Ali Sethi on writing The Wish Maker
(continued)

That same year the democratically elected government was ousted; and once again the military stepped in. Two years later, in September 2001, Pakistan became an official American ally in what was now being called The Global War on Terror.

But we were confused. We had come to think of ourselves as a Muslim nation and were suddenly fighting a war against the people who claimed to fight for Islam and Muslims. Were we fighting our own people? And with the growing violence and unrest came other questions: what did it mean to be Pakistani? What was our history? And where were we going?

From 2002 to 2006 I attended Harvard College in the US. I was asking myself the same questions, and was no longer comforted by the myths of my childhood. I wanted to trace the stories I recalled to their roots; to do that I had to enter and inhabit a past that lay in photographs and letters and newspaper clippings, in old houses and shrines, and often in the faded recollections of still-living people.

The Wish Maker came out of that immersion in my country's past. The novel is narrated by Zaki Shirazi, a fatherless boy living in a middle-class Lahore household run by women. His mother is a strong-willed journalist; his grandmother is an equally strong-willed, socially conservative matriarch. The two women raise Zaki to believe different and often conflicting things about his dead father, an experience that endows him with an overactive imagination. He comes to understand why the maidservant Naseem is obsessed with performing the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia; and he becomes a participant in his cousin Samar Api's quest to find her Amitabh, the Bollywood movie star she has always dreamed of marrying. The story of Zaki's upbringing, then, becomes a story about the women who surround him and the ways in which they each chase their wishes to often surprising conclusions.


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