The Wish Maker (9 page)

Daadi cooed humorously at the picture and shook her head. “You see it?” she said, pointing to a black dot above Chhoti’s mouth. “She made it with a pencil. Some days on her lip. Other days on her cheek. Above her eye, below her eye—she was very involved with the fashions.” Here she raised the picture and brought it near her face. “Of course,” she said, squinting, “it didn’t do her any good.” She lowered the picture into her lap and sighed.

“Did it do her any bad?”

Daadi tossed the picture into the box. She said the bad wasn’t a thing as such, it wasn’t an event or an occurrence. It was a way of living in the world, a way of seeing things that did not exist and of not seeing those that did. She raised the oval lid from the table and placed it firmly on the box.

“There are things,” she said, whirling a finger in the air, “things in the atmosphere that start to have an effect on the raw mind.”

Chhoti was only sixteen years old when she came home and made the announcement. It was the Malik boy, the brother of her classmate. They were a merchant family who lived in one of the newly built houses on the canal. Chhoti had been to their house, had seen the boy and had liked him. And she had reason to believe that he liked her too.

“He wants to marry me,” she said.

Chhoti’s parents were alarmed but also bound by convention to consider that a family known to them was involved. And they could do nothing when they heard that the boy’s family was preparing to send a proposal of marriage. Chhoti was confident of her selection; he was studying to be a philosopher, she said, he was going to write books and he was serious and accomplished.

The boy’s family came to the house. The boy wore a blazer, a scarf and trousers, and sat with his knees wide apart. He shook his foot when he talked, and thick folds appeared around his mouth when he smiled. The family had a shoe shop in Anarkali but the boy wanted to publish books. There were ideas, he said, that were sweeping the world and would transform the way of man, and he wanted to prepare the minds of the youth, whose role in the future was going to be important. He became excited and produced a tin of cigarettes from his blazer pocket, opened it and offered the cigarettes to Chhoti’s father, who declined, then extracted and lit one for himself with a match. He said he wanted to send Chhoti to the department of Oriental languages at the university, where she would learn to read Arabic and Farsi. Then she could translate manuscripts for his publishing company.

He puffed at his cigarette and smiled at the curling smoke.

His parents said they were encouraging his ideas but also hoped that he could be persuaded to join their line of work.

And he said, “Shoes. They want me to make shoes,” and tapped his foot on the floor and laughed, the folds around his mouth not forming.

His family proposed on his behalf. But he said he wanted to set a date for the end of the year because he wanted to obtain his degree first, a master’s in philosophy that was going to take a few more months to complete.

In the afternoons Chhoti went out. She had befriended a European woman who had arrived to make paintings of the countryside but had then met a poet in the city and stayed on. They were living at that time in a rented apartment behind the Dyal Singh Mansion, and living, it was said, without the proper documents to show for their arrangement. Chhoti went to their apartment, went with them to the bookshops in Anarkali and to the coffee houses that lay in the shadows behind Mall Road. She came home in the evening and named other friends, and said that she had gone to the bazaar and looked at clothes and shoes and beauty potions. She laughed in those days without a hand to cover her mouth, and in their neighborhood, where sounds were rarely heard outside the rooms of houses, it was a thing to keep in mind and report to others.

On a dull winter’s day the news was delivered to their house. The boy’s father himself had come to say it, and was led into the baithak room. He drew the curtains, sat on the floor, held his head and said that he was ruined.

His son was suffering and had always suffered, but it was now beyond their control. The boy wasn’t right in the head; they had nothing to say for themselves; they were ordinary people, and their luck was bad; they could offer an apology but that would amount to an insult.

The engagement was off. No announcement was made; it was already known to the people of their neighborhood, and none of them could claim to have been surprised. Only Chhoti was impossible to persuade and went to stand by the gate and said that she was going to his house. They had to hold her back, had to take her into her room and keep her there. Her mother went in with things to eat but Chhoti threw them aside. Her mother brought a rag, knelt to clean up the mess, then beat Chhoti with the heel of her shoe. Chhoti howled in her room and broke things. But they didn’t let her out.

She passed her matriculation exams in the summer but refused to enroll at the university. Daadi had graduated from university, was married and had a child, and she knew that a bachelor’s degree, while it was a thing for a girl to have, was not a requirement. It was enough that she was young, that she could read and write and had a family behind her and nothing significant or unusual in her past to explain. That was what they told the matchmaker, who came on a horse-drawn taanga from Begumpura, saw the house, appraised the things in it and said that she had some families in mind. But she wanted to see the girl. And they were relieved when Chhoti came into the room and sat on a silken, cylindrical cushion on the floor and didn’t say or do an untoward thing. The matchmaker went away with what they thought was a good impression, and reported back to them within the month and said that she had found a Khatri family of jewelers: they had a well-known shop in the city and a son who was working with his father and uncles.

