The Wish Maker (49 page)

“Please wait,” said my mother. “I have brought the documents with me.” She was looking for them in her handbag.

“But, my sister,” said the coordinator, and brought his palms together. “Why search for a way when you have the destination? Please, I have told you. I cannot help you: my hands are tied.”

The test took place that afternoon in an upstairs room, in the presence of an elderly invigilator: he wore a beige safari suit and walked slowly up and down the room, his hands behind his back, and glanced repeatedly at the clock as though he had somewhere to go. I was unable to finish the math section and was unfamiliar with the Urdu expressions, which had to be converted into sentences. At last I turned to the English test. I read the comprehension passage and answered the questions, then considered the last part, the composition, which asked for a story about human nature. I wrote about a pair, a boy and a girl, younger boy and older girl, who live happily in a house on a hill but are separated by fate and spend years trying to find each other. The boy becomes a forlorn judge; the girl becomes a mother of four in a village and lives a life of smothered respectability. But they are denied a reunion and eventually die tragic, unrelated deaths. “The mourners gathered at their graves,” went the last sentence, “and prayed for their departed souls, but who knows what lies ahead, beyond the ashes and the dust?”

The papers were tied with string and submitted. Two weeks later the package containing the results was delivered to the house: I had failed in math, failed in Urdu and done badly on the comprehension passage, but the story had earned full marks. “Superb,” was the comment, and beside it a mad swirl of a signature, attributed in typing to the principal of Wilson Academy, who had read the essay and approved my admission into the school.

Daadi said it was Allah’s doing.

My mother said it was talent.

And Suri and Hukmi said it was all very well but stories alone couldn’t get you through your life.

It was the first day of school and I was late.

“Naseem!” cried my mother. She went through the veranda to the kitchen, then hurried back in her nightgown, looking around in delayed distress. We emerged from the dressing room after having fussed over the tie and the shirt, which had not been ironed to Daadi’s satisfaction.

“It doesn’t matter,” my mother had said.

But Daadi had insisted, condemning the characteristic inattentiveness, and sent the shirt back to the kitchen.

“He is a growing boy,” she had said. “And this is not that kind of school. It is not for your amusement.”

My mother said, “Why don’t you iron it, then? Why don’t you pay the fees? Why don’t you take over everything?”

And Daadi had said there was no need to have a fight in the morning.

Barkat drove me to the school. It took a while: the school-related traffic began on the canal and lasted all the way to the campus gates, two of which had already closed; it was late now, past the time for the first bell, and the few cars on the road were rushed. Barkat had to make an effort to reach the last gate before it was shut, and I ran after the other boys, who were marching far ahead in lines to the clanging of the bell.

The lines led through the hallway and out into a large circular field behind the main building. And here was the noise of so many voices speaking at once and the sight of hundreds of boys all dressed in the same clothes, the same blue shirts and green ties and pale khaki trousers. They were assembled in separate squares, each made up of five rows, the shorter boys ahead and the taller ones at the back. Beside every square stood a teacher: they were mostly men but there were some women too, and they were looking around and nodding and smiling at one another in acknowledgment.

I joined the first square and stood at the end of the last row. It was a hot, damp morning, the sky low and overcast; I tried to loosen the knot of the tie but desisted when this began to draw attention. The other boys had starched shirts and neatly knotted ties, their hair combed and wet—they had showered in the morning, and some had even deodorized their armpits and now gave off the smell.

An older boy was going around with a register and a pen. He wore a blue and yellow badge on his breast pocket, a mark of his separateness. There was an importance in the way he lingered and tapped the open register with his pen.

“Shoes,” he said.

“Sorry?”

He looked up from under a frown. “Your shoes,” he said, and pointed the pen.

I looked at my shoes. They were black, like the ones shown in the brochure. “What’s wrong with these shoes?”

He began to blink. “You have no respect?” He was suddenly close, his jaw jutting forward. “What’s your name?” His breath was sour and heated. “What’s your name?”

“Zaki Shirazi.”

He wrote it down. “You come see me after this.” And he resumed his rounds with an attempt at preserving the initial pace.

“He’s the monitor,” said the boy to my right.

I said, “What’s he going to do?”

“Nothing. He’s new. He has to try.” This was a charitable assessment, not lacking in potential for humor or depth. I looked at the boy: he was narrow and of medium height, his hair falling forward in thick slants and into his eyes, which were small and appeared to squint out as if at something bright.

I said, “You’re new too?”

But he wasn’t. He had been at the school for a year, but had developed an illness in the second term that had forced him to take leave and repeat the grade. “Same class,” he said. “Same teachers. Just different kids.” He smirked at this twist in his fate.

“I’m new,” I said.

“I could tell.”

