The Wish Maker (68 page)

By night the mourning had stopped. The professional mourners had been sent outside and were sitting on their haunches in the courtyard. They had been fed, and were waiting to be paid. A servant brought them tea in steel cups. Their voices were heard inside, the low voices in which they spoke to one another and mourned other things.

Inside, the men and women were sitting in separate rooms. Daadi was slumped behind the door in the women’s room and was no longer crying. Her eyes moved along the walls of the room, and she seemed to want to say things. But she said nothing and only moved her eyes.

The women came and went. The new wife was giving instructions to a tired maidservant who was visible only when she carried the tray of pastries back into the room. The sisters-in-law were watching her.

And the other girl was not in the room.

They were not asked to stay the night. They had done what was required of them and were expected to leave. The tired maidservant showed them out.

“The girl,” said my mother. “Where is she?”

Daadi was held between the maidservant and my mother, and was lurching.

The maidservant pointed to a door they were passing and said, “She is inside.”

“Petrol,” said Barkat in the car. He was pointing to the needle, which was in the red.

My mother told him to stop at a station on the way.

They left the house, the lights still on inside, some cars still parked outside. On their way out they passed a family who was now heading back to their car. They were not recognized, and the looks were searching but brief.

The PSO station came after the first tollbooth. Barkat took the money from my mother and got out of the car to monitor the infusion. Daadi and my mother were alone in the back. Daadi had her face turned to her window. The silence ended when Barkat returned to his seat and revived the engine. He took the receipt from a boy in a gray PSO uniform and a green cap, and held it out for Daadi to put in her bag.

“I’ll take it,” said my mother.

The road was empty. The occasional lorry came and went at a swaying speed, its lights dimmed. Otherwise the view was dark and unmediated. They drove for some minutes, their windows rolled up. At the first curb my mother told Barkat to reverse the car. “Turn it around,” she said. “We have to go back.”

“What have you left?” said Daadi. Her voice was dry and emerged in a croak.

“We have to go back,” said my mother. “Turn it around.”

The car turned at the curb.

They were sitting in the drawing room, Uncle Fazal, his wife, his three sisters and their sons. They stopped talking when my mother came in. They had parted with their last guests, and the mood of reception was still in the room.

Uncle Fazal placed his palms on his knees.

My mother said, “We have come back to take the girl.”

Uncle Fazal continued to look at her and moved his palms back and forth along his knees.

My mother said, “Where is she? Where have you kept her?”

One of the sisters said, “The girl is ours. She was taken away once and it was against our wishes.”

Another sister said, “We have learned from our mistake.”

“Where is she?” said my mother.

And the third sister said, “If you think we will part with our children you are mistaken.”

“I have raised her,” said Daadi.

She was in the room, and was standing by herself in the darkened doorway.

One of the women laughed and said, “But who will feed her? Who will clothe her? Who has paid for her all these years? We have. Our brother has.”

Another sister said, “They think they can take what is ours.”

But Daadi said, “I will feed her.” And then she said, “I will pay for her. I will clothe her. I will take what is mine. I don’t want what is yours. I want what is mine.”

My mother said, “We will do a court case. We will send the police here and have this house raided.”

The women were looking at Uncle Fazal.

My mother said, “We will put it in every newspaper in the country.” Daadi said, “Allah has taken from us. Now He will give.”

One of the women said, “Don’t come here when it all runs out, because we will not be giving.”

Her brother said nothing.

Daadi said, “Where is the girl?”

And my mother said, “Come with me.”

They went out of the room and through the hallway, which was emptied now of voices, and to the door they had passed earlier in the night. And they opened that door and went in.

It was a small room, bare, unlike the room in which she had grown up. The floor was tiled and uncarpeted. The thick curtains were drawn. A small brass lamp was kept alive on a table by the bed. She was sitting on the bed, wearing the same black clothes she had worn in the day, her arms folded around her knees, which were drawn up and pressed into her chest. Below the bed, next to her sandals, was an opened suitcase; and it showed the clothes she had folded and kept inside as though, on the basis of what she recalled, she had led herself to believe that they would come.

20

News from home makes you aware that the flow of memory has stopped. A life you no longer live is a life you no longer know. But you rely on memory to inhabit, however falsely, what now lies outside your experience; and every homecoming involves the puncture of memory’s airy bubble.

News came in e-mails from my mother. They had headings and indentations, and contained mildly musical paragraphs that were marked by a novice-like formality of tone.

I didn’t go home for the winter holidays. The ticket was expensive and I didn’t want to ask my mother for the money. It was a two-week recess anyway, so it made sense to take the Greyhound bus to New York. We went in a group of eight people, and slept three to a bed in a tiny sublet in the East Village. (The owner had gone on holiday to the Caribbean.) I took pictures with my new camera and sent them as attachments to my mother from the Internet café downstairs. And she wrote back with more news.

In May, Daadi wrote a will. And she agreed to pay for Naseem’s accommodation in Jeddah, because the return tickets from the Zakat Ministry had arrived.

Naseem and her husband left for the Holy Land on the PIA flight from Lahore, and returned the following week with two Samsonite suitcases that opened and closed with buckles. For weeks afterward Naseem claimed that the weight of her suitcases had made the porters stumble. And she attributed this weight to the cartons of the Aab-e-Zamzam, the holy water, which she stored in Daadi’s fridge and served in glasses to the people who came to congratulate her.

I wasn’t going home because I had won a grant to conduct research in New York City for my sophomore tutorial. (I had said in the essay that I wanted to explore the discursive space allotted to Other cultures in the American media.) The grant paid for housing and airfare, and I saved some money by sharing a room.

At the start of the autumn term I became a subscriber to
Women’s Journal
. My copy arrived by post and was always two weeks late. But I read the editorials and wrote to my mother:

And she replied:

In October I joined the editorial board of a magazine called
Peace and Justice
. The day after I joined it the editors participated in a sit-in with the janitors who were working on the campus. And the week after that we led a protest march from Kendall Square to Downtown Crossing, waving flags and chanting slogans to condemn the occupation of a country with which I had no connection, but which I had found, in this time of new kinships, similar to my own. I was in charge of magazine publicity, and took their flyers everywhere. I went to the Nineties Dance, to the South Asian Dance, to the Islamic Society Banquet, and I went to the Queer Dance, and stood beneath the colors of the rainbow, which were mine.