The House of Djinn

by Suzanne Fisher Staples

  But Baba would not let them into the garage. “It’s a surprise!” he said, and everyone looked around at everyone else, eyebrows raised, which pleased the old man very much.

  Within the hour Baba gathered a party together on the bank of the canal, outside the garden gate. He sent Leyla to organize tea and cake, and he called Uncle Omar to come home from his office downtown. Jameel’s mother went back up to the house with Leyla, and Muti held Selma’s arm as they walked to the canal’s edge.

  When Omar arrived at the spot beside the canal, Baba waited for Nargis and Leyla to return before pulling a tarpaulin from the back of a battered pickup truck to reveal a shining silver Jet Ski. His driver, Khoda Baksh, supervised five servants as they unloaded the machine and slid it into the slimy green water where the canal curved to run beside Anwar Road. Baba waded in and climbed aboard, revving the engine and nearly toppling off as the Jet Ski leaped to life.

  Omar leaned back on his elbows, stretched his legs out before him in the grass, and laughed. Jameel’s mother and Auntie Selma smiled affectionately, and Leyla put her hands over her mouth in horror.

  “I’m glad your mother isn’t alive to see this,” Leyla hissed under her breath. Grandmother had died the year before. Omar looked at his wife and sighed.

  “Mother always tolerated more than she let on,” he said. “He always expected her to disapprove—and she never let him down.” Since his mother’s death Leyla had taken on the role of household critic. Omar shifted his attention back to the canal.

  Jameel and Muti and Jaffar all clapped as Baba got the machine under control and shot down the canal with his beard flying and the end of his turban flapping over his shoulder and a bright arc of spray jetting out behind. Two turbaned malis stood from their work around the rose beds beside the canal and stared in wonder after Baba, their lungis loose around their hips, their hands holding sickles dangling by their sides.

  Jaffar, Muti, and Jameel all begged for rides, and Baba took the boys first, one at a time. When he returned for Muti, Leyla marched down to the edge of the canal.

  “You mustn’t, Baba,” she said, her eyes flashing. “All of Gulberg is laughing at you.”

  “Let them laugh!” Baba said loudly. “It’ll add a little fun to their day!”

  Leyla was stricken and unable to speak for a moment. “But … but … for Mumtaz this behavior is unseemly! You know what people will think! How will we find a suitable match for her if she behaves this way?” Leyla’s voice had grown shrill. The spell of Baba’s amazing machine was suspended for a moment.

  “Oh, let them think!” Baba boomed, brushing aside Leyla’s protests—just as he’d brushed aside his wife’s objections. “Come on, Mumtaz,” he said, beckoning Muti into the water. “We only live once, eh?” Muti pulled her shalwar up around her knees and waded in, the bottom mud squishing between her toes. She climbed onto the seat behind Baba. But she knew that Leyla would make her pay later, when she was out of Baba’s sight.

  That evening Number 5 Anwar Road overflowed with members of the Amirzai extended family. They gathered first in the large reception hall to honor Jameel and his parents amid flowers and pitchers of pomegranate juice, and whiskey, too, although Baba kept it in a teapot, and offered it quietly to the gentlemen, all of whom considered themselves good and devout Muslims.

  “More cold tea?” he asked, and the men chuckled and said yes, holding out their teacups for more whiskey.

  Jameel and his parents were leaving in two days to return to San Francisco, where Jameel was born and had lived his entire life. They’d arrived in Lahore the week after school ended, the third week in June, after two or three days in Karachi to visit Jameel’s paternal grandparents. And now it was August, and school would begin soon.

  Jameel couldn’t imagine where the summer had gone. This year he’d come to Lahore reluctantly for the first time in his life. He’d met a girl in California, just before the end of the school term—a beautiful blond girl named Chloe. He couldn’t wait to tell Muti about Chloe, but this summer it seemed his parents or Uncle Omar or Auntie Leyla—someone—was always around. It was as if he and Muti needed a chaperone.

  Muti and Jameel had been best friends since they were toddlers. Technically, they were first cousins once removed. They were a month apart in age, and they shared secrets and jokes and dreams. As children they had made up games, instantly falling into each other’s imaginings. There were dragons in trees and monsters in bushes, villains and bandits who needed routing around every corner. Evenings they’d sneaked down the back stairs to watch the adults at lavish dinners, and to listen in as Baba settled tribal disputes in his grand reception hall. They’d exchanged letters in the long fall, winter, and spring, devising plans for the summer. But this year it seemed one of the adults was always nearby and they’d had few private conversations.

