The Five Fakirs of Faizabad

by P. B. Kerr

  “That’s not true,” said John. “He just thought that if I was going to go somewhere and grant three wishes, it ought to be somewhere that needed a bit of good luck.”

  “I can see you don’t yet know your uncle,” said Groanin.

  “And there’s nowhere,” insisted John, “that needs a bit of good luck quite as bad as Bumby.”

  “Well, there’s no denying that,” admitted Groanin. “They’ve had it tough here, and no mistake. Tougher than tough. Hard. Harder than hard. Tragic, even.”

  John cast his eye down the length of the newspaper clipping to remind himself of the chapter of accidents that had befallen Bumby. Tragic didn’t even begin to describe it.

  First, the nearby chemical factory had accidentally discharged a large quantity of bright pink dye into the River Rust. And not long after this there had been an unusually high spring tide, which, following a whole month of rain, had caused the river to burst its banks and flood the town, turning everything — the church, the town hall, every shop, and every house — a hideous shade of pink. Bumby was so pink that on satellite pictures of England, the town looked like a sort of livid pimple on the country’s shulder.

  Next, several residents of Bumby had been taken to the hospital after consuming a lethally hot curry at the local Indian restaurant. An investigation by the Food Standards Agency revealed that the restaurant’s chicken Madras had contained a Yorkshire mamba — a chili pepper that is five times hotter than the Dorset naga, which had previously held the record as the world’s fieriest chili. (The Yorkshire mamba is so hot that it is illegal to sell the seeds and grow one outside of laboratory conditions. Quite why England should have become the world center for developing hot chili peppers is anyone’s guess.)

  It is said that accidents come in threes. In Bumby they came in battalions.

  Not long after the curry incident, a Ukrainian circus came to town. On the first disastrous night, the Magnificent Mikhail, a world-famous magician, managed to saw a lady in half for real, while Leonid the Lion Tamer got himself eaten by a hungry lioness.

  Meanwhile, Bumby turned out to be the point of origin for a computer virus — the Bumby Bacteria — which infected half of the computers in Europe before it was contained and then destroyed. Then the Bumby Foreign Language Press published an English phrasebook in forty-two languages with many wrong translations so that, for example, foreigners who thought they were asking the way to the Tower of London were really asking to be sent to prison. Many of them were.

  If all that wasn’t bad enough, the Bumby gold mine had proved to be the biggest disaster of all. Following the discovery of several sizable nuggets of real twenty-four-karat gold in the famously deep Bumby caves, the town thought its luck had finally changed. Local people turned up in the hundreds to dig for the precious metal and make their fortunes. But no more gold was ever found. Not only that, but several gold miners were never seen again after one miner sank his pickax into some rock and somehow managed to restart an ancient volcano that had been long-thought extinct.

  John had never encountered bad luck like Bumby’s. Even while he and Groanin had been there, suffering the poor weather, the town had been further afflicted by a plague of extra-smelly stink bugs — Nezara viridula — which emit a foul odor when threatened. This meant that as well as being the unluckiest town in the world Bumby might also have been the smelliest.

  Not surprisingly, the town was almost empty of the tourists who usually came to Bumby during the Easter holidays. And John and Groanin were the only two guests staying at the inhospitable bright-pink-colored hotel that went by the unlikely name of the Oasis Guesthouse.

  John flicked a stink bug off his knee and put away his newspaper clipping unaware of the fact that the insect had landed on Groanin’s bald head and immediately made a smell.

  “But are you sure that Bumby can wait for your holiday to finish?” John asked the butler. “I mean, before I try to fix the town’s luck.”

  Groanin sniffed the air above his head suspiciously. “What’s that you say?”

  “Are you sure the town can afford to wait that long?” said John. “With luck like Bumby’s, a meteorite could land here tomorrow. And your holiday would be over.”

  Groanin looked up at the sky wondering what the odds were of something like that happening. The movement of his head only served to make the stink bug feel even less secure and it made another smell, even fouler than the last.

