The Wish Maker (8 page)

“I already said I won’t.”

“So say it again.”

“I won’t tell people.”

“Say ‘Godpromise’.”

“Godpromise.”

She went on writing in her notebook. “Godpromise!”

“Fine,” she said, and came forward and whispered it in my ear: “His Vee Oh I See Eee.”

She was madly in love with him. The picture frame on her bedside table was made of two small hearts that touched when they folded, uniting her with Amitabh. And the walls were swarming with posters and stills from his films, including images from the very early years, which were culled from cracking magazines bought in secondhand bookshops and continued to fill the darkness beneath her bed. Every month she returned from the market with fresh supplies of
Stardust
and
Filmfare
and
Cine Blitz
and
Movie Magic
and flung them lavishly on her bed. The magazines contained lively articles with titles such as “The Old and the Beautiful,” and used a recurring stock of terms to report on the Indian film industry, of which “vixen” and “half-baked” were Samar Api’s favorites. “Oh, please,” she would say to the mirror, “you’re nothing but a half-baked vixen.”

On film nights we extracted the VCR from Daadi’s cupboard and set it up with the TV in Samar Api’s room. Our places were on the floor, before the TV, on cushions taken from beds and sofas. And the films were often familiar and contained songs and dances and dialogues we already knew by heart. But we watched them with a peculiar excitement, anticipating and also inhabiting the culminations, which we re-enacted afterward: I lay on the floor and held an empty 7UP bottle and waved it about like an inebriated Amitabh. And she gasped with surprise and shrugged her shoulders like Parveen Babi in
Namak Halaal
, then wrapped herself in a bedsheet and stood on the bed and wept, the lonely Jaya Bhaduri of
Abhimaan
, her hands repeatedly drawing the veil over her head. She was suffering then, a woman in pain; she settled in a chair before the mirror and began to touch her face, her neck, recovering from her sadness. And then she was running down a staircase and the lights in the ballroom were coming alive and the guests were all turning now to look, and she was Jayaprada in
Sharaabi
, her dress billowing in the wind, and she was arriving at last to end the long wait of the night:

 

 

 

 

She danced and she danced.

And she danced and she danced.

Until she fell to the floor in a tangle of exhausted limbs, sweating and out of breath.

“One day,” she pledged to the ceiling between breaths, “my Amitabh will come.”

“How do you know?”

“I know it.”

“You never know where life will take you.” It was something my mother had said.

But she was adamant. “You’ll see,” she said, seeing it in the ceiling, in the stars beyond. “I’ll find him.”

Samar Api’s parents lived in the village of Barampur. Her mother, my great-aunt Chhoti, was married to a man called Fazal. Uncle Fazal was very serious. It was Daadi’s description of him. And it was a compliment, because seriousness was a trait Daadi associated with virtue. But in Uncle Fazal that seriousness was a barrier to communication, a way of establishing his indifference to children. There was no cheek-pulling or coochie-coo with him, none of the appreciations that usually came from elderly relatives. His visits to the house were rare; he came only when he had business in Lahore. And even then he was distant, forbiddingly impressive, a fair-skinned man with a rounded, puffy face and thick eyebrows that merged in a frown, creating an expression of persistent regret. He declined sweets and drinks and watched them closely when he did accept, never finishing his portions and considering them with his fingers like a man attuned to the subtleties of poisoning. In his presence this abstinence was fussed over but was later explained as the habit of an important man, a man who had served on zila- and tehsil-level councils and had twice won an election to the Provincial Assembly; in the village Uncle Fazal was seen frequently in his jeep with his subordinates, driving on dusty roads and dismounting near the banks of canals and ditches, walking with his hands behind his back, and stopping to ask questions about the water that was going into the fields. He was seen at the offices of councilors and magistrates, sometimes at police stations, where he went to get people released or to file the reports that got them arrested. It was explained as the nature of his work; it was what men like him were expected to do in the village. And it brought people to his house in the mornings, people who waited on chairs in his courtyard with their requests and their complaints.

My mother said he was a feudal.

“What’s feudal?”

“Feudalism,” she said, “is one of the oldest systems in the world. It’s when a small group of people own a lot of land and make other people work on that land but eat up all the revenues.”

“What’s revenues?”

“Money made from doing work.”

“Is Uncle Fazal a bad man?”

“Not
bad
,” said my mother. “He just follows a very old system. Most of our country is rural. All rural areas are run by feudals. For them everything is property: land, labor, women. They have a lot of power. You have to see it to believe it.”

“Is Uncle Fazal a rich man?”

My mother thought about it and said, “He’s not
that
rich. He’s got a few hundred acres of land.”

Daadi laughed and said, “It’s more than some other people have.”

My mother said Daadi was materialistic.

