The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn: a Tor.com Original

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The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn: a Tor.com Original Page 2

by Usman T. Malik


  “Bibi,” he said not unkindly, “let me tell you something. The eucalyptus was brought here by the British to cure India’s salinity and flooding problems. Gora sahib hardly cared about our ecology.” His mustache drooped from his thin lips. The strawberry mole on his chin quivered. “It’s not indigenous, it’s a pest. It’s not a blessing, it repels other flora and fauna and guzzles groundwater by the tons. It’s not ours,” the officer said, not looking at the princess. “It’s alien.”

  It was early afternoon and school hadn’t broken yet. The truant Gramps sat in a corner sucking on a cigarette he’d found in the trash can outside his school and watched the princess. Why wasn’t she telling the officer about the jinn? That the tree was its home? Her cheeks were puffed from clenching her jaws, the hollows under her eyes deeper and darker as she clapped a hand to her forehead.

  “Look,” she said, her voice rising and falling like the wind stirring the tear-shaped eucalyptus leaves, “you take the tree, you take our good luck. My shop is all I have. The tree protects it. It protects us. It’s family.”

  “Nothing I can do.” The officer scratched his birthmark. “Had there been no complaint . . . but now I have no choice. The Lahore Development Authority has been planning to remove the poplars and the eucalyptus for a while anyway. They want to bring back trees of Old Lahore. Neem, pipal, sukhchain, mulberry, mango. This foreigner”—he looked with distaste at the eucalyptus—“steals water from our land. It needs to go.”

  Shaking his head, the officer left. The princess lurched to her stall and began to prepare Rooh Afza. She poured a glittering parabola of sharbat into a mug with trembling hands, staggered to the tree, and flung the liquid at its hoary, clawing roots.

  “There,” she cried, her eyes reddened. “I can’t save you. You must go.”

  Was she talking to the jinn? To the tree? Gramps felt his spine run cold as the blood-red libation sank into the ground, muddying the earth around the eucalyptus roots. Somewhere in the branches, a bird whistled.

  The princess toed the roots for a moment longer, then trudged back to her counter.

  Gramps left his teacup half-empty and went to the tree. He tilted his head to look at its top. It was so high. The branches squirmed and fled from the main trunk, reaching restlessly for the hot white clouds. A plump chukar with a crimson beak sat on a branch swaying gently. It stared back at Gramps, but no creature with razor-blade jaws and hollow dust-filled cheeks dangled from the tree.

  As Gramps left, the shadows of the canopies and awnings of shops in the alley stretched toward the tree accusatorially.

  That night Gramps dreamed of the eucalyptus jinn.

  It was a red-snouted shape hurtling toward the heavens, its slipstream body glittering and dancing in the dark. Space and freedom rotated above it, but as it accelerated showers of golden meteors came bursting from the stars and slammed into it. The creature thinned and elongated until it looked like a reed pen trying to scribble a cryptic message between the stars, but the meteors wouldn’t stop.

  Drop back, you blasphemer, whispered the heavens. You absconder, you vermin. The old world is gone. No place for your kind here now. Fall back and do your duty.

  And eventually the jinn gave up and let go.

  It plummeted: a fluttering, helpless, enflamed ball shooting to the earth. It shrieked as it dove, flickering rapidly in and out of space and time but bound by their quantum fetters. It wanted to rage but couldn’t. It wanted to save the lightning trees, to upchuck their tremulous shimmering roots and plant them somewhere the son of man wouldn’t find them. Instead it was imprisoned, captured by prehuman magic and trapped to do time for a sin so old it had forgotten what it was.

  So now it tumbled and plunged, hated and hating. It changed colors like a fiendish rainbow: mid-flame blue, muscle red, terror green, until the force of its fall bleached all its hues away and it became a pale scorching bolt of fire.

  Thus the eucalyptus jinn fell to its inevitable dissolution, even as Gramps woke up, his heart pounding, eyes fogged and aching from the dream. He groped in the dark, found the lantern, and lit it. He was still shaking. He got up, went to his narrow window that looked out at the moon-drenched Bhati Gate a hundred yards away. The eight arches of the Mughal structure were black and lonely above the central arch. Gramps listened. Someone was moving in the shack next door. In the princess’s home. He gazed at the mosque of Ghulam Rasool—a legendary mystic known as the Master of Cats—on its left.

