The Wish Maker (18 page)

Moeen came back and said, “They don’t have it here.”

The painter said, “What?”

And the other girl said, “I don’t
believe
this!” in a high, tremulous voice and with a delight in her disappointment.

“They don’t have it here,” said Moeen again. He was genuinely surprised.

Zakia said, “It’s banned,” and wanted also to say that this was not the East Coast of America.

“That’s the whole bloody problem!” said the small little thing with the high voice, and Zakia thought that she could tie her up and punish her and experience a new kind of pleasure.

“I’ll go to your house and get it,” said Nargis practically.

And the painter said, “Don’t you touch my bartender.”

After that the people did come. And the dancing began. Nargis returned to the crowded ballroom and had to push and squeeze past the bodies. Zakia was standing with the others in a circle, which extracted a commitment but also gave protection. Nargis produced a small plastic bottle from her handbag; the liquid inside it was clear.

“Ooh,” said the painter, and rubbed his palms.

“Shall we?” said Nargis.

They opened the bottle and drank from it.

It came to Zakia.

“Come on,” said the painter.

Nargis said nothing.

And the other girl laughed and said, “Don’t force her,” and then looked away in a kind of dare.

Zakia took the bottle, held it, watched it, put it to her mouth and closed her eyes.

“She’s doing it!” cried the painter, and clapped.

She scowled. The taste was vile but the heat inside was new.

Nargis said, “Take it from her.”

The painter said, “Give it here!”

And it became a joke in which she was newly acquainted with alcohol and they were all oldly acquainted, and they were trying to take the bottle from her and she wasn’t letting go.

“Give it here!” cried Nargis, and laughed.

And Zakia drank more of it.

Then she was dancing with them in the circle, and then outside the circle, dancing first with Moeen, a friendly little dance, and then an extravagant dance with the painter, who held her and danced slowly and majestically, with exaggerated swaying movements, and the look on his face was a mock-serious one that she first found funny and then sad; and then she was laughing through her tears and they were laughing with her, and she knew she was separate from them but also had nowhere else to go, so that crying became the only way and swept over her and was fulfilling.

“Excuse me,” she said, and went past the bodies.

And they didn’t stop her.

She cried until she was outside, beyond the warmth and back into the cold. She saw that he was sitting on a bench in the darkened patio, smoking a cigarette that he now threw away.

“I was waiting,” she said.

In the dark her tears were invisible.

“I came to find you,” he said. “You were with your friends.” And then he said, “I thought you might not like it . . .”

She walked over to the bench and lowered herself carefully into the place beside him. She sat very straight, with her back stiff and her hands folded for stability in her lap. The chairs in the garden were empty. The people had all gone, but the lights in the hoops around the trees and in the jagged lines along the walls were still on.

She spent five more days in the mountains. And on the seventh day, when they were returning in the same car, Zakia tried to explain to Nargis what it was like.

“It’s this feeling,” she said, and found that she could say no more. She knew it well enough by now to recognize the things it did to her.

“It’s love,” said Nargis.

That was sudden and frightening.

“Not yet,” said Zakia.

“I hope not,” said Nargis.

“Why?”

“Because,” said Nargis, and shifted around complicatedly in her seat, “there’s a price to pay for that kind of thing.” She was implying that she herself had paid that price.

“I’ll pay it,” said Zakia.

And Nargis said, “Good. I’m glad. That’s the right approach. I’m really glad you’re thinking like that.”

The car took them down to Islamabad, and from there a plane took them up in the air and south to Karachi. On the way Zakia thought about Sami, thought about meeting him again, then thought about her parents and decided that there was nothing to tell them yet.

At home her parents were waiting. Mabi was in the kitchenette, Papu was on the balcony. Her younger sister, Shazreh, was not at home. She was out with friends. But it was late. Zakia couldn’t imagine Mabi letting Shazreh stay out that late. She wondered if they had changed in her absence.

She deposited her suitcase by the door and was struck by the smallness of the suite. Seven days in the mountains, in that large house, with open spaces everywhere, had shown this to be a confinement. She went to the balcony and parted the billowing curtains. Papu was sitting in his wrought-iron chair and reading a book under the burning light.

“I’m back,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, and looked up briefly from his book. “Do sit down.”

She took the chair next to him. In the silence the breeze was like an intimation.

Mabi came to the balcony and sat down on the third chair. They were all here now, all except Shazreh.

“Where’s Shazreh?” she said.

“That’s what we have to talk about,” said Papu, and tossed his book on the table. “You tell her,” he said, meaning Mabi.

Zakia’s first thought was of a hospital.

“Why should
I
tell her?” said Mabi. “She’s your daughter too.”

