The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories

by Mahvesh Murad

  “Please?” Saman whispers.

  It is all right, you tell Saman, and the leaves above her head coagulate into a wreath that sinks and settles around her slender body.

  Saman begins to shake. The red door of the cottage stays shut.

  ZAK LURKS BY the cottage at the bottom of the front garden.

  The evening is moonless, a celebration of shadow in the grove, but little electric lamps have popped alight along the path, a trail of mushrooms leading to and from the cottage. The smell of jasmine doesn’t fill the air tonight. Zak fiddles with the brass keyring he is holding. They clink and slide.

  The grove listens. It is still breathing.

  One by one, Zak counts off the keys.

  Behind him, the white circle made by Saman’s chalk has faded. Saman left a couple hours ago. She looked dazed. Forlorn, Zak thinks. Dragging her feet as if hobbled by iron chains. She didn’t hug him goodbye. He doesn’t think he will see her anytime soon.

  Zak slips the key inside the lock. He turns it, pushes. The red door gives way, swinging open to a narrow corridor. Zak’s blood pounds in his fingertips. The hand that holds the keyring is trembling. The cottage is dark; his sister hates light. Soon their mother will make her last rounds and turn on recessed lamps to get her daughter through another summer night.

  Zak takes a deep breath, bracing himself for the familiar hateful odor – musk and sweat and dirty undergarments. How many times has he seen the servants emerge from this hell hole, carrying soiled clothes and cutlery? Bent plastic spoons, tineless forks, warped tin plates, chewed bits of styrofoam. There has been blood on them over the years. Blood and filth have shaped Zak’s understanding of Rukhsana Apee, but lately there has been something else.

  You cock your head and read him: curious, dread-filled, a bit elated. You wait patiently because Zak is pissed. Zak is thrilled. Zak is feeling things he doesn’t understand ever since he followed the filthy boy into the basement after his uncle told the guards to throw the bastard in the Drawing Room. They did as ordered. Zak had wanted to stay and watch, but his uncle shooed him away. Zak crept back and put his ear to the steel-reinforced door. Not a peep.

  That fuck, that murderer. Killed what was ours. Sister-fucker. He’ll get his tonight.

  You notice that Zak is warm from top to bottom. His skin is sweaty. The warmer his skin, the stranger his heart.

  Shuffling. Snickering. Clinking of metal against metal. Sounds that make up the world of the cottage.

  Zak begins to tremble.

  And now because he’s afraid, afraid of the jinn, his heart is hammering, his pupils are dilating, Zak unbuckles his belt. He drops his jeans and moves into the shadows to inhabit the darkness in his sister’s room.

  YOU ARE WROUGHT. You are abrim.

  And now because you are converged, you rise. Through the eye of the narrowest tangle of root, shoot, and branch, past the tallest emerald treetops, up and up, gathering strength. A curlicue of mystery, a calligram of power, you wrap yourself around yourself and tornado to the Saigol mansion, quaking that mausoleum of a hatchery in your wake – where a long time ago, when it was a horse shed, a clutch of lesser relatives and their children were beheaded with scythes and secreted beneath the floorboards for transgressions no one remembers, or deigns to remember. Down the smoke vents, up the stairs, past Zak’s bedroom, a titanic wind known by one secret name, you howl into the depths of the house, where behind a steel reinforced door, surrounded by a grinder of guards and thugs, a young murderer hangs from the ceiling fan by his roped feet. Blood drips from his nostrils onto the concrete floor.

  Zak’s uncle is seated on a cedarwood chair before the hanging. In one hand he holds a Cuban cigar, in the other a cellphone. “The one by the canal, yes, yes, that one. Two hundred acres.” Before him, the stinking boy screams as iron rods descend on his arms and bare feet. Zak’s uncle waves away the smoke and screams with a flourish of his iPhone and lazily drapes one leg over the other.