  When everyone moved into the dining room for the banquet, Baba upset Leyla’s seating arrangement, insisting that men and women sit together at the two long tables, and the younger relatives—boys and girls together—at the smaller round tables around the edge of the room. Leyla tried to redirect ladies to one table, gents to the other in a more traditional seating arrangement, but Baba easily overpowered her with his booming voice.

  Once the confusion ended and everyone was seated, a dozen bearers in white uniforms and fanned turbans brought out platter after platter: roast meat in spiced gravy, vegetables in delicately flavored sauces, biryani made with scented rice and pieces of meat, steaming piles of roti, kebabs of lamb and chicken, deep dishes of channa and lentils and pickles and dahi with cucumbers to cool the heat of the spices.

  Members of Baba’s family who seldom appeared at Number 5 Anwar Road were there: his brother Nazir, who lived alone and out of favor in a suburb on the road that went toward the border crossing at Wagga; their sister, Selma, who lived alone in the family’s old haveli in the ancient walled city of Lahore; and cousins, aunts, and uncles whom Jameel and Muti greeted politely before joining the younger people at their own tables.

  The dining room, which had a white marble floor, echoed with the sounds of laughter and talk, glasses clinking, and the ping of silverware on china plates. An enormous crystal chandelier hung overhead, its arms branching out the length of the two large tables, which seated twelve people each. Jameel and Muti and Jaffar sat at one of the smaller tables with four cousins, who ranged in age from eight to eighteen.

  When they had eaten, the bearers began to clear the plates while others brought out platters of fruit and sweets—silver-covered burfi, bhoondi ladoo and bowls of coconut kheer, halwa and rasmali, pretzel-shaped jalabis—and the children’s faces rekindled with smiles as each new tray arrived. Leyla rose from her place at one of the large tables and made her way around to where Muti sat, and stood facing her, hands on hips.

  “Get up and help clear, Mumtaz,” Leyla said. Out of the corner of her eye Muti saw Jameel look at her in surprise. “You’re supposed to earn your keep.” Muti glanced over toward the big table. “Omar and your grandfather have been into their cold tea,” Leyla continued. “They aren’t going to rescue you. Get up!” Muti got to her feet obediently, collected the remaining plates on their table, and carried them toward the kitchen. She didn’t want Leyla to make more of a scene and embarrass everyone.

  As she passed the end of the large table, Muti smiled at Auntie Selma. Her father’s sister frowned, and did not smile back. Selma shifted her eyes toward Leyla, watching her until she resumed her seat at the large table.

  When Muti was helping to serve tea, Jameel caught her eye and gave her the signal they’d always used for emergency meetings: five fingers spread on the tabletop, his head beckoning slightly with a tilt over the shoulder. It meant five minutes, out in the garden.

  Muti waited until Leyla was occupied with giving more orders to the bearers, and slipped out the French doors that led to the swimming pool and the gardens beyond. She followed the path beside the pool, through the rose garden, and down to a
small garden with a little pond that held Baba’s silver-and-orange koi, with a wooden garden swing beside it, where Jameel sat waiting.

  “What took you so long?” It was Jameel’s turn to smirk. Muti sighed and sank down beside him on the swing.

  “Leyla’s always watching to take advantage of me. It’ll be almost a relief after you’ve gone, when she’ll simply ignore me again!” Muti said.

  “Did you do something to make her angry?” he asked. Muti sighed but said nothing. Jameel had never seemed to notice before that Leyla spoke sharply to Muti, that she ordered her to do things only the servants were expected to do, and that she acted under the radar of Omar and Baba. When Muti was little, Leyla and her mother, Amina, tried to make Shabanu mend the clothing and look after the children and clean their shoes, and even Muti’s father didn’t seem to notice.

  “We don’t have much time and I want to tell you something,” Jameel said, clearing his throat and turning to look at Muti. “I’ve met a girl I like very much. Her name is Chloe, and she’s beautiful and kind. And my parents would freak out if they knew.” He smiled at Muti, whose jaw had dropped.

