The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories

by Mahvesh Murad

  The younger man, seeing this, drew from his belt a little knife, and with barely a flinch, drew it fast across the palm of his hand, that the blood might flow.

  Now all was fearful and hushed in the sanctum, even Nizamuddin mountain-still, watching as Davud held his hand out to let the blood drip onto the stones.

  At once the djinn came, roaring out of the air itself, a great swirling that consumed all, all within its reach – bone, sword, blood, drawing the red liquid fast from Davud’s hand, a tendril of black cloud twining itself around the sorcerer’s wrist, pulling him to his knees so that he gasped in horror and pain. But still the circle held, and both men clung to their staffs, and for a moment the djinn raged and blazed against the world, arms and legs and claws and even, it seemed, the face of a child forming within the storm as it lashed against the circle, before at last – still holding the bloody hand of Davud within its tendrils – it subsided into a maelstrom column and breathed in the language of the shattered night:

  “Why have you brought me here, little men?”

  Davud – gasping for air, arm numb and skin white as, still, the creature fed on his blood – could not speak, so Ahmed blurted, “To command and dispel the djinn that surround the woman Hurrem, whose blood you have tasted and whose magic you must know...”

  The djinn interrupted him with a roll of thunder that shook the palace walls, made the old pillars of the cavern shake with dust, cracks breaking in ancient plaster. “I see the woman!” it roared. “But there are no djinn in her command, no magic on her tongue! You have summoned me here to do a fool’s deed, and fools you are that summoned me!”

  So saying it lashed out again, and Davud screamed with a sudden new pain as if all the lightning of the world were breaking through his veins, and the djinn blazed red with his hot blood and tore against the circle. Ahmed stumbled as the staff in his hand began to shiver and crack, then burst in a shower of glass, shards burying in his hands, his skin, his eyes, so he screamed, clawing his face. With the roar of the tornado, the djinn burst free, still holding Davud by a tendril of cloud to his knees, in the eye of the storm. All around, it raged through the cavern, pulling down every sigil and smashing every sacred object; the gale grabbed the bloodied Ahmed and tore him apart like wet paper, drank in his hot blood and swallowed him in the storm, blazing, laughing in its freedom. Nizamuddin ran for the door, and the djinn cackled with merry lightning that ran through his heart, burst thunder within his skull, so that his eyes at once turned red, and still Davud screamed as the blood was pulled from him that sustained the storm. Falling now, the djinn reached tendrils upwards, upwards towards the slumbering palace above until all at once a hand caught Davud’s glass staff from where it had fallen, and plunged it point-first into the heart of that raging storm. The djinn screamed, and as it did, the staff shattered, releasing the breath of the man who had made it from within; and the breath spoke calm, simple words of power and command, and the djinn raged and blazed but could not resist. It diminished, and withered, and at last, faded to a cloud, then a whisper of wind, then a stillness in the darkness, leaving only the marks of lightning and sweeps of blood behind.

  Davud fell to the floor, the blood a mere trickle now from his hand, for a mere trickle was all he had left to give, his face greyer than an autumn sky, his lips the blue of a stormy sea.

  The hand that had held the staff rested on a knee. The knee bent so that the one who had saved him might better look into his face. I stood behind, as my lady, veiled all in grey, smiled into the face of the fallen sorcerer and said softly:

  “Kosaca Davud – I hear you have been taking some interest in my laundry.”

  The fallen man tried to raise his head, but there was no strength left in his body. So my lady, the great Hurrem, beloved of the Sultan, gently turned his chin so he might gaze into her shadowed eyes, and said, “When one may buy the service of a man, one must assume that they are easily bought. If they are easily bought, why would you think that I have not bought them first?”

  Only breath, the broken rattle of air through splintered stone, could Davud give in answer.

  Hurrem sighed, and rose again to her feet, looking round the ruined cavern. “So foolish,” she tutted. “Such a waste. It is always remarkable to me how many men fall from having reached too high. I have learned much from their lessons.”

