Free The Wish Maker by Ali Sethi Page B

of an inexpensive local variety and were everywhere displayed on wooden racks outside shoe shops. And the jewelry was sooty and dull, and irregularly shaped, like the jewelry worn by primitives, and clanked clumsily when a head was turned or an arm lifted and waved. Most of them worked for nonprofit organizations and institutes, entities with names such as APNA and SAPNA and SURAT and SUCH, and went to conferences and seminars and presented papers and made proposals for the increased funding of their projects. Others were lawyers and journalists and were not invited to conferences, and maintained a friendly rivalry with the researchers, whose work they praised for its complexity and fineness. The women shouted when they agreed and shouted when they disagreed and came to the house in droves or not at all: they required situations and discussions, and they came to the house when these were available. Then the driveway filled quickly with cars and the veranda resounded with noises, women talking and walking and shouting and pulling chairs, sandals squinging and the door repeatedly opening and banging.
    “I am not paying,” said Daadi, “for the repair of that door with my money.” She was lying in bed with her feet crossed at the ankles and her arms crossed over her chest.
    Suri stared at the carpet and said nothing.
    “It’s too much,” said Hukmi, and held her temples.
    Daadi said, “There is a limit.”
    Suri shook her head and smiled faintly.
    “Too much,” repeated Hukmi, and widened her eyes in genuine wonderment. “It is just too much.”

    In another part of the house the noise was crowding, the voices all speaking at once and the glasses clinking with the ashtrays and the air souring with smoke, the sour joviality that had descended now on the gathering. Someone was listening to someone else who was making points on her fingers and saying, “There are three strategies for getting out of the provincial quagmire . . .”

    It was on a day in the summer holidays that the cars began to arrive. I was sitting with Barkat on the bench outside the gate and playing cards with his friends. They often gathered in the afternoons to play game after game of Chaar-Chaar, a variant of Bluff that gave quick results and had the added thrill of gambling. But there was no money to bet; the players were gardeners and drivers and chowkidaars, men who worked in the houses of the neighborhood and earned small salaries, and were free to make outlandish claims—cars they didn’t own, wives they didn’t love—that brought extreme consequences: there were cries of jubilation and excited handshakes and silent slides into depression when the results were declared. And there was magnanimity in a winner’s voluntary surrender of his acquisitions, as well as a perverse joy in losing, which came when a player’s wealth of possessions had been exhausted. The present game had progressed to the sixth round, and the stakes, though imagined once again, were rising.
    The first honk came from afar. It was a black Toyota Corolla that displayed a large, bolt-shaped dent on its bonnet and was known to belong to a lawyer friend of my mother’s.
    Barkat went to stand by the gate.
    The lawyer labored with her window, which was jammed and lowered haltingly, and asked to know if my mother was home.
    Barkat said she was home.
    And had the others arrived?
    There were no others.
    The lawyer was surprised and disappointed.
    Barkat opened the gate and the car went in.
    Soon there were two more cars, a broadish Lancer in the old model and an Alto behind it, and again questions were asked and answered and the gate was opened and the cars went in. Barkat returned to the bench to revive the game. “The ladies are coming,” he said.
    “Oh, yes,” said Rifakat the gardener with a wobbling movement of the head. “They are ladies. These are ladies. Hah!”
    A short silence was allowed to pass.
    Barkat sighed and caressed my head, and said that it wasn’t