The Wish Maker (35 page)

In the car Tara Tanvir said, “Your grandmother doesn’t like me,
na
?”

It was her way to ask a question, even a difficult one with a potentially hurtful answer, in a simple and carefree way that didn’t leave room for elision.

I said, “No, man, you’re crazy, obviously not.”

We were parked in her jeep outside an audiocassette and CD shop in Fortress. More than an hour before we had delivered Samar Api to Jamal’s house, which had a high white gate with sharply pointed spears along the top. Samar Api had said to collect her in an hour or so, though by that she usually meant longer.

“I know your grandmother doesn’t like me,” said Tara Tanvir. “I know she hates my guts.” She made guts sound especially horrible, but then laughed at the end into her hand. It implied bigheartedness on her part, or obliviousness, it didn’t matter; she sat up now, brightened by her own high spirits. “So tell me,” she said, “what all have you been up to?”

I told her about my two cousins Isa and Moosa, with whom I had grown friendly over Eid.

She wanted to know their ages.

I said, “Twelve and fourteen.”

“Too young, man!” she cried, and we both laughed loudly, reducing Isa and Moosa to a juvenile experiment, a leaping lesson in adulthood.

“I have these cousins,” she said, “Tina and Sara. They’re coming to visit from America. We’ll all go out. You’ll like them. Very your type. Tina more so than Sara. But Sara’s out of her mind!” She touched her temples. “Boozingshoozing full time, and she’s not like even thirteen!
Kassam se
. Tina’s more down to earth, definitely more than Sara, older and more quiet-and-reserved-type.” She nodded understandingly. “I guess when you have siblings you become like that. One’s always more this than that.” The thought led to others. “You and Samar are like that.” And she went on to explain the difference: Samar Api was more intelligent but in a grown-up way, a way in which girls grew up much faster than boys, who were generally more blunt, though Tara Tanvir herself was more like boys, then, because she liked to say what was on her mind.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Does Samar ever bitch me out?”

I said, “No, Tara . . .”

Her look was unrelenting.

“No way, man!”

“You’re telling the truth,
na
?” She was solemn now.

“Of course, Tara . . .” There was no other way.

“I think,” she said, untying and then retying her hair into a ponytail with practiced swiftness, “that it’s good to know what people think. Like even with your friends you should know. I don’t know. I guess I like to find out beforehand, like I want to know before it’s all over town, you know? Like I do
not
want to find out on the last minute.” She waved it away. “Like I’m so
glad
to have you guys”—she hugged it to her heart—“I’m so
grate
ful to have real friends. Like Samar and me are like this”—she held up two fingers in a knot—“and I
thank
my lucky stars for that. I just don’t ever want it to go wrong, you know?”

It had crossed over and gone beyond.

I said, “Ya, man, you should, definitely you should.” And it had gone nowhere in the end, but still had the shape of a discovery, of something that was agreed upon and settled.

Samar Api climbed into the jeep and her perfume came in a gush.

She switched on the car light. Its dusty glow fell on her forehead, her cheeks and her chin, and brought them out as if for the first time. She was looking inside her handbag and frowning.

It was dark in the lane outside, the houses sharply outlined against the dusk. Somewhere a car roared, turned and vanished. Again the night was silent.

Tara Tanvir looked at the time on her watch and said it was late.

“I know,” said Samar Api. “Let’s go.” She put away the small round mirror, zipped up her bag and sat back in the seat. She looked at her window and sent up a hand to hold the strap.

The jeep was roused, and moved away from the high white gate with the spears at the top.

Tara Tanvir started the music. It was a song about a lover, sung by a girl, the words rapped behind her by a boy to the fast beat.

“What’s the latest?” said Tara Tanvir, and turned in her seat at the front of the jeep.

Samar Api said, “Nothing. We just talked.”

“About what?”

“Stupid things,” said Samar Api.

“Did he say I love you?”

“Not yet. But I haven’t said it either.”

“That’s good.”

The song had changed, and the same woman was singing about having sweet dreams at night.

Samar Api said, “He’s simple.”

“That’s always good,” said Tara Tanvir. “Simple guys are so much better at the end of the day.”

Samar Api was watching her window.

The jeep went past the houses and the lit windows, gathering speed as it climbed the bridge, and left the billboards and the blinking clusters behind them to the night.

