The Wish Maker (10 page)

I told my mother.

She said, “Who told you?”

“No one.”

“Tell me, Zaki.”

I gave no answer.

“You are seven years old,” she said. “You will behave like a seven-year-old.

I will not have you snooping around.”

“Sorry.”

“And she has no business,” said my mother, “putting these things in your head, because she is an old woman and you are a child. There is a difference. And she bloody well ought to know it.”

When Chhoti next came to the house she was taken to my mother’s room and engaged there in tones of cheery indignation. In the course of their meeting Chhoti’s language grew coarse and her jokes became bestial, and the laughs these drew from my mother were appalled and also joyful, since for her a sharp tongue in an older woman of that background was a sure sign of victory. They stayed in these roles until Chhoti began to speak of her daughter. She said that she worried because hers was an only child, a girl, and was being raised so far away from her. It was necessary to keep her away from the village but no less troubling.

“There is no need,” said my mother, “for you to worry. We are here. And you have done the right thing by sending her to the city. She goes to a good school, she has exposure, and these are good things. You are opening up her future. You must look at it like that.”

It was an afternoon in October. My mother was sitting cross-legged on her bed and was writing on typed sheets of paper that were piled in her lap. She was editing: the articles were due at the office before the end of the week, which had almost ended, and the notes she was making now were hurried and illegible.

“Do your work,” she said.

I was writing
My name is Zaki Shirazi
along parallel dotted lines in the school notebook.

“I don’t want to anymore.”

“You have to.”

The windows in the room were open, and the smell of burning rot from somewhere in the neighborhood was sweet and distinct.

“I want to go outside.”

She frowned at a long sentence in her lap and crossed it out, and made a note beside it. She said, “You can’t.”

“Why?”

She didn’t answer.

Then she said, “What’s happened?”

Samar Api was standing before her with her arms stiff by her sides.

“What’s happened?” said my mother, and put away the papers.

Samar Api said, “I went to the bathroom.” She closed her mouth and looked at me.

My mother said, “What happened?”

“There was blood.”

“Come with me.”

They went into the bathroom.

And they returned.

“It’s nothing,” said my mother. “It’s normal.”

Samar Api stood near the bathroom door and kept her hand on the doorknob.

“It’s not normal,” I said. “I’ve never had blood in the bathroom.”

Samar Api was crying.

“Zaki!” said my mother.

Samar Api sat on the edge of the bed and cried now with her face in her hands.

My mother said, “It’s normal for women!” She went across the bed to Samar Api and stroked her scalp. Samar Api’s crying became emotional, an act of release. My mother hugged her and swayed her and made a steady shushing sound. Samar Api sniffed, snorted, pulled away from my mother and rubbed her eyes, then ran the back of her hand across her cheeks.

Her eyes were swollen but the tears had stopped. She looked up and sighed. And then she stood up and began to move away from the bed.

“You’re an idiot,” she said, going away. “It’s normal for
women
.”

Soon after that she had her first waxing, which happened at the end of every month and was performed by a woman called Parveen, a Christian who lived in the small employees’ colony behind FC College and came to the house on the back of her husband’s motorcycle. Her implements were contained in a shiny brown bag, and were taken out after doors had been locked and the curtains of windows drawn. Parveen talked while she performed the waxing, describing the bodies of her other clients, the singers and actresses and wives and mistresses she claimed to know intimately, outlining their proportions with her hands and divulging the locations of their moles. Sometimes, while she talked, there were other sounds from the room, the sound of tearing cloth and screams of pain. But Parveen went on talking, and talked afterward in the kitchen as well, where she smoked a single Gold Leaf cigarette and was given food and drink on a special plastic plate and in a steel glass that were kept separate from the others, even from the already separated utensils used by Barkat and Naseem, who said they had to maintain the separation because Parveen was a Christian and had a flat nose and very dark skin, which made her an untouchable. So later, when Parveen had gone, the plate and the glass were taken outside and washed under the tap that was used for washing clothes, and were then carried back into the kitchen and placed in an isolated corner on the shelf above the stove.