“What’s that?”

“It’s when people go after money. It’s a historical concept as well. You should read about it when you’re older.”

“Why can’t you tell me now?”

“I’ve told you: it’s when people go after money, when they want money above all else.”

I said, “What happens in the village?”

She said, “Agriculture. And exploitation.”

And I didn’t ask for the meanings.

Samar Api’s descriptions of life in the village were unimaginable. She said she wasn’t allowed to sit with her male cousins, she wasn’t allowed to speak until she was spoken to, she wasn’t allowed to step out of the house, not even to go into the garden unless she went with a servant. “We have to wear chadars when we go out,” she said. “Even when we’re sitting in the car. And I can’t even see through it. And it’s so bloody hot in Barampur, like a bloody oven. There are goats and cows everywhere. Sometimes, when our car goes through the town, strange women come out on the balconies and stare at us.”

Chhoti didn’t complain about the village when her husband was present. But afterward, alone, she expanded on opinions she hadn’t expressed earlier, and gave reasons for things that had only been mentioned, things that had appeared to be of no importance until she had talked about them many times and revealed their enduring significance. My mother said people behaved like that when they became self-conscious. “It’s a feeling,” she said. “It comes to people who feel like they don’t belong somewhere.”

But Chhoti did belong to the village, and described the things that happened there with tormented involvement. She talked about the wives of her husband’s relations, women who, like her, lived in big houses in small, poor places and were known to one another because of their seclusion—a requirement for the women of landed families. It was a life, Chhoti said, of waiting in cars and houses, of waiting for occasions that required the playing of roles: the women went to weddings, funerals, milaads, sometimes to watch the ashura ceremonies that were hosted by Shiia families in neighboring villages. They heard stories and told stories that led to new understandings, to engagements and marriages that also broke and caused feuds. There was a tendency for things to get distorted that resulted from people’s unavoidable reliance on one another; there were only so many good families of so many good castes, and it was impossible to break out of some affiliations without imperiling others. Chhoti was grave when she described the things that happened to transgressors: their cattle were stolen, their fields were burned in daylight, their homes were broken into, and their women were abducted and paraded in the streets. She said such things were common in the villages, where customs were old and went largely untouched by the new ways that developed continually in the cities.

Daadi heard the stories but said afterward that Chhoti was suffering from the very ailments she had set out to diagnose. (Chhoti suffered already from the medical problem of diabetes, which was described as a problem of the blood, a matter of highs and lows, and was monitored every few months in the blood tests she came to have conducted in Lahore, the results reflected in the changing colors of her face and in the dramatic expressions of her eyes and mouth.) Even while Daadi listened to the stories and appeared to be involved, she withheld the hum of sympathy, which she said came too easily to those who hadn’t lost things of consequence.

Daadi was of the opinion that Samar Api should live with her mother and father in Barampur. She said it was important for the girl to grow up around her parents and acquire a sense of proportion.

But Chhoti said, “No. I will not allow it. You don’t know what they are like.”

“They” were Uncle Fazal’s three sisters, who had families of their own and lived in different parts of the district. They had each approached Chhoti for her daughter’s hand in marriage for one of their sons, and had later tried to portray her refusal as a provocation.

“They are vultures,” Chhoti said. “They are waiting for me to die. Then they will take everything.” Her eyes were wide and twitching with tears.

My mother said, “It’s a good thing you’ve kept your daughter away from that repressed environment.”

Chhoti was grateful.

But Daadi affected indifference, and said, “Very well. Keep her here. Let her breathe this air. Let it get inside her lungs. What ideas she comes to possess here are of no importance.”

Daadi told the story of Chhoti’s life one afternoon when it was hot and still outside, a dry, dusty day in late spring. The curtains in Daadi’s room were drawn. She was in a mood; she had brought out the oval box of photographs she kept in a locked compartment of her cupboard and was contemplating the days of her youth, moments from the past that were quarantined in black and white and bounded by sharp gray borders. Various relatives appeared, old now and young then, rival truths that were hard to reconcile; a photograph testified to the freshness they had once possessed, their erect postures and their stark, unlined faces. But it didn’t sharpen their gruff voices, and didn’t make them pace the room in youthful demonstration. They remained immiscibly old-and-young, virile bodies with aged souls.

“Look,” said Daadi, “so pretty we were then.”

It was a picture of two girls in a curtained room, both dressed in saris, both rigidly beautiful; the eyes were averted modestly and the smiles were subtle, barely smiles. Daadi stood in the front with her hands clasped at her waist. And Chhoti stood behind her with a hand on Daadi’s shoulder, leaning forward with her lips parted as if about to make a suggestion. The effect was momentous, an artist’s rendering of an interaction between two celebrated mythical beings.