The Wish Maker Read Online Free

and to the fruit and vegetable stalls outside Pioneer Store, where they haggled for her with the vendors, since it was they who now managed her money. They took her to the doctor’s when she felt unwell but only when their own attempts to locate the problem had failed: they measured her temperature with a thermometer, took readings on the blood-pressure pump, stroked her back and monitored her posture on the bed. They were followers of physiotherapy and had replaced her mattress and had made her buy a new foam pillow that kept her neck straight at night. They regulated the items on her mantelpiece, the medicines she could need at any time and also the things she needed generally, the Swaleen pills and the packets of Johar Joshanda, which she drank every morning to kill the colds that developed suddenly in winter. The doctor had said that at her age it was necessary to take precautions. And for this reason the windows were kept shut, the heater was kept alive until night, and the tub of Vicks nose rub was always kept on the bedside table, between a tall cylinder of Tender Rose air-freshener and a framed photograph, old and spotted now, of Flying Officer Sami Shirazi, Daadi’s son and my father, who had been dead for more than twenty years.
    “I can’t sleep,” said Daadi. She was sitting up in bed. Her hair was spoiled. She had been changing the position of her head on the pillow, but the noise outside had gone on.
    “You’ll never say anything,” said Suri unhelpfully. She meant that Daadi was unwilling to go outside and stop the laborers who were setting up the marquee on the lawn. “You won’t say a word.” She lifted a hand and ran it unhurriedly through her hair. “You won’t say or do a thing.”
    Daadi said, “What can I say?”
    “You can say you will not have people in this house after two o’clock. You can say that, can’t you? This is your house too. You too have given for this wedding.”
    “We have all given,” said Hukmi grandly.
    Daadi frowned for a while, then said, “Does anyone listen? Does anyone care what I say?”
    Suri said, “And how will they care if you keep sitting here and saying things? How will they care, when they have been allowed to think that they own everything?”
    Hukmi said, “They don’t own everything.”
    Daadi continued to frown, her annoyance brought out in this way and made binding by the involvement of her daughters. “I am telling her,” she said decidedly. “I am telling her to wrap it up. There will be no hammering here. There will be no tent and no wedding. She can think what she likes; she can write it in her magazine.”
    She meant to say these things to my mother, her daughter-in-law, who lived in the same house and ran a magazine and was organizing the wedding and was felt to have acted as if she owned everything.
    “There will be no wedding,” said Daadi. “We are not responsible for any wedding.”
    She had gone too far.
    “There is no need,” said Suri philosophically, “for anyone to do anything for anyone else.”
    “And still people do things,” said Hukmi.
    “They do,” said Suri.
    “From their hearts,” said Hukmi.
    “From their hearts.”
    “And we are doing whatever we can from our hearts.”
    “Because we feel,” said Suri, and placed a hand on hers, “that the girl is our child, that this wedding is our duty. We are not doing it for ourselves.”
    And Hukmi said, “There is no doubt in it. There is not a doubt.”
    It had come up earlier in the week. They had gone to Saleem Fabrics to buy outfits for the groom’s mother and sisters. It was an important marital tradition—the women of one family gifting embroidered cloth to the women of the other, so they all went: Daadi, Suri, Hukmi, my mother. And inside, amid the unfurling fabrics and the busy mewl of bargainers, they had managed somehow to agree: they consulted one another on colors and patterns, pressed their fingers to the material, made faces and asked for rates.