The Wish Maker (48 page)

It was agreed that Wilson Academy was the first choice.

“Most impressive,” said Suri boastfully, for she had been to the campus once. “They have grounds and grounds wherever you look. They have stables for ponies, houses for teachers. Oh, they have everything, everything.” She looked away and dispelled the temptation with her hands.

Hukmi said, “
Uff vaisay . . .”
and smiled longingly.

But the brochure made no promises, and consisted of only two glossy pages, the first with a faded image of an old clock behind the text, which gave a summary of the school’s history, its aims and objectives and the requirements for admission; and the second page provided a list of affiliated universities in Britain and America and Canada. A phone number and a fax number were given at the back for inquiries. There was no mention of stables or ponies.

“We’ll just have to go and find out,” said my mother.

The next morning she called up the admissions office and was told that the school was closed to visitors. It was open only in the summer, in the two-week window between admission tests and the announcement of results.

“We’ll wait,” said my mother. “You can stay in this school until then.”

The wait was long and daunting. A tutor was hired and came to the house in the evening for lessons in math and Urdu. My mother preferred to teach English herself; she divided the lessons according to the admissions criteria and anticipated the exam questions, which were unknown but fell broadly into the categories of spelling, grammar, vocabulary and composition. And, as the months passed and the efforts continued, a picture of Wilson Academy was assembled from what was generally known: the founding of the school in the nineteenth century by a British administrator, who had modeled it after the prestigious boarding schools of England; its passage into the hands of Irish missionaries, who ran it in the war years as if it were a circus, with public canings and whippings and colorful prize ceremonies; and then finally at Independence the school’s transfer to a local administration, which had since overseen an illustrious roster of cricketers and gymnasts and lawyers and industrialists and diplomats and civil servants. Other aspects were recalled distantly: Uncle Saaji had played tennis with a group of Wilsonians in his youth and remembered them all by name. “A fun bunch,” he noted nostalgically. “But they had discipline. Oh yes, they had discipline.”

Uncle Shafto said, “Fazl-e-Haq was my class fellow. His brother was a Wilsonian.” He had made the connection. He looked around now and nodded clinchingly.

“It is difficult to get in,” said Uncle Saaji. He knew because he had tried for Isa many years ago.

“But you should try,” said Suri, for she trusted in the likelihood and was unafraid. “There’s no harm in trying. You might even get in. You never know with these things.”

The Wilson Academy campus occupied almost seventy acres in an otherwise congested part of the city. There was a logic to its seclusion: the school had been founded at a time of aridity, when the irrigation systems built by the British were still spreading and much of the present city was still barren, an emptiness recorded amply in watercolors and drawings and later even in photographs, some of the first of their kind, developed to an attractively high contrast of blacks and whites. From the start the school had drawn the sons of the very best families, who had seen to the improvement of its surroundings: the road outside and the avenues of old, high, spreading trees—these had come up around the school, because of the school, and were tied to its legacy of public service; many of the city’s famous philanthropists had been Wilsonians, and had served on the school board, as well as on the boards of state schools and hospitals and public libraries. And so for more than a century the campus had resided in uncontested isolation, its noiseless acreage secure behind high brick walls and the tops of trees, only the crowning domes of its buildings visible to the outside world, the same domes that formed the school insignia, which was disseminated across a wide range of objects, including cutlery and wall hangings and a line of stationery that was recommended annually to alumni and made mandatory for enrolled students, who had to make their purchases at the school gift shop.

We waited in my mother’s van outside the gate. It was the rear gate and faced a narrow two-way street behind the campus. The high iron bars were painted black and sharpened into spearlike tips at the top and separated below by thin spaces, providing a view that was more obstructed than revealing.

“Why is it taking so long?” said my mother. She pressed the heel of her palm into the horn and held it.

A security guard appeared. He wore a beige uniform and a black cap, and walked up unhurriedly to the van.

“Admissions test,” said my mother.

The guard looked at her blankly, his hands on the exposed felt of the rolled-down window. He was a young man steeled to procedural silences; without a word he stepped back and brought out a notepad, wrote down the car number, then went back inside and opened the gate, and saluted as the van went in.

We followed a trail of sign boards, blue-and-white reproductions of THIS WAY TO PARKING that led along a winding path, broad enough to be a road. The evenly contoured hedges gapped abruptly and showed a ditch running on the other side. And the trees along the path were chalked up to the waist, with square tin signs nailed to the bark for identification: the names of the species were given in both Latin and Urdu, the scripts juxtaposed in showy equivalence.

We left the van among bicycles in the parking lot—there was no other car and still no sign of people; we went down a rutted old path and past the canteen, closed now, the stone benches outside unoccupied, then alongside a field that was smooth and vast, a hockey field or a football field—the rounds of competitive sporting activity were difficult to imagine on a day like this, with no cloud or breeze. We passed brick buildings that had gone over the years from what was still in places a soft pink to a hard, hot gray, the color of the granite path, which shimmered falsely in the distance with hints of wetness, the very thing that was missing.