  And he looked at the eucalyptus tree.

  It soared higher than the gate, its wild armature pawing at the night, the oily scent of its leaves potent even at this distance. Gramps shivered, although heat was swelling from the ground from the first patter of raindrops. More smells crept into the room: dust, trash, verdure.

  He backed away from the window, slipped his sandals on, dashed out of the house. He ran toward the tea stall but, before he could as much as cross the chicken yard up front, lightning unzipped the dark and the sky roared.

  The blast of its fall could be heard for miles.

  The eucalyptus exploded into a thousand pieces, the burning limbs crackling and sputtering in the thunderstorm that followed. More lightning splintered the night sky. Children shrieked, dreaming of twisted corridors with shadows wending past one another. Adults moaned as timeless gulfs shrank and pulsed behind their eyelids. The walled city thrashed in sweat-soaked sheets until the mullah climbed the minaret and screamed his predawn call.

  In the morning the smell of ash and eucalyptol hung around the crisped boughs. The princess sobbed as she gazed at her buckled tin roof and smashed stall. Shards of china, plywood, clay, and charred wicker twigs lay everywhere.

  The laborers and steel workers rubbed their chins.

  “Well, good riddance,” said Alamdin electrician, father of the injured boy whose possession had ultimately proved fleeting. Alamdin fingered a hole in his string vest. “Although I’m sorry for your loss, bibi. Perhaps the government will give you a monthly pension, being that you’re royal descent and all.”

  Princess Zeenat’s nose stud looked dull in the gray after-storm light. Her shirt was torn at the back, where a fragment of wood had bitten her as she scoured the wreckage.

  “He was supposed to protect us,” she murmured to the tree’s remains: a black stump that poked from the earth like a singed umbilicus, and the roots lapping madly at her feet. “To give us shade and blessed sanctuary.” Her grimed finger went for the nose stud and wrenched it out. “Instead—” She backpedaled and slumped at the foot of her shack’s door. “Oh, my sisters. My sisters.”

  Tutting uncomfortably, the men drifted away, abandoning the pauper princess and her Mughal siblings. The women huddled together, a bevy of chukars stunned by a blood moon. Their shop was gone, the tree was gone. Princess Zeenat hugged her sisters and with a fierce light in her eyes whispered to them.

  Over the next few days Gramps stood at Bhati Gate, watching the girls salvage timber, china, and clay. They washed and scrubbed their copper pots. Heaved out the tin sheet from the debris and dragged it to the foundries. Looped the remaining wicker into small bundles and sold it to basket weavers inside the walled city.

  Gramps and a few past patrons offered to help. The Mughal women declined politely.

  “But I can help, I really can,” Gramps said, but the princess merely knitted her eyebrows, cocked her head, and stared at Gramps until he turned and fled.

  The Municipality officer tapped at their door one Friday after Juma prayers.

  “Condolences, bibi,” he said. “My countless apologies. We should’ve cut it down before this happened.”

  “It’s all right.” The princess rolled the gold stud tied in a hemp necklace around her neck between two fingers. Her face was tired but tranquil. “It was going to happen one way or the other.”

  The officer picked at his red birthmark. “I meant your shop.”

  “We had good times here”—she nodded—“but my family’s long overdue f
or a migration. We’re going to go live with my cousin. He has an orange-and-fig farm in Mansehra. We’ll find plenty to do.”

  The man ran his fingernail down the edge of her door. For the first time Gramps saw how his eyes never stayed on the princess. They drifted toward her face, then darted away as if the flush of her skin would sear them if they lingered. Warmth slipped around Gramps’s neck, up his scalp, and across his face until his own flesh burned.

  “Of course,” the officer said. “Of course,” and he turned and trudged to the skeletal stump. Already crows had marked the area with their pecking, busily creating a roost of the fallen tree. Soon they would be protected from horned owls and other birds of prey, they thought. But Gramps and Princess Zeenat knew better.

