The Wish Maker (22 page)

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 smiled 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.

“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.