  So saying, she gestured at me that we might depart, and I bowed and held the black door open for her that led to the palace. She moved towards it, broken glass and wet blood crunching beneath her feet, then paused again to look back at the fallen sorcerer. “I am not a cruel woman,” she breathed. “It seems to me that the woman who saves the sickly child by her skill is called a witch, and the one who cannot save the child who is destined to die is also called the same. Success or failure, a woman of power is always prey to suspicion. This sorcery you perform seems to me a most unhelpful art, and unnecessary to my cause. The love my Sultan feels for me comes from the union of our souls, and the power I exert, I do so because I am wise, and clever, and know something of the turning of the world. You great men who wish to command the skies should look to me for a little something of that wisdom. You will do better for it. Goodbye, Kosaca Davud. I will pray for you. One way or another.”

  So saying, Hurrem departed, leaving Davud where he was, cold and grey, silent and bloodied, on the ruin of the world that he had made for himself. I followed my lady, and closed the black door behind us.

  And that is how it happened, the night of the storm beneath the palace, the night the great men fell – but please, don’t tell anyone. You know how gossip is; sometimes it’s a story, and sometimes it’s a weapon. But I don’t like to get involved in such things, not me. It’s not a woman’s place at all.

  Glass Lights

  J.Y. Yang

  BEFORE HE DIED, Mena’s grandfather told her she was a djinn.

  More accurately, he told her that her grandmother, whom she had never met, was a djinn. Mena was, at that time, eighteen years old. Her grandfather had stomach cancer, and her grandmother was gone; long, long gone. Her grandmother had been Turkish. They were married for a year, and she’d borne a son, Mena’s father, before fleeing back to Turkey, never to be heard from again, her fate unknown. Mena’s grandfather had bribed some official to get a death certificate issued (as still could be done in those days) so he could marry the woman Mena had grown up calling Nenek, and this mysterious vanished Turkish woman remained a spectre, unspoken of, the only traces of her remaining in the hooked nose of her son, a brief foreign interjection into their peaty Asian stock.

  Everyone had constructed their own narrative to explain the shape of this happening, this flower of passion that had withered so abruptly into abandonment and betrayal. “She was a prostitute,” Nenek would say. Mena’s father said she was a runaway, a war refugee, and Grandfather had refused to follow her home. But in Mena’s grandfather’s telling, she was a djinn, and he freed her from the bottle he had bought from the Thieves’ Market (back when it was an actual market, and not the tourist point-of-interest and hipster hunting ground it is now). She, in turn, had granted him three wishes, and after he had been blessed with the last one (a rice-fed, healthy son), she had vanished forever, for he no longer had any hold over her.

  “You are like her,” Mena’s grandfather told her from his deathbed. “You are just like her. I look at you and I see her, like it was just yesterday.” Of his sixteen grandchildren, Mena was the only one he’d said this to, and with her wide nose and round features she knew he wasn’t referring to her looks. That old man, his mind clouded by the pressures of senescence, raving sometimes about the Kempeitai and the hunger pangs of the Second World War, looked at her and saw a swirl of smoke trapped in a glass bottle, an odd unlabeled thing unknowingly put up for sale amongst the mismatched wares on someone’s dusty tarp.

  THERE WAS A man who looked very much like Anthony plastered, smiling, to the convex insides of the train carriage. The ad, for a mobile app called
SGLoveMatch, was of that species of seasonal offerings that burst forth everywhere you turned for weeks, and then just as quickly subsided into grey obscurity. For now, the artificially happy image of doppelgänger-Anthony, one pillar of the bliss depicted through the sun-drenched embraces of three couples, graced the tepid interior of the train every few meters. Mena, wedged in so tightly she could not raise her phone between the backs of the other faintly-sweating office workers, had nothing to do except stare up at the doppelgänger’s face.

  Like Anthony, he had the clean-cut, coiffed look sported by Chinese mission-school boys from good families, the good stock. The girl wrapped around him, like all the girls in the ad, was thin, Chinese, white-skinned, with perfectly tinted and styled locks that shone in the sunlight, shone like the perfect lines of her smile. The sunlit paradise of those pictures seemed impossibly out of reach for the tired faces packed into the carriage, waists padded by stress and faces lined by sleep deprivation.