  “Aye, well, you make a good point,” he said. “I suppose there’s no point in delaying things any further. But mind you pay attention to what you’re doing. What was the other thing old Rakshasas used to say? ‘Having a wish is like lighting a fire: It’s reasonable to assume that the smoke might make someone cough.’“

  Groanin coughed. It wasn’t smoke that made him do it but the smell of the stink bug.

  “I really miss that guy,” murmured John.

  “Just make sure there’s not much smoke generated when you start granting wishes is what I’m saying,” said Groanin.

  “Of course,” said John. “Do you think I’ve learned nothing since I found out I was a djinn?”

  Groanin sniffed the air again and looked around in search of the smell’s origin. “How will you go about it? I say, how will you go about it, do you think? Granting the town three wishes and whatnot?”

  “I was kind of hoping you might give me some advice there, Mr. Groanin,” admitted John. “About the best way of handling things.”

  Groanin thought for a moment and put his bowler hat on, which, temporarily at least, contained the smell from the stink bug. “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “And I reckon the best thing we could do would be to go and see the mayor of Bumby, Mr. Higginbottom, and just come right out with it. Tell him you’re a djinn, like, and that you’re prepared to grant the town three wishes.”

  “You don’t think that he’ll find me being a djinn a bit hard to believe?” asked John.

  “Happen as he will think that,” allowed Groanin. “Happen as anyone might look at a shaver like you and doubt you had the power to tie your own shoelaces, let alone grant someone three wishes. But then again, what’s he got to lose?”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE UNLUCKIEST MAN IN THE WORLD

  Honoring the custom of taranushi is meant to remind a young djinn that granting a mundane three wishes isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. Very soon Philippa had bitter experience of this.

  Her first search for someone worthy of three wishes had taken her to Miami and the Kidz with Gutz awards ceremony for young people who had demonstrated selflessness or presence of mind. In one way or another in their young lives, these were children who had shown themselves to be kids with gutz. Or so the organizers claimed. And maybe they had once been kids with guts, but Philippa herself had encountered a bunch of greedy, spoiled children who were ruthlessly determined to win the contest at all costs. She decided that none of them was in the least bit deserving of being given three wishes.

  Truly, as Mr. Rakshasas had once told her, there was no point in giving an umbrella to a man who had holes in his shoes. Something like that, anyway.

  So Philippa was now in Italy, in the ruined Roman city of Pompeii, to track down the unluckiest man in the world and grant him some better fortune.

  Of course Pompeii itself had suffered more than its fair share of bad luck. In a.d. 79 the city had been completely destroyed and buried in several yards of ash, during a long and catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius. Two thousand of the city’s fifteen thousand residents were killed.

  Today Pompeii is still big. At least the size of ten football pitches. It is one of Italy’s most popular tourist destinations. And it looks exactly like what it is: a ruined Roman city. Everywhere there are paved roads rutted by the wheels of chariots, wide, paved squares called fora, and solitary standing Corinthian pillars. And above all of these is the huge volcano that dominates the Bay of Naples in a way that makes you think someone must have lif
ted the curtain of the sky to sweep something dark underneath.

  Philippa thought Pompeii was one of the most fascinating places she had ever been.

  Unlike John, she was traveling by herself. Being a more thoughtful and scholarly sort of person than her brother, she was combining her taranushi with a little sightseeing at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Vatican Museums in Rome, and the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. She loved walking around art galleries and museums.

  Besides, looking at pictures and ancient sculptures gave her a chance to think exactly how she was going to approach a complete stranger, persuade him that she was indeed a djinn, and grant the man his heart’s desires without also ruining his life.

  That was always a risk with giving anyone three wishes: that someone would speak without thinking, as King Midas had done when he wished that whatever he touched might be turned into gold. Unfortunately for him, this also included every thing he tried to eat and drink, with the result that Midas was soon pretty hungry and thirsty. And things got even worse when he managed to turn his only daughter into a golden statue.