  There was no protection here.

  The officer cast one long look at the Mughal family, stepped around the stump, and walked away.

  Later, the princess called to Gramps. He was sitting on the mosque’s steps, shaking a brass bowl, pretending to be a beggar. He ran over, the coins jingling in his pocket.

  “I know you saw something,” she said once they were seated on the hemp charpoy in her shack. “I could see it in your face when you offered your help.”

  Gramps stared at her.

  “That night,” she persisted, “when the lightning hit the tree.” She leaned forward, her fragrance of tea leaves and ash and cardamom filling his nostrils. “What did you see?”

  “Nothing,” he said and began to get up.

  She grabbed his wrist. “Sit,” she said. Her left hand shot out and pressed something into his palm. Gramps leapt off the charpoy. There was an electric sensation in his flesh; his hair crackled. He opened his fist and looked at the object.

  It was her nose stud. The freshly polished gold shimmered in the dingy shack.

  Gramps touched the stud with his other hand and withdrew it. “It’s so cold.”

  The princess smiled, a bright thing that lit up the shack. Full of love, sorrow, and relief. But relief at what? Gramps sat back down, gripped the charpoy’s posts, and tugged its torn hemp strands nervously.

  “My family will be gone by tonight,” the princess said.

  And even though he’d been expecting this for days, it still came as a shock to Gramps. The imminence of her departure took his breath away. All he could do was wobble his head.

  “Once we’ve left, the city might come to uproot that stump.” The princess glanced over her shoulder toward the back of the room where shadows lingered. “If they try, do you promise you’ll dig under it?” She rose and peered into the dimness, her eyes gleaming like jewels.

  “Dig under the tree? Why?”

  “Something lies there which, if you dig it up, you’ll keep to yourself.” Princess Zeenat swiveled on her heels. “Which you will hide in a safe place and never tell a soul about.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what the fakir told my grandfather. Something old and secret rests under that tree and it’s not for human eyes.” She turned and walked to the door.

  Gramps said, “Did you ever dig under it?”

  She shook her head without looking back. “I didn’t need to. As long as the tree stood, there was no need for me to excavate secrets not meant for me.”

  “And the gold stud? Why’re you giving it away?”

  “It comes with the burden.”

  “What burden? What is under that tree?”

  The princess half turned. She stood in a nimbus of midday light, her long muscled arms hanging loosely, fingers playing with the place in the hemp necklace where once her family heirloom had been; and despite the worry lines and the callused hands and her uneven, grimy fingernails, she was beautiful.

  Somewhere close, a brick truck unloaded its cargo and in its sudden thunder what the princess said was muffled and nearly inaudible. Gramps thought later it might have been, “The map to the memory of heaven.”

  But that of course couldn’t be right.

  “The princess and her family left Lahore that night,” said Gramps. “This was in the fifties and the country was too busy recovering from Partition and picking up its own pieces to worry about a Mughal princess disappearing from the pages of history. So no one cared. Except me.”

  He sank back into the armchair and began to rock.

  “She or her sisters ever come back?” I said, pushing myself off the floor with my knuckles. “What happened to them?”

  Gramps shrugged. “What happens to all girls. Married their cousins in the north, I suppose. Had large families. They never returned to Lahore, see?”

  “And the jinn?”

  Gramps bent and poked his ankle with a finger. It left a shallow dimple. “I guess he died or flew away once the lightning felled the tree.”

  “What was under the stump?”

  “How should I know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t dig it up. No one came to remove the stump, so I never got a chance to take out whatever was there. Anyway, bache, you really should be going. It’s late.”

  I glanced at my Star Wars watch. Luke’s saber shone fluorescent across the Roman numeral two. I was impressed Mama hadn’t returned to scold me to bed. I arched my back to ease the stiffness and looked at him with one eye closed. “You’re seriously telling me you didn’t dig up the secret?”

  “I was scared,” said Gramps, and gummed a fiber bar. “Look, I was told not to remove it if I didn’t have to, so I didn’t. Those days we listened to our elders, see?” He grinned, delighted with this unexpected opportunity to rebuke.