We stood in the line and watched. A monitor was assigned to every gathering, which the boy, whose name was Saif, said were houses: first the monitors all walked out of their assigned houses and into the center of the field, where they stood in a line, their backs arched and their chests out and their palms stiff by their sides. They were waiting for a sign, which came now from a podium on the semicircular balcony that jutted out of the brick building like a lip: Coordinator Hassan was dressed in a dull gray suit with the buttons closed and the shoulders puffed out; he surveyed the assembly below and gave a single nod. And together the monitors cried:

“Attention!”

The silence was abrupt. The movement of a bird in a tree was painfully distinct: it flapped and tore inside the leaves and then fell away with a patter of its wings.

Coordinator Hassan leaned into the microphone and said, “There will now be a recitation from the Holy Quran.” His voice echoed in the microphone; he held both sides of the podium, and his small body appeared to lift behind it.

A boy went up to the podium from behind the coordinator, took his place at the microphone and began to recite. His eyes were shut, and his body swayed to the drawn-out sounds, which were in Arabic. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Translation! In the name of Allah! The most Beneficent, the most Merciful! Praise be to Him! The Lord of the worlds! The Beneficent, the Merciful, the Master of the Day of Judgment! Thee alone we worship! And Thee alone we ask for help! Show us the straight path! The path of those whom Thou hast favored! And not of those! Who earn Thine anger! And nor of those! Who go astray!”

The boy gave no bow or word of ending, and withdrew abruptly into the shadows behind Coordinator Hassan, who stepped up again to the podium and began a speech about the importance of fairness. Throughout the speech his head was bowed, so that he seemed to read it out from his notes, and when it was done he looked up brightly and said, “And now for the principal, please.”

The applause was like a waterfall crashing; the principal stood at the podium on the balcony and presided over the sound until, at a wave of his hand, it stopped.

He was a tall, regal-looking man with full white hair and a lush mustache, and with the slow, considered movements of tested authority. “It was Eliot,” he said, his voice booming across the field, “who asked the question ‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ It is you, my sons, who must remove that final question mark”—he caught it in the air in his fist—“and make of it a motto for yourselves. Disturb the universe. Disturb it by all means. Things will fall into place.”

The forceful applause returned.

“That was the principal, please,” said the coordinator over the noise, reclaiming his practical place at the podium.

The principal stood beside him with his chin raised.

The coordinator was looking at his notes, waiting for the applause to die, and now spoke in a flatly cheerful tone: our hockey team had just returned from Bahawalpur; the boys had participated in the All-Pakistan Inter-School Hockey Tournament and gone as far as the semifinals; they had brought back some trophies that were now going to be distributed; could the captain please come up and hand them out?

The assembly was dismissed after the national anthem. I waited in the house enclosure, which disintegrated as the boys headed out haphazardly toward the hallway. There were five minutes between this bell and the next one, and I was waiting for the monitor to return, to resume the argument about the shoes and award the appropriate punishment.

“He’s not coming,” said Saif, who was waiting with me. All around us the noise continued as the crowd slowly drained away.

“Then he’ll come tomorrow,” I said. “It’s better to wait now.”

“He won’t come tomorrow,” said Saif.

We began to walk away from the abandoned enclosure.

“What’s wrong with these shoes?”

“Nothing wrong.”

“So? Why’s he acting all worked up like that?”

“He has to. He’s new.”

We walked through the field, then along the crowded hallway, where confident voices rose continually above the hum; boys embraced and shook hands and stood chatting in doorways; some were talking to teachers just inside the filling classrooms, and looking around as they talked, taking up their places again after the void of the summer holidays.

I asked Saif if he knew the monitor.

“Not yet,” he said.

We reached the building where the junior classrooms were situated, a low brick block with recessed corridors under a series of arches. The noise here was pronounced. Saif and I were in the same class (though he was repeating a year) but in different sections: every class was divided into seven sections, with no apparent method of differentiation; it was management, Saif explained, and it would undergo additional changes in the coming weeks, with boys being shifted from one section to another until the arrangements were defined.

“I can come to yours,” I said.

“You can’t choose,” he said. “The teachers will decide.”

The second bell had sounded and the commotion in the corridor had increased. Teachers were visible now, coming down the stone path from far-off buildings. Saif and I parted in the noise and went in opposite directions. I was in 9B, a room with a broken door, smashed in from long ago and left to hang at a slight angle in the doorway; the room itself had a high ceiling with grooves at the top and a single fan that dangled on a long cord; a dead fireplace sat to the side, a blackboard was hung at the front, and lots of chairs with thin legs, and with slate-like surfaces attached to the arms, were littered all around. The room had filled up at the front and in the middle, and only some chairs at the back remained. I took the one near the window, which was made of a rusty old mesh and dented. A dead wasp lay on its back in a corner of the window-sill with its legs curled up. It had wandered in past the mesh and never found its way out.