  Philippa thought of all these things while she pondered contacting the man who, according to several Italian magazines and newspapers, was the unluckiest man in the world: Silvio Prezzolini.

  Silvio was employed in the tourist shop at Pompeii, where he had worked for more than ten years, although he had only just returned to work after falling down a manhole — an accident that had left him with two broken legs. He was forty-nine years old and he had endured a whole lifetime of broken bones ever since the age of two, when he had fallen from a third-floor window and, uninjured, had then been run over by a Neapolitan pizza delivery van.

  At the age of thirteen he had been sucked out of an Alitalia aircraft when the door fell off.

  Silvio had celebrated his sixteenth birthday in the hospital after being struck by lightning on a soccer field. On the day of his discharge, there had been a violent thunderstorm and he had been struck by lightning a second time, on the roof of a multistory parking lot.

  (The odds of being struck by lightning in any given year are about one in 500,000.)

  Between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, Silvio had been involved in forty-two car accidents.

  At the age of thirty-six, Silvio had gotten a job in the souvenir shop of the Rome zoo and, almost immediately, he had been severely assaulted by an escaped panda called Felix.

  By this time Silvio was starting to get a national reputation as the unluckiest man in Italy. Which was why a Japanese television company agreed to pay Silvio fifty thousand dollars to follow him around for a year to see what happened to him; but when a whole year passed without anything at all unlucky happening to Silvio, the television company went bankrupt and Silvio got nothing. What was worse, the Japanese television producer himself suffered a terrible accident when he drove his car off a cliff and naturally, Silvio was in the car at the time.

  Silvio survived, but only just. After a whole year in the hospital, Silvio changed his name and went to work as a tour guide on Mount Vesuvius. But his identity was leaked to the fascinated world by an Italian newspaper and this prompted several other guides to quit their jobs on the basis that, with Silvio’s luck being what it was, their own was likely to take a turn for the worse. Since Vesuvius is long overdue for an eruption — the last one was in 1944, and that current lull in volcanic activity is the longest in five hundred years — this was perhaps understandable.

  Silvio worked for several years at Vesuvius, falling into the dust bowl of the volcano’s crater only once. During the same period he was severely scalded by a jet of hot steam, was concussed by a freak shower of hailstones, survived an earthquake, was run over by a German tourist bus, half drowned in a flood, and was hit by a piece of debris from a failing Russian satellite.

  While working at the Pompeii souvenir shop, Silvio was currently being observed at a safe distance by a team of scientists from Princeton University who were studying global consciousness in an effort to determine if the effects of random or so-called unlucky events could be measured scientifically.

  Of course the Princeton people were not the only ones watching Silvio Prezzolini: Philippa, too, was watching to see what kind of person he was. Just as she had done with the Kidz with Gutz awards ceremony. After all, just because a person has had a lot of bad luck in his life doesn’t mean that by default he is a good person. Even bad people have bad luck.

  Much to Philippa’s relief, what she saw in Silvio Prezzolini was a small, balding man with a limp and a big smile, who was kind to animals and children. The more she observed him, the more Philippa was inclined to believe that if anyone looked like he deserved to be granted three wishes, it was surely Silvio Prezzolini.

  Philippa knew he spoke good English, so the only problem that faced her — that faces any djinn granting a mundane three wishes — was how to make the poor man believe what she was saying without scaring him half to death and without him wasting one important wish.

  Careful observation of Silvio revealed that he started each day in the souvenir shop by conscientiously dusting all of the merchandise. Mostly this was plastic junk, but there were some rather nice-looking reproductions of Roman cameo glass featuring scenes from Pompeii that Silvio treated with extra attention, polishing them all very carefully.

  And this gave Philippa an idea as to how she might reveal herself to Silvio as a djinn ready to give him three wishes. She decided that perhaps the old-fashioned, traditional way of doing this was the best way, after all; and so, one morning, before he arrived in the shop, she transubstantiated herself into a cloud of smoke and hid herself in one of the Roman vases.

