The Wish Maker by Ali Sethi Page A

in the daytime, markets to see and walks to take on the beach; and at night there were dance halls and cabarets where the dancers were Egyptian and Lebanese but also Czech and Russian. It was said then that Karachi was the future of the East, a dream in the making, and needed only more of what it already had to eliminate the margins and have that vision of its successes become its totality.
    Among the leading hotels was the Palace, stout and high-domed, and the Imperial, where the cabaret dancers were known for removing their tops and came by later at the tables. The Metropole was located near the offices of newspapers and was frequented by journalists in the evening. Duke Ellington had performed there with his jazz band, and had discovered, during one of his rehearsals, the astounding skills of a local saxophonist, with whom he then played in a freewheeling jam session that brought the house down.
    Removed from the sights and sounds of that world was the Beach Fantasy Hotel. Drivers heading out from the city center were required to navigate; and on the way the road began to crack and the buildings deteriorated. This was a greater Karachi area of plain, ugly buildings, with black windows that shone in the sun and stayed lightless at night, and where many people appeared not to live in buildings but instead on the streets. There were tents now in sight, and suddenly more people, women talking and walking and children playing barefoot on the pavements and old men who stared at the cars that went past, as if seeing in those rushed visions a reminder of things they had known and lost, or were promised and had yet to receive. The Beach Fantasy Hotel was located a little beyond this world in an area secluded by the high walls of buildings on one side and open on the other side to the sea. At once the breeze, warm and tinged with salt, brought on the memory, formed sometimes without experience, of a languid romance in the tropics; and the hotel, with its low white walls and its rose garden at the front and the line of turbaned bearers standing near the entrance, seemed to welcome and extend this impression past the doors and into the lobby, where a man sat playing old familiar tunes on a piano. The general manager, a small, well-dressed man who spoke a kind of theater English, was there to receive his foreign guests and snapped his fingers at the bearers, who wore their extraordinary costumes everywhere. The manager said that tips were allowed but not encouraged; the staff at the Beach Fantasy were better paid than the staff at other hotels and became spoiled by fluctuating expectations. It was one of those things he said, personal as well as professional, that revealed his reliability to his guests, who came to know him and his wife, Mabi, and their two girls in the course of the visit, and later sent postcards and thank-you notes that were displayed on a small, square table in the reception area for new guests to see when they arrived. Again Papu was standing in the lobby, his hair combed above his small, fine face and gleaming with wet, and his manner was sure and readying, that of a man who seemed to reside permanently in morning.
    But he hardly slept. It was his habit, after he returned from work in the evening, to take his book and go out onto the slender balcony that was attached to their three-bedroom suite. There he sat in a chair and read under a single bright light, and later ate his dinner; and he stayed there in the breeze with the sound of the waves behind him because it soothed his mind. He dreaded the night because that was when most sounds stopped. He went inside, brushed his teeth, changed into his nightclothes and went to lie down next to Mabi on their bed. But he turned from side to side. Mabi didn’t notice it and slept with her arm thrown over her face. She didn’t groan when Papu turned, didn’t open her eyes or ask questions when he got up and went outside. Her sleep was a form of protest, a refusal to