The Wish Maker (56 page)

And Naseem, who was privileged and could speak now from experience, said, “I have always said it, always.”

It was Majida again who brought the news.

“Open this door!” she cried, banging on it violently.

Naseem came out of her room, went through her courtyard to the door and said, “What is the matter? What has happened?” She wasn’t expecting anything.

But Majida was panting and became anguished and held her temples when she saw Naseem in the doorway, and said that the wagon had been in an accident, the people in the other car were saying it had no mirrors and that was against the law, and the matter was quickly getting out of hand and they were going to take it to the police station.

Naseem stepped out of the house without her shoes. “Where is it?”

“In the street,” said Majida, acting all frail.

Naseem said, “Who taught them the law? How do they know who has broken it?”

They reached the fray and found that it was finished: Naseem’s son was standing on one side of the road with the wagon, which was full of passengers; and on the other side was a much bigger car, a white Cruiser jeep that started up now and began to drive away.

Around the wagon a crowd had gathered.

“
They
break the law,” Naseem’s son was saying. “And
they
blame it on us. It is because they think they have the authority.”

A boy was rubbing his back; another was leaning against the wagon and smoking a cigarette. The passengers inside were waiting for their journey to resume.

Naseem said, “Where did they hit it?”

Her son showed her the dent on the door.

She said, “From where are they coming? Why are they telling
us
to talk to them? Do they
want
to go to the police station? Do they want
us
to take them there?”

Majida said loudly, “She drives a car in the city. She has bought this one with her own money.”

The faces in the crowd were watching.

Later she was told how it had happened: the wagon was emerging from the underpass and was hit from the side by the Cruiser jeep, which had turned in without warning, without so much as a honk. After the collision they stepped out of their cars: in the wagon it was only Yakub, who had been driving; the passengers were his customers and they stayed inside. And in the other car was an old man in a hat, a sweater and a shirt and trousers, sitting with his driver and with a uniformed security guard, who stepped out with a gun. That was when the fighting started: people came from all sides to separate them, and it was being said, without consideration of right or wrong, that both sides were at fault and it was best to bury the matter and to go home with the damage.

“But there was one man,” said Yakub, his features dancing in the light of the fire around which they had gathered in the courtyard to listen, “there was one man in that crowd who knew right from wrong.” And the man was described: he was a young man, not much older than Yakub himself, and he wore white clothes and a black turban on his head, and had a beard but without a mustache. “He was the one,” said Yakub, “who saw the dent on the door, who knew right from wrong and asked to know what had happened, and took the guard’s gun from his hand and told him to get in that car and go away.”

“A good man,” said Naseem, who had visualized him.

Her husband said, “There are good men still in this world.” He was sitting on his haunches, enjoying the warmth from the fire on his palms, showing a ludicrous grin on his face. Naseem had learned after many years to ignore his moods, which went with the moods of those around him.

But her son said, “I have thought about it. I will ask him to eat with us. When a good man comes along, it is good to be good to him.”

And Naseem said, “It is a good thing you are thinking, son. I will cook for him with my own hands.”

Dr. Shafeek agreed to the meal. Yakub escorted him from the mosque, where he was setting up a new program, and brought him to the house in the early afternoon. It was a dry day, and the sun blazed above them; they went through the parched courtyard, the brick walls shining, past the kitchen (where Naseem, assisted by Majida, was cooking rotis on the fire) and into the cool room where they kept their belongings: the tin trunk was in the center, visible below the table; the plastic plates and glasses were on a shelf hacked into the wall; the black-and-white TV (which hadn’t worked for some months now) was kept on a high shelf in a corner, and was covered with cloth to guard it against the dust. And all around there were posters that showed the imagined features of dead saints, of Hazrat Ali with his black beard and green headdress and sword, and of the eccentric Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in a trance, and of the docile-looking Bhulleh Shah, whose shrine in Kasur they had visited in the spring.

Dr. Shafeek was looking around the room and had a ready smile on his lips, which were oddly visible in the absence of a mustache and seemed to give his beard an added lift.

“Your wife’s decorations?” he asked. He had used the formal word for wife.

Yakub grinned frankly and said, “Not yet. No wife.”

Dr. Shafeek’s smile was the same as before.

He said, “It is a tenet of our religion.”

Yakub nodded.

“You must do it young. And you may have more than one.”

It was said with seriousness.

Yakub said, “Well, yes; please, eat.” And he raised the lids from all the pots that were arranged in a line on the table and which they had brought out for the occasion. “Please take.”

