The Wish Maker Read Online Free PDF Page B

Her golden sari held its shine in brassy dents. She began to tap her foot to the gathering beat, her eyes closed, a hand massaging the chunky pendant at her throat. She was warming up. And now, her feet moving, she began to dance, but slowly, using only the features of her face, her mouth and her eyes and her eyebrows, and occasional twirls of her hand for expression. Daadi watched the dance with her own hands folded in her lap. She watched when Auntie closed her eyes and smiled, watched when Auntie began to dance in circles and stumbled and scowled and resisted with her fists the attempts of a concerned relative who was trying to take her away.
    Later it was agreed that the event was mediocre at best, the groom’s relatives brash and uncouth and overly affectionate and oddly endearing in their lack of refinement. It was a way of measuring the first defeat, theirs, against the success that was expected to be ours.
    But the next event was a dholki organized by Aasia and Maheen, and it fell into the hands of their friends, girls as well as boys, many of whom were newly befriended and took their time to arrive. They began to appear on the lawn after dinner had been served, the girls in long, flowing skirts and short blouses, the boys in dark blazers and shawls that were worn over plain shalwar kameezes. Their arrival caused excitement among the guests: there was talk now of dancing and speculation about the possible pairings. In a corner the girls and boys were being organized into dancing positions by their leader, a thin, rosy girl called Bushra who had come from Dubai and wore her hair in a pile and was instructing her subordinates with swift slashing movements of her arm. A rumor began to circulate, instigated by a male fashion designer in a declarative mood, about the girl’s temper at a photo shoot; she was a model or had been a model in the past; it was a shoot she had done for a magazine or a newspaper; the story traveled to the veranda, which had been converted with a screen into a place for men to stand with drinks and chat. Isa’s colleagues from the bank were there, and Moosa was trying unsuccessfully to enter their conversation. He was nodding a little too much, his loud laughs were incongruous, and he was drinking against this growing failure as a form of resistance, a refusal to submit; soon he was lost in an expression of bitter recall and staring with a drunk’s disdain at the extended folly of sobriety. He was seen wagging his finger at someone, then smiling slyly and saying something about loans. After that he attached himself to the idea of Bushra, who was about to start her dance. He announced it many times, in each instance with fresh excitement, and it began to have an effect on the gathering, which dispersed and reformed into a crowd of clapping onlookers. Bushra danced alone in a clearing to a fast-paced song about a veil the singer wanted her lover to touch: she was dancing back and forth with her own veil held taut between her hands, plunging forward and coming up and plunging and coming back up. Among the watching women there were expressions of admiration, shock, enchantment and developing interest, as well as boredom and mild contempt. And the expressions on the whole were serious and preoccupied. Then Bushra was gone; she had sat down abruptly, and in her place a boy was dancing to the rest of the song, which was the lover’s audacious response to the part about the veil. The boy too was fair-skinned and danced with slow movements of his shoulders, and it was instantly sexual, it was sexy in the extreme, and in the men’s gathering to the side this was expressed as encouragement, acknowledged with small smiles and nods of recognition, while among the women it caused a contagion of chortling and hand-holding shyness. The song ended and another began; another dance was danced; the choreography went on as before and began to lose its grip on the audience, which was increasingly restless. There