  Tenderly, like the gentlest lover, you drape the young murderer. He exhales. You cup your hands and breathe yourself into him. You lick his marrow, settle into his blood. Enthroned, you fasten his skin across us, like the slide of a curtain. You tauten it around us, mystery around mystery. Layer within layers.

  The pages of a book. The membranes of a womb.

  History

  Nnedi Okorafor

  HISTORY WAS A powerful witch who didn’t know what the hell she was doing. However, few laughed at or gossiped about her. She was too glamorous, too enchanting, she was too entertaining. Plus, many were waiting for the right time and the right place. Tonight was both of those things, but History wasn’t aware of this fact; she was just there to dance and sing and be the superstar that millions so loved.

  As she inspected her face in the mirror, she half listened to the TV mounted on the wall behind her. “The woman was in labor when she stepped out of her home,” an excited anchorwoman said, staring into the camera. “She was alone and she’d planned to catch a cab, but, well, the baby refused to wait. We’re right at a crosswalk here on East 68th Street and 3rd Avenue, and she’s in the process of giving birth! The news team just happened to be in the area, so we’re covering this miracle live!” History turned to take a look. The anchorwoman laughed giddily as the camera turned to show a group of people crowded around paramedics. The woman in labor was barely in sight.

  “Wow, that’s bananas,” History whispered, decreasing the volume and turning back to her mirror. “Good luck to her.”

  She shut her eyes and took a deep breath to clear her mind. She was here, now, almost ready. When she opened her eyes, she stared at herself in the large round mirror. Her dark brown skin glittered with the make-up her crew of artists had applied an hour ago. They’d used broad strokes of mascara to make her almond-shaped eyes sharp and piercing, and red, red lipstick to make her thick lips like cherries. She looked garish, but on stage she’d be the image of a queen, and that’s all that mattered.

  “One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three,” she whispered. Counting soothed her nerves, as long as she didn’t count too high. When she got past three, she always began finding it difficult to think and her discomfort would cause things to fall off tables and shelves. She glanced down at the turquoise mat her bare feet rested on and wiggled her toes. She smiled. The tattered old thing was the most valuable object she owned.

  “Your toenails are so long you’d cut the grass if you walked barefoot,” a nasal voice said. The bush baby snickered as it flattened itself on the top half of the large round mirror. It mashed its body against the surface, pressing until its white bug-eyes bugged out even more. History tried to ignore the creature inside the mirror. “Stop it,” she eventually said. “I’ll be on stage in minutes, you’re distracting me.” She paused, admiring the sound of her own voice. She hadn’t even applied the juju, yet already it was like honey.

  “That is my greatest wish,” the bush baby said, stretching itself into a thin line, against the rounded top of the mirror. “You’re a thief, and thieves don’t deserve any peace of mind. Only annoyance and distraction.”

  Though not so much now, over the years the reward for tolerating its insolence was far greater than the satisfaction of shutting it up forever. Twenty years ago, she’d stolen the bush baby’s mat and then lived through the seven-day ordeal it enacted fair and square; when the constant banging and screeching was over, silence had never been so sweet. Even an eleven-year-old needed silence at some point.

  Surviving the bush baby’s ordeal meant that she became its lord and master. Also (and most importantly to History), the creature’s powerful juju blessed her with great wealth as she grew up. Still, though she could have, she didn’t hurt the irritating squat onion-shaped earth spirit; she’d never had the heart. She’d toted the bush baby-inhabited mirror with her across the United States, across the sea and there and back again so many times, he’d become a kind of companion to her.

  She plumped up her bushy blonde w
ig, tilted her face to the side and smirked. She’d been dancing since she could walk, dancing well. She’d been singing since before she could talk, humming sweet melodies her mother imagined she must have heard in her head and her father thought she learned from the local birds. History was born amazing, but it was the bush baby’s mat that got her where she was today. Stealing it was fate.

  HISTORY HAD GROWN up in a large Eastern Nigerian village surrounded by dense forest. Her parents were African American researchers from Jackson, Mississippi studying Cross River State’s glorious butterflies. One day, they came home from a long day of research and found their five-year-old daughter singing like an angel and dancing like a goddess for the captivated audience of her caregiver’s market women friends and local passersby. Right then and there, her parents knew her destiny.

