The Wish Maker (4 page)

I had been asked to distribute the invites. It was distressing. I didn’t recognize most of the names and addresses that now appeared in embossed golden script on the envelopes. But weddings, like funerals, required staging to an audience, and the final list of names had come to one hundred and seventy-three. I now had to make perhaps as many trips to unknown houses in the city and was grateful when Isa and Moosa, my cousins, offered their help.

They had changed. Isa, Suri’s son, had settled into adulthood (he was twenty-three this year) with an airtight, burp-coming chest and a toughened but tolerant look. He wore full-sleeved shirts with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his jeans, which were fitted along the thighs and bulged provocatively at the back with his wallet. (He had joined one of the new international banks on Main Boulevard.) When we met he posed many quick questions about life in America and then answered them for himself. He asked about housing, rent, taxes, interest rates, and then disregarded my answers and delivered an unprompted omen on the boom. “Too much too soon,” he said in English, shaking his head gloomily, and I heard him repeat it later at night, so that it appeared to have been picked up from one of the new business channels on TV.

And Moosa had changed too, but not in the same way as Isa, who had come to inhabit his personality with an air of confirmation. Moosa, Hukmi’s son, was twenty-one this year, only two years younger than Isa (and older than me) but somehow elderly already, as though he had learned a humbling lesson that had left him subdued and even grateful; he wore sweatshirts and baseball caps and walked around the house with a slouch. And he hadn’t shaved in weeks, and responded to related inquiries with a smile.

“Mullah!” I had cried in greeting.

“Naw, man,” he said, shaking his head in the new disarmed way, “bro’s a hippie now. No more drama, man. No more of that stuff.” It wasn’t clear what he was referring to—he was aggressive once but that was long ago, a thing from childhood.

“Smoking?” I said.

Again he shook his head, this time in defeat. “Old habits, man . . .” And again he smiled, incorporating the habit into his new, pleasant take on life.

Their car was now a red Honda City that Isa had acquired with a loan from the bank. It was a strong, stout car, inexpensive but efficient; Isa gave me a proud external tour of the thing, tapping the shiny bonnet and praising the tough tires that he claimed could handle a mountain. “Get in gear,” he said, soaring his hand like an airplane, “and that’s it. Takeoff.”

“Frickin’ awesome,” said Moosa, who was standing nearby and nodding.

I thought of the old Suzuki with its one functional headlight, its dark, furry boot and slackened dashboard. The memory was attached to the faults, things we had then wished away.

“Solid,” I said, and knocked on the bonnet to confirm it. “Yup. Looks good. Take it for a ride?”

“Sir,” said Isa obligingly, and held open the shiny door.

Most of the houses were in Defense, and these were easy to find—the division into sectors was surprisingly reliable. In two trips we had delivered more than half the cards. But areas like Gulberg and Garden Town were difficult: the houses had retreated from the roads, which had succumbed to boutiques and restaurants and shopping plazas, many still bare with cement and guarded by smart neon screens that came alive at night and painted promising pictures of standards surpassed and goals achieved. The houses were hidden behind these hasty conjurings, lost in a confusion of unnamed lanes that often died abruptly in empty plots. And other parts were stranger: the one time we went to Mughalpura our car got stuck in an alley. There were no boutiques here and no plazas, only small, unshuttered shops on the sides and rubbish heaped on the streets. Our car was stranded between a bus and a donkey cart, and attracted a pack of children, who were thrilled by our misfortune and banged their fists on the bonnet and dragged their squeaky palms across the windows.

Isa lowered his window and shouted, “
Maaderchod!
”

A laughing boy darted into the recessed shade of a house and made a shoving gesture with his fist.

“Frickin’
wild
,” said Moosa, who was sitting in the front and wearing sunglasses.

The children stared and kept walking, past the car and then along the sides of the bus, dragging their palms with slow sureness across its shut doors.

Moosa said, “They’re like monkeys.” He lit a cigarette and lowered his window a little.

And Isa said, “Education,” and stared defiantly at the children outside, without saying whether he thought this was the problem or the solution.

Morning was spent locating caterers and light-wallahs in obscure, grimy corners of Ichhra, then ordering the flowers in bulk from stalls in Liberty and stopping at the roundabout to negotiate with the dholwalas, who wore starched silver turbans and yellow clothes and sat on the footpath with their drums. They took down the address and promised to be there on the night of the wedding. But there was more to do the next day, as the chores were renewed and led again into the afternoon, which was long and touched with sunshine and then a little cold, the large, low sun hanging red behind the rising dust. In the evening we were asked to collect Aasia and Maheen, sisters to Isa and Moosa respectively, from their tuition centers in Muslim Town. They were in secondary school now and were preparing for their end-of-term exams but had nothing to say on the subject; they sat at the back of the car with their mobile phones, and played with the buttons and watched the luminous screens for results. They were girly in their habits but physically complete: their shalwar kameezes were tight around the waist and accentuated the bust and the pelvis, the sleeves short and modern. Aasia was older and had stocky upper arms that she stroked from time to time as if to soothe a rash. She had thin eyebrows and stylish black glasses with thick rims, and wore her hair in a ponytail that rose and fell in a fluffy
S
. Maheen was pale and lanky, also pony-tailed, and wore no makeup other than a striking smudge of black around the eyes. Both carried handbags. They were at that place where, after years of conflict, they were discovering a quiet understanding with their mothers, who now appeared sympathetic and weirdly familiar.