  A nebulous sense of discontent pressed against the inside of Mena’s belly as she thought unkind things about the people in the picture. The blessed lives of model-types, banking on the envy of the unwashed populace to earn their keep. Find love. Find life, said the ad in looping, golden text, as if your life didn’t count unless you were aping the airbrushed, carefully-lit confection they were presenting to you.

  Mena’s arrival in the office always preceded that of most of her colleagues, leaving her an hour of air-conditioned silence to grind her way through the inbox without the threat of interrupting chatter. At this hour, it was just her and the cleaning aunty Choo, a Peranakan woman in her late forties with a wide, gapped smile and a steady supply of sticky fragrant kuih-muih she would sneak to Mena in lovingly rumpled little plastic bags, the kind you put takeaway kopi into. Choo never had much time to chat – there was always too much carpet needing her attention – but over the course of the time Mena had worked there, the whole story of her life and family had percolated out of their brief question-and-answer sessions. Her recurring back pain, her husband’s diabetes, their money problems.

  This morning Choo pulled at Mena conspiratorially and whispered, her eyes all lit up, “I bought a dress yesterday!”

  “That’s nice,” Mena said encouragingly, knowing her happiness came from places other than this.

  Choo’s voice dropped lower as her smile got wider. “I’ve dropped a dress size!”

  “Oh! Congratulations.” And she meant it. She was glad; she was glad that Choo was glad.

  Choo’s grip was so joyous, and so vital, that she ground the knucklebones in Mena’s hands together. “Not since I was a young girl. It’s so good, I can’t believe it happened.”

  Choo had the wide, starchy body of a person who had had four children, and had to provide for them. The pear-shaped lines told a story not of abundance, but of hardship, of too many fast food dinners, of too many hours spent standing on swollen ankles, of weekends spent in front of the TV or in the kitchen, manufacturing happiness out of nothing. Mena did not begrudge her the happiness she found in reclaiming some of her past, a time that, in all probability, had been fuller with hope and desire.

  There was something bright and sweet about having the fervently wished-for fulfilled, and Mena relished the taste of it in her mouth, the feel of it in her chest. “I hope you’re happy,” she said.

  “Oh, I am. Oh, I am!”

  The office buzzed with unusual energy that morning. There was a meeting at 10am with their ad agency, and that meant Anthony would be gracing them with his presence. The senior project managers, both of them married, ribbed Wendy about the dress she’d put on, and the makeup: lips redder, eyes crisply lined. It was the office joke that Wendy fancied Anthony, in the warm way that friend groups will try to get their girlfriend hooked up with the hot guy. The corp comms department for their ministry was small – six of them excluding the two department heads – and it had the close-knit, conspiratorial feel of an all-woman team in a particularly male-dominated industry. The other five girls in the department giggled, put their heads together, talked about boys and TV dramas and dresses. The iron bars of a cage can be kind of a comfort when the world outside is all hungry teeth and slicing fins.

  But not for Mena. You don’t giggle with a girl in a headscarf, who can’t watch any of the Channel 8 K-dramas you follow because she doesn’t speak Mandarin. It’s not an unkindness, it’s just the way it is. The other five girls sat around in circles and whispered among themselves, and conveniently forgot to invite Mena out for lunch when they went, more often than not. They spoke a lingo that lay alien in Mena’s ears and could never come from her tongue, and moved in circles she had no part of. What could they possibly talk about, anyway?

  Wendy’s exhilaration had quiet spots in it, and in those little silences Mena could sense how much she really wanted the romantic fantasy to happen.

  Anthony arrived at 10.30, by which time the meeting room had already been filled to capacity with titter. He swept in with his arms bearing paper bags and his face bearing that winning, model-boy smile that let him get away with saying sharp things and dismissing them as jokes. “Sorry, sorry, I’m late, ladies,” he said. The paper bags bustled onto the conference table. “Okay, to make up for it, I bought everybody Starbucks and donuts. Okay?” That was his way of things, his simple and easy charm, and the meeting room responded accordingly, with pleased noises and airy banter.

  Almost everyone in the department was here, like it was a spectator sport. Wendy sat in the middle of the room, in between the director and one of the senior managers, with her laptop all prim and at attention. This wasn’t even her account, but the civil service habit of having more participants piled onto meetings than strictly necessary was working well in her favour. Anthony had bought enough donuts to make sure everyone got at least one.