Dr. Shafeek expressed a desire to wash his hands.

Yakub led him outside, into the heated courtyard. Dr. Shafeek crouched before the tap and washed his hands, his wrists, his elbows, then his mouth and his face. “It is my habit,” he said afterward, when they had gone back inside to eat their meal. “When I was in Saudia, at every meal we washed in this way.” He said he had gone there first to study, and then, later, to obtain donations for the mosque and training center he was setting up here in the village. “Over there,” he said, “it is all desert, all dry and hot.” His mouth was sour with severity, but his eyes were bright. “It is scorching, scorching. The people are Bedouins.” He smiled wistfully. “They are used to the heat. Oh yes. Thousands of years they have spent there. They are not like us, not used to this and that. Their lives are spare and simple.”

Yakub was smiling too, as if sharing in the recollection of the Bedouins, seeing the huts and camels and the customs that Dr. Shafeek had not yet described.

“Bismillah
,
”
said Dr. Shafeek.

They ate.

The room was dank and decorated.

Majida came in with fresh rotis, dropped them into a plate and went away.

After she had gone, Dr. Shafeek said, “In Saudia women are separate. They have separate quarters, separate schools. Islam allows. But there are limits.”

Yakub took the hot roti from the plate, broke it in half and placed the other half in Dr. Shafeek’s plate.

“Your car,” said Dr. Shafeek. “It is new?”

“Very new,” said Yakub, who was assuming that Dr. Shafeek had allowed for the maneuverings of a previous owner.

“It is a gift from Allah,” said Dr. Shafeek.

And Yakub said, “There is no doubt in it. We were saying only yesterday how it was good to get it blessed. Otherwise there are many accidents, and many are fatal, destroying not just the car, which is made of metal after all, but also the flesh and blood inside, the men and women and the children.” He was talking like a schoolteacher now, which was another of the things he could have been.

Dr. Shafeek said, “Blessed?” His eyes were narrowed and his smile was incredulous and small.

“At the shrine,” said Yakub confidently. “Hazrat Karman Aley Sharif.”

Dr. Shafeek lifted his glass from the table and drank all the water in it. Then he brought it down on the table and gasped. “My friend,” he said, and burped, “it is all a fraud. These shrines”—he waved his hand about generally, and it very nearly missed the pictures on the walls—“they are places of burial. Who is buried inside? A man is buried inside. You think that man is listening to your prayer? How can he listen when he is no more than bones? Who is listening to the wish that you make from your heart?” He was tapping Yakub’s heart with his finger. “Is it your fellow man, whose own heart is full of wishes, good
and
bad wishes, or is it God, who knows the things you keep in your soul?”

Yakub had the sense to say, “God.”

“So why,” said Dr. Shafeek, “are you praying to a man?”

Yakub was nodding.

“Tell me,” said Dr. Shafeek, and placed a morsel in his mouth. “Who bashed up your car that day?”

Yakub said, “A man.”

“And who saved your car? Who saved you that day?”

Yakub was nodding, and said, “You did, you did.”

“No,” said Dr. Shafeek. “Allah saved you.”

“Allah,” said Yakub.

“Allah,” said Dr. Shafeek.

They continued to eat. They were men. It revealed the act of sitting together in a new light, made it mundane, and made them audacious and unafraid.

Dr. Shafeek explained about the concept of shirk. It was when people ascribed godlike powers to entities other than God, to mere men (though in some parts of the world they were still worshiping stones and animals, and it was hard to say if that was better or worse), and thereby denied the oneness of God. “There is only one place to go,” said Dr. Shafeek, “to receive a blessing. And that place is the House of God. You must go. It is your duty as a Muslim. And it is your duty to send your parents, to send your mother, who has no doubt made many sacrifices, and your father, whose blood is in your veins. Send them, and then go yourself, and see the blessings Allah will bestow.”

Dr. Shafeek ate the rest of his meal, washed his hands once again in the courtyard and went away. And afterward it was agreed that his visit to their house had been a visitation. They didn’t immediately abandon the notion of shrines (though they saw now that it was a notion) and none of them dared at first to take down the posters from the walls. But on the matter of making the pilgrimage they were decided. Yakub said that he would start saving from the next day and promised to provide two airplane tickets for his parents to Saudi Arabia.

“But it is not enough,” said Naseem. “We will need more than that. We will need for the time that we are there, for the things we will eat and the things we will buy.”

And she said, “Allah gives. Allah will give. I will find.”

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