The Wish Maker (25 page)

“Obstacle” was a mixture of “obvious” and “bicycle.”

“Then what is it?” said Mabi. “You have to explain it to me.”

“I don’t have to explain anything,” said my mother. She had stood up and was walking toward the door.

“Zaki!”

“Sorry,” I said, even before she had finished saying my name.

She was looking at me now, and looking as if for the first time, a boy in rolled-up jeans who had nowhere to go and was not the obstacle in her path.

“O God, sorry!” I was crying now, bawling.

“Shhh,” said my mother, and lifted me up in her arms.

Her happiness was not in question. There was cause for thought, moments that belonged to a time when she was someone else, a girl in a Polaroid with the depths of mountains showing behind her. But even that was tainted by the incipient story of my life, as though I had been in her womb all along and was pushing her from the start toward the axial event of my birth. I couldn’t ask her if she was unhappy because I couldn’t ask her to say that I was not the cause of her unhappiness.

“Samar Api,” I asked one night, “do you think she doesn’t get married because of me?”

We were lying in wicker beds on the roof. It was August, the last month of the monsoon. All day the rain had been slashing and insistent; trees swayed and fell and lay like logs in the roads, which were swamped. The overhead wires had snapped; there was no electricity in the neighborhood and the house was dark.

On the roof the night was clear. The clouds had left the moon in light.

“Not at all,” said Samar Api. “She doesn’t do it because she doesn’t want to. Her heart won’t let her. There’s nothing like your first love.” She closed her eyes and released a sigh. It merged with the breeze.

“Samar Api?”

She moaned.

“Make a wish.”

She cupped her hands, brought them to her mouth and whispered the wish, which was chosen without deliberation, without hesitation, then blew it away and watched as it went up into the night.

5

Morning assembly at an all-girls English-medium secondary school was usually rowdy: it took regimentation and surveillance and repeated warnings from the microphone on the headmistress’s elevated podium to settle the hush. But this was the first day of the first term of the year, a new start by all accounts, and already the square was filling up with early arrivals: the girls stood in lines beneath the leaves of trees and were glad to find a flow in the atmosphere, the confused camaraderie that follows the relief of finding an altered sameness. Talk today was lively and encouraging and frequently involved a mention of Tara Tanvir, a new girl who had joined their school.

“I keep hearing her name,” said Samar Api.

“She’s got a rep,” said Snober Tariq factually. She herself was plain and unremarkable, an ordinary girl who was not in the running for things but had developed an ability to circulate.

“Have you seen her?” asked Samar Api. It was a way of furthering a conversation that had begun.

Snober Tariq said she hadn’t, and added that, to the best of her knowledge, neither had anyone else.

The bell rang and the girls went to new classrooms. They were heightened, practiced, discerning, alert to signs of progress, the way bodies had shed shapes and grown into new ones; and the voices were kinder, less jutting in their own-ness, so that talking to one another felt easier and also surpassable. Samar Api took an empty desk at the back and settled her bag on the floor. She took out her new books and smelled the pages.

Mrs. Waheed came in and said, “First of all I would like to say welcome back.”

Her hands held the topmost edge of the high teacher’s chair at the fore of the classroom. She was wearing a green-and-yellow floral-print sari, a thing for which she was known, and her gaze sought to establish contact, then distance and order. “I would also like to add,” she said, “that we have a new addition to our class. She has just joined this institution and I have no doubt in my mind that you will make her feel at home in no time at all.” This kind of language was assumed to be an aspect of Mrs. Waheed’s specialization in English literature. She enjoyed using words like
prudence
and
prurience
and enjoyed writing long sentences in her stylish hand on the blackboard.

“You may come in, Tara,” said Mrs. Waheed, and stood with her hands behind her back.

In the doorway there was no one and the pause that followed was charged with challenge. Mrs. Waheed gave a smile that suggested her patience and experience as a teacher, then repeated her request without annoyance but also without the earlier note of invitation.

The girl came in. She stood against the wall with her schoolbag in her hands, her arms fair and rounded in the half-sleeved summer uniform and linked below her belly in a V as if against a chill in the room.

