The Wish Maker (23 page)

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 always 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.

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.