The Wish Maker by Ali Sethi Page B

share in his miseries, which she said he had brought upon himself.
    In the morning, when his daughters saw him on their way to school, his eyes were swollen as if from excessive crying. But they knew he never cried, and knew that he would go now for his run along the beach, running with his fists drawn up like a boxer’s, after which his face was properly exhausted and needed only a cold shower to become refreshed.
    “Discipline,” said Papu. “It’s all a man has.” He said it without pride.
    Mabi said, “It’s all you’ll ever have.”
    She had told the girls that their father was a refugee, which was a person without a home.
    Zakia said, “We live in a home.”
    But Mabi said that a small suite in a Parsi-owned hotel did not amount to a home. “Forget houses,” she said. “We don’t even live in a country of our own.”
    Zakia appeared to understand but didn’t. At school she learned every day about the country they called their own, the country with the sea and the desert and with the mountains in the north, where the second-highest peak in the world was; the country that contained so many languages and ways of dressing in clothes, where Sindhis wore ajraks and the Baloch wore turbans, where Pathans herded mountain goats and wore hats that looked like pies placed on their heads, and where Punjabis, most memorably, carried pots on their hips and moved swayingly through mustard fields. She was sure this country existed. She just didn’t see herself in it, or her father in his suit, her mother in her cotton sari, or even, for that matter, Sister Andrews, who taught them English at school and wore a cross and a wimple, and the girl called Edna, who was darker than the other girls and lived in the Goan colony, and the sharp-nosed Parsi lady who owned the hotel and wore large, amphibian glasses and came by every Sunday afternoon with her friends and sat beside the pool and played cards. Then there was the other half of the country, the half that lay on the other side of India, the part where people ate rice and where, she knew, there was presently a tension.
    “They want their own country,” Mabi had said after reading the newspaper. “They are asking for it.”
    Papu said, “They won’t get it.”
    Mabi said, “It’s ridiculous.”
    And it was one of those moments when, by belittling the desires of other people, they had happened to agree with each other.

    Otherwise they themselves were those people, the ones with the desires, the ones who felt belittled and ridiculous. It was almost physical, that feeling, when Papu spoke of the things he had left behind in Kanpur, his home, which was now a part of India. He said he had lived in the best house in the best lane of a mohalla, a neighborhood, with his father and mother and brothers, and had studied at the best university. But his father had died, and his mother had announced that they were going to move to Pakistan. She wanted to send Papu first, and Papu, being the eldest and the only married son, had felt it his duty to abide by her wishes. He left most of his things, his books and medals, his best clothes and shawls, his gold and silver tilla-worked shoes, in his room in a tin trunk. His gold-plated watch he left with his mother, who promised to keep it until he returned. He always thought he would return. It was inconceivable then that he wouldn’t.
    He took trains. They took him from Kanpur to Agra, Agra to Jodhpur, and from Jodhpur into Sindh. The train compartments became crowded. He looked past his window and saw desert turn to desert, and his mind filled with foreboding. He had a little money, and his clothes and his diploma were in his suitcase. He kept the suitcase between his legs. He closed his eyes and tried to think of the city that awaited him, a city he had never seen but had to envision in that moment for his own sake.
    “Brother,” said a voice.
    It was the old man sitting across from him. He had asked Papu earlier to consider some