“Tara hasn’t made any friends yet,” noted Mrs. Waheed.

The girl was looking at the floor and at the fronts of desks.

“But I am sure she will make them.”

Other girls were smiling.

“You may sit down, please,” said Mrs. Waheed withdrawingly, and turned to the blackboard.

The girl began her walk along the column of desks, and was unfazed by the attentive silence. She seemed to live inside a wide-eyed imperviousness that caused a current of self-awareness to pass in her surroundings. Abruptly she chose an empty desk at the back of the room and let her schoolbag drop to the floor.

Samar Api saw that they were neighbors.

For some minutes they remained unacquainted.

Then the girl reached out a hand that left a ball of paper on her neighbor’s desk.

Samar Api unrolled the ball and read it.

Samar Api wrote,
Samar
.

The paper was crumpled and returned.

Samar Api wrote,
Thanks.

Samar Api wrote,
Why?

Samar Api wrote,
I think its a nice name

And Tara Tanvir wrote,
Thanks babe!!
And then:
So tell me something!!

Later that day we met in Daadi’s dressing room. I had tripped on the gravel path at school and had scraped my knee, and was looking for the bottle of Dettol in Daadi’s cupboard.

“What are you doing?” said Samar Api. She was following the slow progress of a lipstick in the wardrobe mirror.

“Finding Dettol.”

“What happened?” Her interest was minimal.

“Fell.”

“Oh no.” She frowned at the mirror in a version of concern.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“My makeup.”

There was nothing more to say.

“Guess what?” said Samar Api.

“What?”

“Today I had the shock of my life.” She made a smack with her lips.

“What happened?”

“I met this new girl, Tara Tanvir. She’s got a rep.”

I said, “Wow.”

She screwed on the cap to the lipstick and returned it to the shelf, watching herself perform this neutral function.

I said, “What’s your rep?”

And she said, “I don’t have a rep.” She altered her expression in the mirror to one of piety and innocence, then changed it abruptly to one of trauma and shock.

“What’s mine?”

“Boys don’t get reps. Only girls get reps. Like only girls get boobs.”

I said I understood.

“I’m going to her house in a while,” said Samar Api. “She has a cinema in her basement. She invited me herself. You can come with me if you want.”

Tara Tanvir lived in Cantt. She gave directions to her house on the phone: it lay beyond the bridge in one of several small lanes, beyond a chowk that was popularly associated with a bakery. The gate was made of beige wood and the house number was engraved on a large brass plaque that was nailed to the outside wall. The rest was reassurance: the way was short; directions would suffice; the thing to remember was the bakery, beyond which everything was simple.

We left the house at sundown, when the roads were filled with vehicles returning from the day’s destinations. Our driver, Barkat, was obliging and succumbed again and again to manipulations. Briefly, on the bridge, the traffic eased; then it thickened again. We emerged from the blockage into Cantt, where the roads were in night and the trees stood in pools of shadow, the houses large and lit behind high walls and gates. We passed the army school for boys, then the army school for girls, dark properties that were guarded by gates with the army emblem of two locked swords. We passed the famous bakery, where cars had gathered under bright neon lights. And then we were lost. The road was dark again and the lanes were unmarked and sprouted continually on either side.

“We will find it,” said Barkat.

“Oh, yes,” said Naseem, imitating his manner and voice, “we will find it.”

“O God!” cried Samar Api, because the time for our arrival had passed.

But we found the house: the lane led directly to the gate, which sat in a warm haze of lighting. Barkat corroborated the house number on the plaque and honked.

A guard appeared in a uniform. A rifle was slung in its casing behind his shoulder. He bent, placed his head in Barkat’s window, took our names and went back inside.

There was a wait.

“They take precautions,” said Naseem. Her window was down and her elbow was settled on the felt. It was hard to tell from her tone if she thought this to be an affectation.

“Security,” said Samar Api.

Barkat nodded.

The gate opened and the car went in. It was another straight drive into a porch. The walls to either side were thick with ivy, high and obscuring, like walls in a maze. The car stopped behind two others, a jeep and its low relation, both parked in the shaded porch with their backs turned. The rest of the house rose above and behind.