The Wish Maker (14 page)

And it was one of those moments when, by belittling the desires of other people, they had happened to agree with each other.

Otherwise they themselves were those people, the ones with the desires, the ones who felt belittled and ridiculous. It was almost physical, that feeling, when Papu spoke of the things he had left behind in Kanpur, his home, which was now a part of India. He said he had lived in the best house in the best lane of a mohalla, a neighborhood, with his father and mother and brothers, and had studied at the best university. But his father had died, and his mother had announced that they were going to move to Pakistan. She wanted to send Papu first, and Papu, being the eldest and the only married son, had felt it his duty to abide by her wishes. He left most of his things, his books and medals, his best clothes and shawls, his gold and silver tilla-worked shoes, in his room in a tin trunk. His gold-plated watch he left with his mother, who promised to keep it until he returned. He always thought he would return. It was inconceivable then that he wouldn’t.

He took trains. They took him from Kanpur to Agra, Agra to Jodhpur, and from Jodhpur into Sindh. The train compartments became crowded. He looked past his window and saw desert turn to desert, and his mind filled with foreboding. He had a little money, and his clothes and his diploma were in his suitcase. He kept the suitcase between his legs. He closed his eyes and tried to think of the city that awaited him, a city he had never seen but had to envision in that moment for his own sake.

“Brother,” said a voice.

It was the old man sitting across from him. He had asked Papu earlier to consider some items, some things he had with him in a cloth bundle.

Papu said he wanted nothing from the man.

“Oh,” said the man, as if hearing it for the first time. “Oh, I see.”

The train went on shuddering on its tracks. Papu closed his eyes again. And again the man disturbed him, until Papu, unable in that crowded train to change his seat, had to sit with his eyes wide open, his face turned resolutely to the window and his ears unresponsive to the man’s increasingly maudlin appeals.

Zakia said, “Did it get any better?”

And Mabi said, “It didn’t.” She knew because she had been with Papu on those trains. She said that in Karachi they had had to sleep in camps that were set up in public places, camps that lacked water in the dry season and were flooded in the rainy season. When people protested they were beaten with batons and tear-gassed. Mabi said it was ironic, and told Zakia, when she asked for its meaning, to look it up in the dictionary.

Then she had to look up “irony,” and the word had three meanings, of which the third Zakia recognized at once: irony was “a literary technique in which the audience can perceive hidden meanings unknown to the characters.” It was like the time when she had wanted to build a sand castle and had told Papu, and Papu had said, “I don’t think you have the initiative,” and it was like a pin going into a bubble. Many people were ironic, and Zakia decided that she hated it when they were.

“I hate it when you’re like that,” she told her friend Nargis at school.

They were standing outside the canteen. Nargis had just seen a film in which the woman took off her shirt, and was describing it as if it didn’t even matter.

Nargis said, “You’re oversensitive.” And then she said, “It’s just a film.”

And it was implied that Nargis, whose family was rich, was used to such things, whereas Zakia had yet to make the acquaintance of those kinds of pursuits.

Zakia said, “I know it’s a film. I’ve seen many films.” She said it calmly. She was good at doing to Nargis what Nargis did to her—an inverted challenge in which the seeker pretended to possess the knowledge that was eluding her.

And Nargis retreated, and became coy and merry and said, “I know, I know.”

They were together in school. Then the time came for university, and Nargis was enrolled in a well-known women’s college in America.

“I’m going to the East Coast,” she said in an exaggerated American accent. She wasn’t excited and was listlessly packing her things into a suitcase. Zakia had come by to help, to sit around and stand around.

“I’m not sad or anything,” said Nargis.

Zakia saw that Nargis was preparing. She said, “Of course not. Why should you be sad? You’re lucky.”

Nargis said, “I know,” but with too much meaning and feeling, so that it exposed her own conception of luck as being reliant on the lack of it in other lives.

Zakia said, “Home is home.” And her composure, though it upheld her dignity, could do nothing about her own sense of failure, which on this occasion led not to resignation or disengagement but to a clear new feeling of deprivation.

“You’ll have fun,” she said.

And Nargis said, “No, I won’t,” and sat down on the bed and began to cry.

Zakia stayed in Karachi. She went to her university in the morning and came back in the evening. Hostel life, which seemed to provide many thrills, was not hers, and studying beyond the memorization of passages and the making of notes and the planting of those same notes in the end-of-term exams was not appealing. It was a time of slowness, of slow-passing hours and slow-passing days, in which the search for new meanings was not encouraged and led to nothing, until repetition itself became a way of living, of waking in the morning and taking the bus to university and eating in the canteen with interchangeable people who had interchangeable preoccupations and concerns, and of walking back alone in the afternoons and witnessing sometimes a scene of excitement, students gathered outside the campus to protest the election results, students rioting and clashing with police, the screams and the violence, which she never saw directly but acknowledged like everyone else who read the newspapers.