  “But that’s cheating,” I cried. “The gold stud. The jinn’s disappearance. You’ve explained nothing. That . . . that’s not a good story at all. It just leaves more questions.”

  “All good stories leave questions. Now go on, get out of here. Before your mother yells at us both.”

  He rose and waved me toward the door, grimacing and rubbing his belly—heartburn from Hanif Uncle’s party food? I slipped out and shut the door behind me. Already ghazal music was drifting out: Ranjish hi sahih dil hi dukhanay ke liye aa. Let it be heartbreak; come if just to hurt me again. I knew the song well. Gramps had worn out so many cassettes that Apna Bazaar ordered them in bulk just for him, Mama joked.

  I went to my room, undressed, and for a long time tossed in the sheets, watching the moon outside my window. It was a supermoon kids at school had talked about, a magical golden egg floating near the horizon, and I wondered how many Mughal princes and princesses had gazed at it through the ages, holding hands with their lovers.

  This is how the story of the Pauper Princess and the Eucalyptus Jinn comes to an end, I thought. In utter, infuriating oblivion.

  I was wrong, of course.

  In September 2013, Gramps had a sudden onset of chest pain and became short of breath. 911 was called, but by the time the medics came his heart had stopped and his extremities were mottled. Still they shocked him and injected him with epi-and-atropine and sped him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

  Gramps had really needed those water pills he’d refused until the end.

  I was at Tufts teaching a course in comparative mythology when Baba called. It was a difficult year. I’d been refused tenure and a close friend had been fired over department politics. But when Baba asked me if I could come, I said of course. Gramps and I hadn’t talked in years after I graduated from Florida State and moved to Massachusetts, but it didn’t matter. There would be a funeral and a burial and a reception for the smattering of relatives who lived within drivable distance. I, the only grandchild, must be there.

  Sara wanted to go with me. It would be a good gesture, she said.

  “No,” I said. “It would be a terrible gesture. Baba might not say anything, but the last person he’d want at Gramps’s funeral is my white girlfriend. Trust me.”

  Sara didn’t let go of my hand. Her fingers weren’t dainty like some women’s— you’re afraid to squeeze them lest they shatte
r like glass—but they were soft and curled easily around mine. “You’ll come back soon, won’t you?”

  “Of course. Why’d you ask?” I looked at her.

  “Because,” she said kindly, “you’re going home.” Her other hand plucked at a hair on my knuckle. She smiled, but there was a ghost of worry pinching the corner of her lips. “Because sometimes I can’t read you.”

  We stood in the kitchenette facing each other. I touched Sara’s chin. In the last few months there had been moments when things had been a bit hesitant, but nothing that jeopardized what we had.

  “I’ll be back,” I said.

  We hugged and kissed and whispered things I don’t remember now. Eventually we parted and I flew to Florida, watching the morning landscape tilt through the plane windows. Below, the Charles gleamed like steel, then fell away until it was a silver twig in a hard land; and I thought, The lightning trees are dying.

  Then we were past the waters and up and away, and the thought receded like the river.

  We buried Gramps in Orlando Memorial Gardens under a row of pines. He was pale and stiff limbed, nostrils stuffed with cotton, the white shroud rippling in the breeze. I wished, like all fools rattled by late epiphanies, that I’d had more time with him. I said as much to Baba, who nodded.

  “He would have liked that,” Baba said. He stared at the gravestone with the epitaph I have glimpsed the truth of the Great Unseen that Gramps had insisted be written below his name. A verse from Rumi. “He would have liked that very much.”

  We stood in silence and I thought of Gramps and the stories he took with him that would stay untold forever. There’s a funny thing about teaching myth and history: you realize in the deep of your bones that you’d be lucky to become a mote of dust, a speck on the bookshelf of human existence. The more tales you preserve, the more claims to immortality you can make.

  After the burial we went home and Mama made us chicken karahi and basmati rice. It had been ages since I’d had home-cooked Pakistani food and the spice and garlicky taste knocked me back a bit. I downed half a bowl of fiery gravy and fled to Gramps’s room where I’d been put up. Where smells of his cologne and musty clothes and his comings and goings still hung like a memory of old days.

 

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