Make a Wish

My mother always told me that if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. I never knew what exactly that particular phrase meant. I really never knew what people were saying or what they wanted to say. They would keep telling me all those typical conventional things like, “Dreams are a fool’s paradise, Keep your nose to the grindstone, work is worship, etc , etc.”

I’d keep my eyes down and listen attentively nodding along and looking for all the world like the most obedient child in the entire world. But somewhere deep down I’d keep my dreams alive, nothing could stop me from wishing, nothing that a person said would ever make a difference to my beliefs because I’d never stop believing.

I’d search for shooting stars lying flat on my back in the dead of the night. I’d wait with the innocent cruelty of a child’s heart for a beautiful and vibrant bit of heaven to break so that my wishes could come true. Ironic yet true. I sometimes feel guilty but at that point of time I felt that my dreams were more important. I like to think that because I never violated any law of nature that my dreams came true. For centuries the foundations of every new civilization has been based on the destruction of the previous one. And my wishes were the new civilization that I would build with the aid of my wishes on the ruins of stars.

Maybe because what I wanted seldom disturbed the order of the world that I was able to find enough shooting stars to carry my heartfelt desires on their tails to where god in his ever eulogized benevolence waited for them to decide their fate.

I visualized god as a round little man, a direct paradox of his omnipotent and omnipresent tangibility. I’d think of him plucking out wishes from the tails of shooting stars, dipping his hand into the golden liquid that trails along behind the star and fishing out a string of words. He would then sit at his well worn wooden table and feed that almost unending string of words into his universal translator where he would then read the output. The translator would not convert the words into a language but into a stream of colored emotion that only god would be able to understand.

The streams of color would depend upon the purity of the person’s emotions. I always believed that my stream would come out white, the color of purity, the color of diamonds and wedding gowns and unadulterated laughter. It would be the color of the clouds and the color of lightning, blinding white, intense.

I don’t know if my childish fantasies were true but I do know that my wishes came true. My wishes were very simple.

I wished for answers. I had hundreds of questions and no one to answer them. I was the youngest of seven children, the only girl in a menagerie of boys. All my brothers were mischievous without remorse. They were the bane of the neighborhood and the pride of my father. I was the exception, the quiet one.

I remember my mother telling me that I didn’t utter a word until I was three years old, and then when I started speaking, the first thing that I said was, ”Ma, Why is the sky blue?”

My mother was so shocked that she fell silent, my father would say later that those were the most peaceful five minutes of his entire married life.

Soon, I relapsed into silence. No one could tell me what I wanted to know. I asked my eldest brother and he just looked at me like I was speaking Greek. I asked my father and he just brushed me away. One of my brothers told me that I would get the answers if I wished on a star, I took his words to heart and every night long after everyone had gone to bed, I’d lie awake at night and stare at the sky looking for my wish bearers. It was probably a good thing that we were a typical rural Indian family and we slept out of doors. Otherwise I would have had to sneak out in the dead of the night. An idea that did not have a lot of appeal.

I’d been wishing for a long time, but I never gave up hope. I believed that like the Indian postal service that my parents were so fond of cursing; probably god too would ultimately make my wish come true.

One day as I went about my daily chores, I was after all the daughter of a farmer in rural India, my father came into called my mother and told her that my Grandmother was coming for a visit. My mother was not amused. My Grandmother was a formidable character, not to be messed with.

The next day my grandmother arrived. Blame it on the Indian postal service if you want but arrive she did and what an entrance. It was like walking into a dark room, fear and excitement, Warmth and arrogance, water and fire, they all came together and left you breathless. My mother once described it like being an ice burn, cold enough to freeze you yet leaving you burnt.

Yet I never felt any of it, perhaps because she never let me feel it. She took a shine to me immediately. Another paradox that god is so fond of peppering my life with. She took one look at me ordered me imperiously to help her walk to her room. Once she had settled down, she asked me what I wanted to know. It was my turn to be flabbergasted. How did she know? She just smiled kindly and asked again,” What do you want to know?”

What did want to know? What did I not want to know? Why was the sky blue and the grass green? Where did the sun go at night? What did the songs of the birds mean?

I asked and I asked not waiting to hear the answers, she let years of silence wear down before she answered. She told me that I would have to wait a little while. Can you imagine my disappointment? Here I had just poured out heart’s deepest desire and she was telling me to wait? But I had to and I did.

In fact, I’m glad I did because she sent me to school. I was probably the brightest pupil around but she never let it go to my head. She’d wait for me to come home and make me tell her everything that I had learnt. I’m sure she enjoyed every bit of it almost as much as I did.

I’m glad I believed, I’m glad I made wishes and I’m thankful that they came true. My wishes are still coming true. Today I’ve become the first woman from my village to be selected in the IAS.

My grandmother is no more but then wishes don’t last forever. That’s why you have to keep making new ones.

Make a wish , it might just come true.