“It’s changed so much,” said Nargis when she arrived for the summer holidays. Her hair was short; she was reading a book called
The Second Sex
.

Zakia said, “I know what you mean.” But she didn’t. There had been a military takeover, the prime minister was in jail, and it had all happened in some other place. Her own life went on.

Nargis said she was shocked to see a decent-looking man being interrogated at the airport by uniformed officials for carrying a bottle of whiskey in his suitcase.

Zakia said, “It’s banned now.”

Nargis said, “I
know
it’s banned. It’s just not something you
perceive
until you
see
it with your own eyes.” This way of speaking she had brought with her from America, where everything was expressively recounted with eyes and mouth and hands.

Zakia said, “It’s not that bad.” And she meant only that the changes hadn’t yet entered the consciousness of people like herself, who didn’t require bottles of whiskey and didn’t walk around in airports with suitcases.

Nargis said, “No, no, you’re right. We shouldn’t get worked up like that. I mean there’s so much
more
that’s happened, it’s not just alcohol, you just have to look
around
here . . .”

Later she told Zakia about her friend Alice, who was black and a lesbian and was in the habit of settling Nargis’s head in her lap and playing with her hair. “She calls me her doll,” said Nargis.

Zakia didn’t ask any questions.

“You’re shocked.”

Zakia said, “Not really.” She didn’t know about those things.

Nargis said, “But that’s not who I’m having an affair with.” And she then told Zakia about Moeen, who was some years ahead of her and studied at MIT, and lived in a place called Kendall. “He’s from Lahore,” said Nargis, and explained that they had met at the home of a family friend, a boy who went to Tufts and lived in an apartment on Beacon Street. “There are all these people there,” she said, and it was tempting and dismaying at the same time, “all these people you either know from before or have friends in common with. You meet them everywhere you go. It’s like here. It’s a small world.”

Nargis went back to America in August. And the next time she returned she was in love with Moeen, and in Karachi things were the same: the military was postponing elections and the prime minister was still in jail.

“I don’t know,” said Nargis, “if I could live here now. I don’t know how you can.”

She came back in March. Her hair had grown back to its old length. And she was angry. Her parents didn’t want her to marry Moeen, who was not a Bora and whose parents owned only a carpet shop in Lahore. But Nargis had arrived at her own conclusions and had decided to do what she had always wanted to do. “Which is to change things. Take things into our own hands. We have to. The personal is political.”

She was planning a trip to the mountains and wanted Zakia to go with her. They would stay with Nargis’s aunt, a widow who lived in a large, empty house in Nathiagali. Moeen would be there. He was going with his friends. But Nargis was telling her parents only that she was going to get some air.

They took the morning flight to Islamabad. Nargis had stayed up the previous night because she was talking to Moeen on the phone, and was now fully asleep. Zakia sat beside her in the window seat. She had brought
Middlemarch
, a book she had just begun to read. It was written by a woman who had assumed the name of a man, and in a high rambling way that at first was difficult to follow; but Zakia had stayed with it, going in and out, and was settling now into the ever-expanding world it described. The light from outside was bright and flooded the pages in her lap. She saw the texture of the pages, the minutely hewn paper on which every letter stood out like its own little act of creation. It was an aspect that had been there all along but one she had noticed only now, in the light. She stared at the pages and saw only textures, and then had to unremember them in order to go back to the meanings, which required absorption.

The plane landed in Islamabad. A car was waiting for them at the airport. There was a Pathan driver, an old man in a shawl with a tough, fair face and henna-red hair, and an elderly maidservant who smiled a lot and said that she recalled Nargis as a child. They drove from the airport to the hills, and then directly into the hills, which were small and rocky and shrubbed, and then became greener and grander as the winding road ascended into the mountains. Nargis, awake after her nap, was sitting at the back with her legs folded beneath her on the seat, and was smoking a cigarette and talking to the maidservant about her daughters and their children and the state of public hospitals in the villages. The driver was driving. And Zakia was looking out of her window and following the depths of the valley, which plunged just past the railing and suggested only violence, as though in some ancient era God Himself had pounded a fist into the earth. A flood came to mind. It would fill the valley and transform it into an ocean. And then she saw that that was what the ocean already was: height filled with water. So height and depth were the same, depending on where you stood. But here the thought became mundane. The world had expanded and then contracted and made Zakia its witness.

They reached the house at night. The gate was open and was flanked by fortune-teller lamps that glowed with hazy light. The car went in along the meandering driveway, and Zakia got out and was shocked by the chill, and then by the smell, which was like grass but greener, more distinct, the smell of pine trees roused by rain.

They went inside the house, Zakia following Nargis, who pointed out the china on the shelves and the old books in the cabinets and the paintings on the walls, which were done by the same artist in the same style, and showed shepherds and shepherdesses in traditional Punjabi clothes standing under trees and below clouds that bulged like ice cream. It was a famous style, Zakia knew, and she saw its appeal too, which was that of meritless indulgence and escape.