The women of the Khatri family came to their house in a car, and it was grand, like wheels attached to a polished desk; the children of the neighboring houses came outside and touched it, and were scolded by the matchmaker, who was escorting the family and wore earrings and held a purse. She lifted curtains and opened doors and led the women into the house, made introductions and asked for tea, then went herself into the kitchen. There she encountered Daadi and told her that she had a very good feeling. And Daadi said, “Allah-willing, Allah-willing.”

At first Chhoti’s silence was assumed to be a shyness, natural and becoming in a girl. The chatter around her continued, and she didn’t contribute to it and didn’t look up. Her silence became conspicuous, then odd and unnerving. The boy’s mother asked her with a laugh if she was the kind of girl who stayed in rooms and read books. Chhoti said she wasn’t. Then her own mother asked her to fetch the platter of sweets, and Chhoti got up and went into the kitchen and returned with the platter, and took it from person to person like a child being made to carry out the particulars of a punishment.

The women sat with them for more than an hour. And then the wait came to an end: the boy’s mother rose, the girl’s mother rose, the boy’s mother smiled at the girl’s mother and was led outside by the matchmaker, who walked ahead of the Khatri family and said that she was going in their car. At the gate she looked at Daadi and said, “Allah will help you.”

And Daadi said, “He will,” and watched them get inside their car, one after the other, until they were all inside and the doors were shut, and the car was roused and went away, and she was able to shut the gate and bolt it from inside.

The matchmaker came back to collect her fee. And after that she wasn’t summoned. In the house a feeling of defeat had settled, and they had decided and said to one another that it was best to give the girl some time.

In spring Daadi had her third child, a son, and was able to move out of the home she shared with her husband’s family—a cramped and unpainted house in Mughalpura, a house in which seven people lived out of three thinly partitioned rooms—and was able to move into a house that she had built for herself on a bigger plot of land, in an area where dark mango trees had once ranged, and where now, in the clearings, more and more houses were getting built. She brought Chhoti to this house and took her from there to the bazaars: they went to the sabzi mandi and bought fruits and vegetables from stalls, to the meat market on Mondays and to Anarkali and the Tota Bazaar on good days, when the weather and the mood matched. Sometimes they went into shops and bought things for the children, and Chhoti made suggestions and showed her tastes and inclinations. It was at her urging that they went to the Regal Cinema and saw a film called
Qaidi
with Shamim Ara in the main role; afterward Chhoti sang the song with her chin raised, her voice quavering, her hand held out like a professional singer’s and turning at the turns.
There is more to life
, she sang,
than romance, and there are pleasures other than those of love. So, my love, don’t ask me to give you that first kind of love.

She sang it well. And that made her more tragic, more painful to behold. She was showing a spirit and a willingness that was ultimately addressed to no one, and was settling into spinsterhood, a life of futility and dependence.

Daadi had a friend in those days, a girl called Seema who had been with her at university. It was Seema who told Daadi about a landowning family from a small village in the Okara district. Seema said that the boy, or man, considering his age, had divorced his first wife, who had borne him no children and with whom there had been a property dispute; the wife had been his cousin and that had complicated the divorce. But it was done now and they were looking for a girl, and were willing to consider a girl from the city as long as she was ready to live in the village and observe purdah. Seema said they were old in their ways, and their holdings, though they seemed unremarkable when compared to those of other landowning families, had been gradually acquired and were safe.

Daadi encouraged Seema, and Seema arranged a meeting between the women of the two families. And it was decided then that Chhoti would wed Uncle Fazal in a small nikah ceremony, with just the families and the qari present, and would go away to live with him and his family in the village.

“Then what happened?”

Daadi said, “Then
buss
. She went to live in the village and is living there still.” She had placed the lid on the oval box of photographs and was holding it in her lap.

I said, “The End?” It was the sign that appeared in large white letters on the TV screen when the story had run out and the last action or gesture of the actors was held in a trembling stillness.

Daadi thought about it and said, “Yes.”

I said, “Happy ever after?”

And Daadi said, “That was our intention. But who knows what tomorrow will bring? Good things happen and they go bad from neglect, and bad things happen and sometimes they lead to good things. There is no ever after in these things. One can only do one’s work. And one can pray. One must always pray.”