  Little History was never very gifted in academics, and her mother often laughed at her daughter’s lack of critical thinking skills, but History was born with the power to mesmerize. And five years later, a year before they left Nigeria, some of the local women (with the permission of her parents and her caregiver, who was like a second mother to her) took her to Abassi, a local woman who was both the best farmer and the oldest person in the village. Abassi was also – quietly, unassuming – a sorceress.

  “Don’t take her back to America until I am done preparing her,” Abassi told History’s parents after spending two hours talking to the ten-year-old girl. “Someone like her will cause a lot of trouble. If she’s taught a few things, the world will be better off.”

  And teach her Abassi did. Over that year, she groomed the ten-year-old to become her successor. Little History was to take her gifts wherever she wanted, be it into the forests of rural Nigeria or back to her parents’ hometown in Mississippi. One fateful night, weeks before she and her family were to leave, little History saw something and made a choice that changed her life. She was eleven and restless. Thus, she was up that night gazing out the window, dreaming of what America would be like. And that was how she saw the bush baby.

  A short onion-shaped creature, standing upright, with beady blue eyes and soft pig-like skin, the bush baby looked nothing like the cuddly furry animal one would find under the name ‘bush baby’ in the encyclopedia. The bush babies of Cross River carried lanterns that glowed a soft orange in the night, and rolled-up mats made of a straw-like turquoise material. History remembered Abassi telling her about them. Their peculiar look, and the fact that if you stole a bush baby’s mat you could become rich, were easy enough for History to remember.

  She crept outside and crouched behind the car in the compound. When the bush baby walked by, she leapt and tackled it, pressing it to the ground with her weight. She was a plump child, and this served to her advantage.

  “Are you crazy?” it screeched. Then it spit some of the worst obscenities in the Igbo language that History had ever heard. Still, she and the creature wrestled and eventually she won. Right before her eyes, the creature farted loudly and then disappeared. That night, there it was, inside her mirror, leering and rudely gesturing at her. And it continued to do so when her father entered the room to get her ready for bed, to her father’s horror.

  Now, twenty years later, History still had the mirror and mat, though she didn’t need the mirror anymore and could afford elaborate mirrors plated with gold and diamonds and free of annoying forest spirits. She was deep into her career as the top performer and singer in the world.

  During that pivotal year of learning with Abassi, History developed what Abassi and everyone in the village called ‘four eyes’. Thus, now as an adult, she could see and shove away the large, oily, green ghost-hopper sitting on her red leather juju bag. The insect was big as a stapler, but light as a pencil. It flicked her hand with its powerful yet ghostly legs as it jumped to her table, knocked over her capped bottled water and proceeded to walk up the wall. History righted her bottle of water and reached into the bag again.

  She brought out a brown leather satchel filled with sand and poured a hand-sized pile of it on her cleared dresser table. Then she spread it over the surface with an open hand and drew two lines in it at 45-degree angles with her index finger. At the tip of each line, she did the same. Then she did the same to those lines. With each repetition, she drew shorter and shorter lines, branching out in a way that always reminded her of a tree she liked to gaze at back in Nigeria. She’d never known the name of that tree, but with her ‘four eyes’ she had seen that every part of it was inhabited by coin-sized spherical spirits that bloomed into flowers at night. Only certain bats saw them, and those bats liked to eat them when they were ripe. That tree was so strange, she thought as she drew.

  When she finished, she reached into her bag again and grasped the long glass neck of a large bottle and slowly brought it out. It was like a wine bottle, except the body of it was round instead of cylindrical. Inside was what would make this particular concert the best of her career. She held it to her face. Last night when she’d summoned the jinni, it had been in the form of a tiny, angry, periwinkle dragon. Tonight, it had decided to take the form of something like her bush baby, round like the bottle with soft dimply flesh and so fat that it filled almost every inch of it. The folds of fat that would have been its neck waggled as it cocked its head, smirking slyly at her. Then it opened its mouth and stuck its pink bumpy tongue out at her, pressing it against the glass. “Blaaaaah!” it said, and then it laughed wildly.