At night I went with Isa and Moosa to see the new places of leisure. There was a mini-golf course near Center Point with gently sloping islands and fountains that coughed colorful water; a karaoke bar in Defense Market that played songs too new for nostalgia and not new enough to stir up the excitements of the present; and a dim sheesha bar in Gaddafi Stadium, where two waiters in waistcoats sat idly at a table, surrounded by the dark décor and a ghostly absence of customers. They were surprised to see us, and talked and motioned erratically as they led us up a winding wrought-iron staircase into the smoking section. We settled into a sofa by the window, and I saw that our arrival had stopped the advancements of a date: they were sitting in a corner, the boy now looking sourly in our direction, the girl speaking rigidly to the table as though someone had just switched on the lights after promising not to. An abandoned hookah sat between them like undestroyed evidence. They ordered the bill and paid it quickly, and left maintaining a careful physical distance.

And that was it. There was nothing more to do. There were still no bars or nightclubs in Lahore or in the rest of the country, where alcohol was banned. Isa said it was unnecessary since people went on doing what they had always done. He gave the example of Dubai, where they had achieved some kind of regulation by allowing alcohol only in the clubs; you couldn’t buy a bottle and take it home with you. That system was better because it allowed things in small amounts and saved people from excess in the end.

“Over here,” he said hopelessly, “everything goes on underground. Everyone does everything.” He meant the people in the society pages, from whose world he was excluded. He went on to list their vices in a burning whisper: “Partiessharties, coke-shoke, anything and everything, E
bhenchod,
speed and heroin.” He recovered his voice and said, “What the fuck is booze, man? It’s nothing.”

“Orgies,” said Moosa with a smile of depravity, a guilty smile that suggested complicity of intent if not in the act itself. “Swapping partners. There’s a club in Karachi where you swap your car keys first.” He laughed mordantly, as if at a hard but distant memory of the thing. “And gays. So many gays.” He said it with a sigh of amazement, a yearning for a time when it was still an occasional occurrence and not a pervasive phenomenon, a thing that happened but didn’t yet demand a reckoning by showing up so obviously around him.

“And bombs?” I asked.

“And bombs,” said Moosa, who hadn’t thought of it like that. “And bombs.”

“Basically it’s all changing,” said Isa, whose vision of it had suddenly expanded and gone beyond the horizon; he saw it all at once and it compelled him to bring up his hand and rock it to either side like a raft in water. “It’s all up for grabs,” he said. “It’s all up for grabs.”

The alcohol still came from bootleggers. And their names were the same: Samuel, Emanuel, Joseph, Ilyas—Christians with purchasing licenses. The imported bottles were sent from the warehouses of embassies in Islamabad, and in Lahore they were always more expensive. One evening we set out in the car to acquire our stock for the wedding. We were following directions delivered by the man, who was gruff and edgy on the phone and spoke only in codes (“the stuff” was ready, he said, five “browns” and five “whites”). The place was in Cantt, which was surprising, since only rich people and retired generals lived in Cantt. We got lost trying to find it. It was late already; the maghrib azaan had sounded and the sun had vanished behind the thick, dark trees of a park. Night would soon descend, and the policemen would surface at the curbs, waiting to stop cars like ours (too rich to be poor, too poor to be rich) so they could search the seats and trunks with flashlights.

“Dogs,” said Moosa, “bribe-eaters.”

“No worries,” said Isa, who had tried this sort of thing and succeeded.

We found it in a dusty lane behind the polo grounds. It was a large gray house guarded by a tall gate of thick blue iron. The owner’s name was inscribed on a white plastic plaque outside. It was not the name of the bootlegger, who went only by Ashfaaq.

Moosa offered to ring the bell.

“No,” said Isa, and dialed a number into his mobile phone.

Moosa began to gallop his fingers on the dashboard.

“Don’t,” said Isa.

Moosa didn’t.

“Ji!”
said Isa to the phone, suddenly buoyant. “We are outside. Yes, right outside. Okay, no problem, no problem.” He held up the phone to check that it was the same number, then tossed it onto the dashboard.

“Coming?” said Moosa.

Isa nodded. He was watching the gate beyond, which opened at last with a whine and a clang: a man emerged with his shoulders thrown back as if to further project the bulge of his stomach. A duffel bag was carried on his palms. He paused at the gate and looked quickly to either side.