  He looked at Mena while the girls were dividing the spoils, and warmly said, “The donuts are halal, I checked specially for you, okay?”

  That was how it went. Anthony would do things like these, and Mena would feel warm inside for hours. Stupid, but soft and warm, and also full of bird wings, colorful and rustling and beating around her chest and belly.

  This was the kind of happening that would send Wendy grabbing the hand of a colleague after the meeting, and they would descend into the kind of excited recounting that was the province of the young and in-love. But Mena had no-one’s hands to grab, and never had. There wasn’t anyone on her team, so to speak.

  Anthony tactfully said nothing about Wendy’s makeup, but he complimented her dress, which was always a safe bet. Wendy tried to play it cool, but the fairness of her skin betrayed the blush around her ears. She remained preternaturally attentive during Anthony’s presentation, as if overcompensating. Mena could feel the strength of her desire, her own fairy-tale wishes, as they circled her in the dimmed light of the room, and she remembered the fruit-bright taste of a wish fulfilled that she had savored in the morning. Wendy’s want was easy, a low-hanging conjecture, one which the universe had pushed together to make it as easy as possible to grant.

  Mena thought about it, and found her thoughts wandering, straying far from the PowerPoint slides going over her head. Anthony’s project was, in fact, on her account. But it didn’t matter. These meetings were always a waste of time, anyway. Tomorrow there would be a one-line email from one of the big bosses, and everything would have to be changed again.

  After the meeting was over, the girls asked Anthony to join them for lunch. It was one of the senior managers who made the invitation. “There’s a new ramen place next door, heard it’s quite good.” Sure, Anthony said, in his booming way, stretching wide as he could. I’ll never say no to lunch.

  The ramen restaurant was not halal, naturally. It was authentic Japanese, it used exclusively pork for the soup stock. No-one asked Mena to join; if they had, she would have said she had packed her own lunch. Which she had. She had given up on being asked long ago.

  A FOREST OF striped tarp
aulin roofs strung with cheap, bare bulbs had overtaken the field next to the MRT station near Mena’s house, catching the home-bound travellers with honeyed feasts of street food and rows of glittering kitsch. Like a desert mirage, the pasar malam surfaced in such intersections for a few days, an intense spot of saturated energy and color, before vanishing without a trace.

  Mena loved exploring the transient capillaries of these modern day caravans, breathing in air perfumed by hot grease and savory steam, the plywood boards creaking under her feet. It let her dream of days past, of times when everything was as impermanent as these lashed-together tents, where the shape of the land followed tide and season, before rock and sand were poured into its bones. She bought a bag of steamed chickpeas and walked around with them soft between her teeth, looking at cheap knockoff T-shirts stamped with whatever the current pop culture obsessions were. Under the naked glare of the temporary lighting, they took on a stark, sharp clarity. Mena appreciated this: the copper tang of capitalism unromanticised, unapologetic in its ugliness.

  At one of the stalls, its makeshift shelves stacked high with bootleg mass produce, a toddler tugged at her harried mother’s shirt-hem, chubby fingers yearning for a small, stuffed approximation of a Disney character. Her desire was that of a child’s: Pure, overwhelming, and of universal importance. The strength of her want pulled Mena in, and she watched as the child’s mother, distracted by some other shiny bit the next stall over, said no, in that tone that children of authoritarian parents everywhere know. The tone that brooks no dissent. The girl’s lip trembled, and she stared marble-eyed at her object of desire, far out of her reach. The stall-keeper stood by and said nothing, stone-faced, unmoved by the moment.

  Drawn by her nature, the nature gifted to her by her grandmother, Mena dove to one knee, unobserved, next to the child. This one was easily solved: tied to Mena’s bag zipper was the genuine version of the small stuffed thing the child wanted, happily trademarked and bought from a gift shop somewhere. A beautiful cosmic coincidence. Mena slipped it from the zipper tie and pressed it into the child’s hand. The girl’s eyes went wide, star-filled, and Mena pressed a finger to her lips. Their secret.