A bearer in white clothes stopped us at the entrance to a hallway for questioning. He checked the name on a printed list, then led us through the hallway and showed us into a room with upholstered chairs.

A woman was sitting in a chair with her hands on her knees. Her head was covered and her eyes were closed. She was swaying and muttering. My mother sat on a tattered red chair, folded her hands in her lap and looked around with feigned interest. The room had a high ceiling and no windows, and was lit faintly by the blaze from outside; the ceiling fan groaned lethargically and gave no relief. The walls carried paintings of flowers and fruits and vegetables, and were made by the students, signed and dated in the bottom-right-hand corners; in some the paint had come off, had chipped or had started to peel, or had formed bulging pustules that sat within the glass malevolently, like sores, constrained by slim black frames all of the same size, so that some of the pictures had been decapitated in order to make them fit.

“Amma.”

A plump and sullen-looking boy stood in the doorway with a folded paper in his hands.

“Did you fail?” said the woman, and rose from her chair.

The boy stared at his mother, stared at the paper in his hands.

“Did you fail? Tell me now: did you fail?” She was shaking him by the shoulders.

The boy was crying.

The woman snatched the paper from his hands, looked at it, scowled at the boy and took his hand and hurried out. Their voices receded down the hallway, the mother shouting and the boy bawling like a much younger child.

I looked at my mother.

She was looking at the pictures on the walls.

My name was called. The bearer reappeared in the doorway and was brisk now and energized; he went making musical sounds in the hallway, glancing importantly at the brick walls, at the pillars and the notices up on the boards. He knew we were following. At a door near the end of the hallway he stopped and gestured emphatically with his palms—we were to stop here and wait. He opened the door and parted the curtains, went inside and drew the curtains again. A man’s voice was talking inside on a telephone, laughing and describing a hockey match the boys had won at a rival school. He mentioned the trophies, the team’s impressions, the undeniably good reception given by the host school, and then said nothing for a while, only “yes, yes” and “God’s grace” as he brought the conversation to an end.

He hung up the phone and said, “Yes, please?”

The bearer parted the curtains and we went into a museum-like room, with framed English poems and sayings on one wall, and a collection of shields and trophies on two sagging shelves, one below the other. Another wall was devoted to the framed portraits of men, first a set of faded white men, made distinct by the sharp jutting darks of hairlines and beards and mustaches—they were the early administrators. The Irish missionaries, who were harsh-looking and wore black cloaks with small white squares in their collars, followed; then came the men who had served since Independence, locals more at ease in these surroundings, gazing calmly and smiling occasionally. Their names and tenures were given on slim silver plaques below the frames. Only the last picture was undated, and showed a thin, balding man with lively eyes and lips sealed up in a smile, his expression one of childlike mischief or wonderment: he had the look of someone who has made a discovery and possesses it in the form of an unmade revelation. His name and title were given on the plaque as
Tabassum Ali Hassan, First Chief Coordinator, Wilson Academy.

The man sitting at the desk beneath the picture was frail and completely bald, his shoulders hunched behind him and his hands settled before him on the desk. But his eyes were still bright, and the smile, though twitching unconsciously at the corners, was still the presiding aspect of his expression, and promised both durability and resilience.

“Please,” he said, and waited for us to settle in the chairs.

My mother smiled and said,
“Slaamaleikum
.
”

“Tabassum Ali Hassan,” he said, and touched his heart. The gesture was perfunctory; it did nothing to the mask. He lifted a pair of spectacles from the desk and settled them on his face, and his eyes became magnified. “Yes,” he said, and picked up a pen. “Your name, please?”

“Zaki Shirazi,” said my mother.

“I asked him,” said the man.

“Zaki Shirazi,” I said.

“Zaki Shirazi, sir.”

“Sir.”

He waited as if for a retraction. Then his gaze relented and shifted to a notebook, and he located a page and took his finger to the bottom of it. “Yes,” he said. “And your age, please?”

My mother looked at me.

“Twelve,” I said.

“Are you lying?” It was asked in a disconcertingly tender tone.

“No, actually,” said my mother, and then remembered that she wasn’t supposed to speak. “Sorry,” she said, and covered her mouth with a hand. “May I?”

He was nodding.

“Yes, well: he’s actually still twelve, he’ll be thirteen in August.” She smiled and nodded.

“That means,” said the coordinator, writing it down in his notebook, “that he is thirteen. For our purposes. We select on the basis of age, you see. He will have to sit for the year-nine test.” He turned the page and continued to write.

“But he’s only twelve,” said my mother.

“My sister,” said the coordinator, and put away the notebook; his eyes were frank and uncomforting. “There is always a complication. But we cannot always make an exception.” He looked at me, and his smile returned. “He is a smart boy. That much I can see. In the end it is simple: if he is intelligent enough, he will pass the test. And if he passes the test, we will consider him intelligent enough to be in this school. It is the best philosophy.” And he laughed at the philosophy, a surprisingly robust laugh for a man of his proportions.