The Wish Maker (43 page)

We danced slowly, then freely and audaciously.

“O God, Zaki!” She was laughing. It was a new song with quick beats and frank sexual lyrics. The woman behind us was dancing alone, and with a strange intensity, her eyes closed and her shoulders shrugged and her hands pronged and shivering.

And the others:

A fat, balding man in a suit, dancing with his fists next to a tall, thin woman in heels.

A couple who were dancing together but looking around vacantly.

Four girls dancing in a circle that went round and fell back, and fell forward, and fell back again.

“He’s here,” said Samar Api. “Don’t look.”

She fell into my arms.

“Now throw me up, throw me up.”

I threw her up.

“Don’t look.” She was dancing, smiling and looking around and laughing too, but she was clenched with awareness.

“Where is he?”

“Behind me.”

I looked.

“Zaki,
don’t
look.”

We went on dancing.

“How am I looking?”

“Good.”

“Just good?”

“Very good.”

“Okay, now look. Look behind me. Can you see him?”

I looked behind her at the tables, where a fresh wave of dancers rose with exclamations of surprise and delight at the change of song, and rushed forward from different directions, obstructing the view.

“Can you see him?”

I was trying. The people had blocked the steps; more and more were crowding on the platform.

“What’s he wearing?” I said.

“A suit.”

All the men were wearing suits.

She said, “He’s sitting at the table behind me with his friends.” But she was dancing in front of me and had her back to the tables.

I danced on tiptoe and saw the men at the table, then the girl walking up to the table. It was Tara Tanvir. She saw me, looked away, hitched up her dress and sat in the lap of a man in a suit.

“Did you see yet?”

I said, “No, not yet.”

The song was in Spanish. The dancers had decreased.

She said, “Let’s walk past the table.”

I said, “Don’t look, Samar Api.”

But she looked. And she turned around at once, her face not showing what she felt.

She said, “Keep dancing.”

We were. The foreign words of the song gave no sign of abating.

She said, “I can’t, Zaki.”

I said, “Let’s go.” And I took her hand and began to break past the dancers. She was behind me, and I could feel her following closely, but I couldn’t see her face as we passed the tables and kept walking.

We passed the table.

And Samar Api laughed.

But they weren’t looking.

“Samar Api . . .”

“Just walk.” She was walking very quickly now, past the tables and under the curving archways of the façade, then down the elevations and through the brick passage, and finally out the big doors.

“Samar Api! Wait!”

She was running. She ran all the way to the ricksha, parked where we had left it, in an unnecessarily distant alley where it was most unlikely to be seen, and she climbed in and told the driver to take her home.

The ricksha started.

“Samar Api . . .”

But she snatched her hand away and kept her face turned to the window, where she had begun at last to cry.

12

WOMEN’S JOURNAL,
21-27 OCTOBER 1993

And from there the editorial went on to impart advice: the prime minister must take “concrete steps” now to ensure that the women of Pakistan were healthier and freer in the future, starting with the abolition of the anti-women laws instituted by the military under its so-called Islamization campaign. (There was a photo feature in the middle pages on “The Dark Laws,” which showed women working in the countryside, women handcuffed, women holding their heads and looking out at the world from behind metal bars.) Then the prime minister must turn her attention to health care and family planning, especially among women in the rural areas, where literacy levels were unacceptably low; then to education in general and to the secondary schools and universities in particular, which continued to rely on textbooks poisoned long ago by the anti-democratic forces. And finally the government must rescue the economy, which was sinking, and work to secure the assistance of foreign donors and development organizations to set it right.

Above the text, in place of the usually satirical cartoon, the cartoonist had composed a solemn picture: the restored prime minister was emerging from a crowd of her supporters, the dupatta worn high above her head, and was holding the green-and-white Pakistani flag, which gleamed incredibly with light and rippled like corrugated iron in the winds of change.

“Three years,” said Daadi, “have gone by and none of it has happened, not one thing. But is anyone asking? Does anyone ask?” She held out her hand and shook it demandingly.

“Princess,” said Suri. “She thinks she is a princess.”

“Oh, yes,” said Hukmi gravely, as though this were a charge that ought to be investigated.

But
Women’s Journal
continued to address its exhortations to the government, displaying a patience that in other publications (right-wing rags, partisan pamphlets) had already run out; another English weekly had published a two-page spread called “The Million-Dollar Question,” in which the mug-shot pictures of politicians were accompanied by the amounts they had allegedly earned in bribes, kickbacks and commissions.

A black-and-white photograph of the prime minister’s husband was at the top of the page.

“Yes,” said my mother. “We know there is corruption. There has always been corruption. But why do we look now? Why are we looking
only
at this government? Why don’t we look at the corruption of those who rule with guns, and have ruled with guns for so many years and are even now waiting in the wings?”

Daadi said no one was waiting in the wings.

“You are sadly mistaken,” said my mother.

I said, “Who are the guns?”

“The establishment,” said my mother.

“It is a word,” said Daadi, and held up a hollowed hand. “A long, empty word.”

My mother said it was absurd and hypocritical, like pardoning a gang of known robbers who raided a house at regular intervals and then punishing a little girl for daring to steal an ashtray.

“Ashtray,” said Daadi one morning, and flung the newspaper across the table. The headline was UK COUNTRYSIDE PALACE SAID TO BELONG TO PM AND HUSBAND. There was a picture beside it of the discovered mansion, brown and withdrawn in the mossy English countryside, and an inset picture of the couple: she was sitting on a sofa with her hands in her lap and he was standing behind her in a black suit.

“Little girl,” said Daadi. “And little boy. Jack and Jill.”

She laughed.

“Hand in hand,” said Suri. “
Hand
in hand.”

The
Women’s Journal
editorials became subdued and conflicted, and readers began to seek explanations for the magazine’s continued engagement with a discredited government. One reader, a resident of Karachi who was now pursuing a Ph.D. in political science at a university in Sydney, Australia, wrote to say that the magazine’s silence was “tantamount to quietism.” After that the news pages began to carry investigative reports on the alleged misconduct of sitting ministers, often with enlarged, damning quotes from members of the opposition. A highlighted rectangle at the bottom of the page insisted that the views expressed in these articles were those of the sources quoted, and did not necessarily reflect the editorial position of the magazine.

But the content spoke for itself.

Late one night the staffers converged in the veranda, and the chairs they sat on formed an elongated circle. The smoke from cigarettes rose silver in the dim light. A man and his companions had been killed in Karachi; the police had stopped their cars and opened fire, and were now saying that the victims had fired first. But no policemen had been killed in the encounter.

A man was saying, “It is murder. It is state terrorism. And it is
her
government,
her
police.”

A woman said, “It is her enemies who have done this. No sister can order the killing of her own brother.”

And another said, “It is politics. They will do anything.”

My mother was listening.

“Daadi said you saw the light.”

We were sitting before the borrowed TV in my mother’s room. She was watching the unbiased news channel, a discussion program called
Debrief
.

“Daadi would say that,” she said.

The Indian journalist was now arguing with a politician on the panel, a fight over the fighting between Hindus and Muslims. The other two panelists—an elderly man and a corpulent middle-aged woman in a golden sari—were both trying to look unsurprised, trying to stay unbiased for the viewers.