It wasn’t a hospital.

“Fine,” he said, and cracked a knuckle. “Your sister has run off.”

“Run off?” She looked from one parent to the other. It was too good to be true.

“Not run off,” said Mabi, who had prepared these words for the world, and did not have the ability to distinguish between that world and the members of her own family. “She is with a man. A man who wants to marry her. It’s been going on for quite some time, apparently.”

“Who is he?” asked Zakia. She was surprised because Shazreh hadn’t given her the slightest indication.

“I don’t know his name,” said Mabi, though it was unlikely that she didn’t.

“His family is in Canada,” said Papu.

“Well,” said Zakia, “that can’t be bad . . .”

“Good or bad, I don’t know,” said Mabi. And she sighed.

Zakia was tempted to leave. But here she only had her room. Her time with Sami was suddenly imperiled and she felt she had to tell someone.

“I say we get them married,” said Papu with an awkward movement of his fingers that seemed to enact the elopement as well as parental absolution.

“What are you talking about?” said Zakia. “She’s still at university. She has to finish her degree.”

“Degrees don’t matter,” said Papu.

“Yes, they do,” said Zakia.

“Didn’t do anything for
you
,” said Mabi.

She felt the wound and then the numbness. The life she had glimpsed was lost.

She got up from the chair and went inside, back into her room.

Nargis graduated in June and came back to Karachi. She was going to marry Moeen. Her parents tried to dissuade her, failed, and disowned her. She moved with some of her possessions to his house in Lahore.

Zakia went to stay with her.

“How are you?” she said.

“Oh, I’m fine,” said Nargis. She was living in the upstairs portion of a small house, in a room that had a large, square opening in one of its walls for an air conditioner that was on its way. The leaves and bark of a tree outside were visible through the opening.

“Have you talked to them?” said Zakia. She meant Nargis’s parents.

“No,” said Nargis, and it was difficult for her to say it but not as difficult as it would have once been. “I haven’t.”

Nargis had hardened. It made Zakia nervous.

“Will you?” She wanted to ask the right questions, the old soothing questions, the ones with the obvious answers.

“No.”

They were quiet. It was afternoon, and the sounds from outside were of the birds in their nests.

Then Nargis said, “It’s not a free country.”

And Zakia sighed.

But Nargis said, “It’s not,” and went on to describe the new punishment for thieves: they would have their hands severed by special surgeons, who had to know the extent of the amputation and the location of the incision, whether it would go up to the wrist or not. Nargis said she had learned about it from a woman she knew, a lawyer who was trying to challenge the new laws in court. “She’s an NGO type,” said Nargis. “They only talk about politics.”

Zakia said, “You’re making friends here.”

Nargis put out her cigarette in the ashtray and said, “I suppose I’ve made friends. I’m trying to make them. They’re all Punjabis here.” And she smacked her forehead and delivered a line in a Punjabi accent, which was crude and comical. Then Nargis said, “When are you going to meet him?”

And Zakia said, “Tonight.”

“Are you going to his house?”

“No, no,” said Zakia. “His mother is there.”

Nargis said, “It’s good like that. Stay away from the in-laws.” And she described some of her own encounters with her mother-in-law, who resented interference but also complained when Nargis didn’t show an interest.

“You can’t win,” said Nargis. “That’s my conclusion.”

Zakia sighed again, as though she understood. Her own view of Nargis’s new life was tinged with fascination.

She said, “What should I wear?”

“Where are you going?”

“Some food place. He said it’s outdoors. Please come with me.”

They went that night to a place called Paisa Akhbar. It was far away, far from Nargis’s house, which was in a place called Gulberg, and far also from Sami’s house, which was on the canal and which she hadn’t seen. They went in Sami’s car, a small car, but there were four of them in it and they fit. They went to a stall that was surrounded by long metal tables and plastic chairs, and sat at one of the tables in the dark street, Nargis and Zakia on one side and Moeen and Sami on the other, and ate nihari with naans. The nihari came in small plastic bowls that had smears on their rims. It was a thick meat sauce; it slid repeatedly down her wrists.

“Eat like me,” said Sami, and showed her.

The next day she said to him, “What do you think of Moeen?”

“Good fellow,” he said.

“What do you think of Nargis?”

“She’s nice,” he said. “She’s a good friend of yours.”

She thought it was an odd thing to say.

“Where are your friends?” she said.

He said they were in various places.

“When will I meet them?”

“When they’re here.”

She accepted this nomadic life. He was serving in a government institution; it wasn’t even a government institution, it was its own entity and had its own requirements. But her idea of Lahore was attached to her idea of him, and she needed him to make it come alive.