Samar Api’s first waxing was anticipated for days; on the day itself her door was locked. There were sounds: Parveen talking, Parveen waxing, then a rip and a scream, and Parveen saying it would hurt less the next time. The waxing was slow and took up the afternoon. And, when the door opened in the evening, it revealed a room that had been cleared of evidence: Samar Api was sitting on her bed in a long cotton T-shirt and short shorts, and the legs were long and smooth and drawn up like hills.

“Look,” she said, and trailed a fingertip along a calf. “It’s soft and smooth.”

She began to exercise and stood on Friday mornings behind my mother, who had set up the TV and the VCR in her room. They wore tracksuits and stood in poses of attention, waiting for the woman to appear on the TV screen.

“Come on, everybody,” said Jane Fonda, and bent. “Can you feel it?”

“Feel it,” said my mother.

“Feel it,” said Samar Api.

And she began to walk, and went to Race Course Park with my mother in the evenings. The broad dusty track went around a hill and a lake, where people went boating, and was lined with old trees that gave gnawed shadows at dusk, shadows that deepened as the walk progressed.

“Tell a story,” said Samar Api.

“Which one?” said my mother.

“A love story.”

It is a memory of walking under trees in the dark, of hearing the names of lovers whose love was doomed from the beginning; and of watching—a girl, a shadow, walking with a woman’s shadow, and repeating after.

3

My mother was friendly with unusual women. Most drove their own cars and went to offices, and dressed in ways that were not conducive to improvement, since there had been no initial attempt at decoration: the fabrics were often frayed and threadbare, the colors faded, the shoes plain and heel-less. The sandals were of an inexpensive local variety and were everywhere displayed on wooden racks outside shoe shops. And the jewelry was sooty and dull, and irregularly shaped, like the jewelry worn by primitives, and clanked clumsily when a head was turned or an arm lifted and waved. Most of them worked for nonprofit organizations and institutes, entities with names such as APNA and SAPNA and SURAT and SUCH, and went to conferences and seminars and presented papers and made proposals for the increased funding of their projects. Others were lawyers and journalists and were not invited to conferences, and maintained a friendly rivalry with the researchers, whose work they praised for its complexity and fineness. The women shouted when they agreed and shouted when they disagreed and came to the house in droves or not at all: they required situations and discussions, and they came to the house when these were available. Then the driveway filled quickly with cars and the veranda resounded with noises, women talking and walking and shouting and pulling chairs, sandals squinging and the door repeatedly opening and banging.

“I am not paying,” said Daadi, “for the repair of that door with my money.” She was lying in bed with her feet crossed at the ankles and her arms crossed over her chest.

Suri stared at the carpet and said nothing.

“It’s too much,” said Hukmi, and held her temples.

Daadi said, “There is a limit.”

Suri shook her head and smiled faintly.

“Too much,” repeated Hukmi, and widened her eyes in genuine wonderment. “It is just too much.”

In another part of the house the noise was crowding, the voices all speaking at once and the glasses clinking with the ashtrays and the air souring with smoke, the sour joviality that had descended now on the gathering. Someone was listening to someone else who was making points on her fingers and saying, “There are three strategies for getting out of the provincial quagmire . . .”

It was on a day in the summer holidays that the cars began to arrive. I was sitting with Barkat on the bench outside the gate and playing cards with his friends. They often gathered in the afternoons to play game after game of Chaar-Chaar, a variant of Bluff that gave quick results and had the added thrill of gambling. But there was no money to bet; the players were gardeners and drivers and chowkidaars, men who worked in the houses of the neighborhood and earned small salaries, and were free to make outlandish claims—cars they didn’t own, wives they didn’t love—that brought extreme consequences: there were cries of jubilation and excited handshakes and silent slides into depression when the results were declared. And there was magnanimity in a winner’s voluntary surrender of his acquisitions, as well as a perverse joy in losing, which came when a player’s wealth of possessions had been exhausted. The present game had progressed to the sixth round, and the stakes, though imagined once again, were rising.

The first honk came from afar. It was a black Toyota Corolla that displayed a large, bolt-shaped dent on its bonnet and was known to belong to a lawyer friend of my mother’s.

Barkat went to stand by the gate.

The lawyer labored with her window, which was jammed and lowered haltingly, and asked to know if my mother was home.