  “Nonsense,” History softly said, resting a hand on her table. She touched the tip of the fractal image she’d drawn in the sand. “It is well, Ne Ikomm. You will reach deep, but save one hand, which shall remain outside. This way all who watch may see and be in awe of our power,” she recited. It was always best to speak inclusively when dealing with even small djinn like this one. Their voracious powers came with voracious egos. Abassi would have told her to use a more local spirit, or at least one who had known her closest ancestors. This could have meant a ghost, fairy, forest spirit or even an immigrant masquerade. However, History wanted to go exotic, distant, and wasn’t Arab magic more powerful than African? Who had told her that? She couldn’t remember, but it seemed true.

  The media, her label, her fans, everyone had high expectations for tonight’s performance. HBO was filming this one for a documentary that would bring together her life’s work. And though she couldn’t read it, she could feel it, deep in her bones. Tonight was especially special. Yes, a jinni would do.

  It giggled, belched out a foul stench of brimstone and turned around so that its ample backside was facing her, pressed obnoxiously against the glass. “You think you can dance, and maybe you can, but you are a fool,” it said in its rumbly, bumptious voice. “I’ve seen a Sudanese girl half your age dance the fire dance, washing her whole village in flames. Now that is real dancing.”

  “I never said I was the best,” she said coolly. “But I’m damn good at what I do.”

  The creature sniffed dismissively. “Yes. That’s why you need me, right?” The creature was not imprisoned; the glass bottle was of its own choosing. And it would have as much fun tonight as she would. So why is it being such an ass? She wondered. Literally.

  Regardless, as she looked at its backside, she couldn’t help but admire its lovely periwinkle glow. Its wonderful light filled the room and its touch made her sit up straighter, inhale more deeply, deliciously flex all her muscles. She would dance for all the spirits and demons this evening. They would see her.

  With its jiggling jowls and butt cheeks, it made crass faces and gestures at the bush baby in the mirror (who laughed raucously at its antics). This, along with its lovely periwinkle color, made History feel both naughty and gorgeous. She put the bottle down and took a deep breath. Then she sang for the jinni in the glass. The jinni, the bush baby in the mirror and other spirits hanging around her dressing room listened. Her voice was like the most precious palm tree nectar, slowly pouring over everything in the room, warm, sweet, clear and thick. She smiled as she sang
and closed her eyes, enjoying the vibration of her voice, harmonizing every part of her body.

  When she felt the soft tingling in her fingertips, she opened her eyes. The jinni was turned to her and it had changed into what looked like a spherical yet recognizably female stone figurine sitting in the middle of the glass bottle. It had large breasts, no face and meaty thighs and it blazed an electric periwinkle. The bush baby in her mirror was shading its eyes, the ghost hopper was flying joyfully about the room, there were two humanoid spirits sitting on her white couch, rolling as if they were underwater. She grasped the bottle and turned it upside down.

  “Aaaah,” the jinni breathed as its stone body plunked to the opening of the bottle, melted like plastic, stretched and then slid out of the bottle’s long neck onto the dresser’s surface. The fractals in the sand shifted as if to catch the jinni as it poured over them.

  There was a knock on her door. “Two minutes,” Sheila said.

  The light became a thin vapor. History even felt it enter her lungs as she inhaled. She glanced at the TV, where the woman on the street was still trying to give birth, and then used the remote to turn it off. She straightened her golden dress, checked her hair one last time and opened the door.

  “Break your legs,” the bush baby laughingly called from behind her. She shut the door without a glance back. The periwinkle light flooded the hallway as make-up artists rushed at her with brushes, powder puffs, and pencils. No one was allowed in her dressing room right before her shows, so they’d waited there like obedient dogs. Now, they descended on her like seagulls to abandoned French fries.