“You know something?” she said.

I said, “What?”

“When the car goes on the bridge?”

“Ya.”

“It’s like everything becomes amazing. You know?”

I had no recollection of the experience.

She turned on her side in the bed and said, “It’s like you see everything at once, the houses and the sky and the trees and the long line where the sky meets the houses. Then you roll down the window and the wind is in your face, and the music is playing, and it’s like you’re so high. You know?”

I said, “Ya, ya.”

She sat up, placed her palms on the mattress, then stood up on the bed. She lifted the hem of her T-shirt and placed her finger on a small round bruise.

“He hit you?”

“No, dumbo,” she said, giggling, and then came down to whisper it in my ear: “It’s a love bite.”

She went out a few times a week, and not always with Tara, whose name was still associated in the house with truancy and the other unnamed outcomes of excessive freedom. So she said she was going to have her threading done at the beauty salon, and required Barkat to fetch her in two hours. And she signed up for afternoon classes with a mathematics tutor who taught in the Lyceum building on the canal. Once she had to go out for a friend’s birthday party at a restaurant, and there was no one in the house to take her; Daadi had sent Barkat in the car to find a plumber in Canal Park.

She called Tara’s house but Tara had gone out with her mother. The Far Eastern maid gave no time for calling back.

There was no one now.

She was desperate.

I called Isa and asked him if he wanted to go out for a drive.

They came, Isa and Moosa, and waited in their Swift in the driveway.

“Thanks so much, you guys,” said Samar Api. She was dressed for the birthday party: she wore black jeans and a black sweater with no sleeves. Her hair was straightened and fell to her shoulders and from there curled upward. She leaned in repeatedly from the back of the car to give directions to the restaurant, and Isa complied unquestioningly. Moosa was sitting beside him in the front and had the look of someone who is aware of being watched by many people.

“Smokes?” he said after she had gone. The drive was already a success, his role in it undisputed.

“She’s a nice girl,” said Isa. “We should all go out together, like in a group.”

The holy month of Ramzaan arrived that year in spring. Daadi went to the utility store in Main Market and bought a month’s worth of supplies, tins of Dalda cooking oil and heavy plastic sacks of sugar and salt and ground black pepper and chaat masala powders that came in colorful cardboard packs. An afternoon was spent stocking and stacking the many tins and sacks and boxes in the kitchen cupboards. An electric water boiler and a frying pan with a stainless-steel lid came from Al-Fatah; the pan was kept in a cupboard, but the boiler, which came with a one-year warranty agreement written out in many languages on a pamphlet, was stationed for convenience above the fridge, next to the tea bags and the jar of powdered milk.

At night there were sounds from the mosques, some nearer than others, indecipherable murmurings that overlapped continually, like the work of an untiring nocturnal species.

At twilight Daadi awoke. She switched on a lamp. With her feet she felt for the slippers by her bed, found them and wore them, and went into the bathroom to perform the ablutions. She said her prayers in the dressing room, then made her way across the veranda to the kitchen, where she ate the sehri meal in silence with Naseem. They were the only ones fasting. (Barkat claimed to suffer wind-related pains in his stomach and believed that they exempted him in his old age from observing the injunctions.)

At school the canteen stayed open. But it was sparsely occupied: the eaters came in sprinklings and ate their lunches quietly, away from the hordes of fasters, who played fiercely and competitively in the grounds and then went back to their classrooms flushed with thirst, seeking to make impressions on their teachers, who were mostly female and took note.

Fasting—A Pillar of Islam
.

It was a test we had to take in class. The higher marks went to those who had written from direct experience.

“This is absurd,” said my mother. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to see the principal.”

“No!”

“Why!”

“You can’t!”

“But why?”

“Just no, you can’t, please, you can’t . . .”

The sun drowned for the day and Daadi went to stand in the driveway. She walked along it once, twice, then continuously and at a pace that gave the activity the appearance of sustained contemplation. She stopped now, looked up at the sky, and heard the climbing call of the siren that signaled the end of the day’s fast.

The clattering kitchen cart brought food: samosas and pakoras and jalebis on plastic plates, fruit chaat and dahi ballay in bowls. But Daadi broke her fast in the old way: with a pinch of salt, a glass of water and a single shriveled date.