the lull of innocence, that she found obscure and even a little contrived, a plunge into the abstract, a world that bore no relation to the real, which was the truth of the life she was living.

 

 

 

 

She met Sami in the morning. He had come to fetch her from Nargis’s house, where she was staying. They were going to Turtle’s house now (she had agreed), and in the car she was avid and unrestrained. She recounted the details of other people’s conversations with the fervor of a proud participant. The issues raised, the complex analyses, the verses from the poems, all of it had stayed on and acquired a new life in her retelling. She was outraged, she was saddened, she was lively and ironical when imitating the more farcical aspects of the evening, like the first-rate portraitist and her friend with the eyebrows. And then she was solemn and withdrawn, and she said that Moeen had been there too.

“You didn’t invite me.”

“Still,” she said, “you could’ve come.”

They were driving along the canal. Bigger and better cars went past and left them behind.

He said, “I’ll come tomorrow.”

“There’s nothing there tomorrow,” she said. And then she said, “They’re not like your
boys
, they don’t sit around and crack
jokes
all the time.”