  As soon as Silvio started to polish the vase containing Philippa, she turned herself back into human form, just like a djinn from the pages of the Arabian Nights. But by the time she had collected every smoky atom of herself so that she could talk to him, he had dropped the vase and was running away, and poor Philippa was obliged to run after him.

  “It was never like this in the Arabian Nights,” she puffed as she followed him across the Forum. “Who ever heard of a djinn chasing someone to give them three wishes?”

  But Silvio wasn’t very fit and Philippa soon caught up with him trying to hide in the Garden of the Fugitives — so named because here there were plaster casts of thirteen dead people who had made a futile attempt to seek refuge from the volcanic ash from the eruption of Vesuvius.

  “Who are you?” squeaked Silvio, cowering in a corner. “What do you want with me?”

  “Why are you running away?” Philippa asked Silvio breathlessly. “I’m here to help you.”

  Hearing her speak, he seemed to relax a little. “You’re not from the volcano then,” he observed. Silvio stood up and brushed some of the dust of Pompeii off his clothes.

  “No,” said Philippa. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “Only the fact that you appeared out of a cloud of thick gray smoke,” said Silvio. “You want to be careful about doing that kind of thing around here. People will get the wrong idea, that you’re some kind of localized eruption. Or that you’re something to do with Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and volcanoes.”

  “No, I’m nothing to do with him, or the volcano,” said Philippa. “I’m a djinn. A genie, you might say. And I’ve come to grant you three wishes.”

  “You mean like in the fairy stories?”

  “If you like,” said Philippa.

  Silvio regarded the girl standing in front of him skeptically. He supposed she was about fourteen years old. She wasn’t very tall, with reddish hair, and glasses that made her look clever rather than magical. And undeniably she was an American, although not in a bad way.

  “You don’t look much like a djinn,” said Silvio.

  “What’s a djinn supposed to look like?” Philippa asked.

  “About thirty feet tall, with silk trousers, bare chest, little waistcoat, turban, and with a big curly mustache. Scary.”

&n
bsp; “Take my word for it. We’re a little more modern these days.”

  “So, why me?” asked Silvio. “Why not you?”

  “What I mean is: I didn’t do anything for you. Shouldn’t I have released you from a lamp after a thousand years of you being in there, or something?” He shrugged. “Or maybe I did. In which case, you’re very welcome.”

  “That does happen, sometimes,” said Philippa. “But not very often. And to answer your first question, you don’t always have to do something for a djinn to get three wishes. In this case I’m giving you three wishes because four Italian newspapers and two Japanese magazines voted you the unluckiest man in the world.”

  Silvio made a face. “I don’t think of myself in that way at all.”

  “You don’t?” Philippa sounded surprised. “Being struck twice by lightning in the space of one week sounds unusually unlucky to me. Especially on top of all the other stuff you’ve been through.”

  Silvio shook his head. “The way I see it is this: I’m still here. It’s true, some dreadful things have happened to me, but I’ve survived them all. You’d have to be pretty lucky for that to happen. In fact, you’d have to be the luckiest man in the world. This is the way I look at myself, like the luckiest man in the world.” He smiled kindly. “So, I think you ought to take those three wishes and give them to someone who really needs them. Not me.”

  Philippa was flabbergasted. “Look here, I really am a djinn, you know,” she said. “I do have the power to make your dreams come true.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” said Silvio. “I mean, it happened exactly the way I used to read about. Like in ‘Aladdin’ and those other stories. You may not be thirty feet tall with silk trousers, but you did appear from a vase, and in a cloud of smoke. It’s not every little girl who can do that.”

  “Well, I never,” said Philippa, who’d had no idea that granting a mundane three wishes would turn out to be quite so hard. “Are you sure?”

  Silvio shrugged. “What would I do with three wishes, anyway? From what I’ve read, people either wish carelessly, which wrecks their life, or they end up being paralyzed with indecision about what to wish for. Besides, I’m at the kind of age when my life is pretty well set, you know. Having more or less anything I might want, just like that, would only complicate things now.” He shook his head. “It would complicate life and, perhaps, make it less fun.”