  “Where did you meet?” she asked. “Does she go to your school? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I tried! This is the first time I’ve had a chance,” said Jameel. “We met skateboarding. She’s the best skater in the park. She’s amazing. She does flips and twists and ollies and …” Jameel remembered Muti knew nothing about skateboarding. “She goes to a different school—a public school—and my parents know nothing about her. We talked one day, and then we just started to meet at the park, after school and weekends. I almost didn’t even want to come here this summer!”

  Muti’s eyes widened and her breath caught. “How can you say that? I thought you loved coming here. You always say it’s the best part of the year!”

  “It is!” Jameel said quickly. “It was just—you know. I didn’t want to leave …”

  Muti also had been looking for an opportunity to tell Jameel about Jag, the handsome tennis coach she’d met at the Lahore Club—and the most unsuitable person for her to have a crush on. But she didn’t want it to seem as if she was trying to match Jameel’s story. And Jameel was right. This summer they never had the time or privacy to talk.

  Voices wafted through the trellis then, as if someone had opened the French doors leading from the dining room into the rose garden. Jameel and Muti stood. They looked at each other, both struck by the same thought. They almost felt guilty.

  “Mumtaz! Jameel! Where are you?” It was Leyla, and her voice moved toward them. “What do you mean by slipping away when we have guests?”

  “Over here, Auntie,” said Jameel, resting his hands lightly on the gate to the rose garden and leaning forward so Leyla could see him. “We were looking at Grandfather’s koi—”

  “In the dark? You’ve had all summer to look at them!” Leyla’s voice rose, now that she was out of earshot of the dining room. Jameel didn’t know what to say. Muti looked down at her hands and said nothing. “Come back now and say goodbye to everyone. They’ll think you two have been brought up without manners.”

  Muti and Jameel came into the marble front foyer just as Auntie Selma drew her white lawn dupatta up over her hair. Selma had worn widow’s white for more than twenty years.

  “There you are, Mumtaz!” Selma said, embracing Muti and kissing her forehead. “You must come to see me.”

  “When can I come, Auntie?” Muti asked quickly, before Selma had a chance to get away.

  “I’ll call you this week,” Selma said, and her eyes lingered on Muti’s face.

  “Yes, Auntie,” said Muti. “I’ll look forward to your call. I really do want to visit you.” Selma laid her palm against Muti’s cheek and smiled, then left as her driver pulled her old-fashioned sedan up to the door.

  Every time Selma saw Muti at a family wedding or some other event, Selma looked the girl over and kissed her forehead, and asked her questions about school, her friends, and anything else going on in Muti’s life. On each occasion Selma said, “You must come to see me. You and I are destined to spend some time together when the occasion is right.”

  But Selma never fixed a date for Muti to visit the haveli, and Muti wondered what would cause the time to be right and why her mysterious aunt felt destined to be with her. She thought of going there on her own, hiring a motor rickshaw to take her into the old walled city, near the Shahi Qila. Muti had not visited the haveli since she was a child, but she still knew how to get there.

  3

  Shabanu adjusted the folds of the burqa around her, lifting the hem away from her feet, and walked quickly. She had been drawn irresistibly into the smells and sounds and activity of the bazaar, just as she had been the day before. She was bolder today, venturing into conversations with merchants—a simple query as to the cost of bangles here, and there a comment to an apothecary who ground gemstones into powder for kohl to shadow the eyes.

  She made her way to Munir Bookseller and told the clerk behind the counter she wanted elementary readers.

  “How many?” he asked.

  “Twelve,” she said, and he took her to a shelf of booklets that contained rough drawings of foods with their names written under each: chawal, roti, atta; and animals: gaay, bukri, pakshi; and numbers: eek, do, teen. There was a section on telling time. And toward the back were simple sentences. Shabanu paid the bookseller and went off to find a clock to teach the desert women of Cholistan how to tell time.

  Delighted with everything from the sound of her own voice speaking to strangers to the shadow of her form that followed her on the dusty pavement, she had lost track of the hour. It was nearly noon, and Selma would be coming to have lunch with her in the pavilion to tell about the banquet at Number 5 Anwar Road. Most important would be the news she brought of Mumtaz. It was Shabanu’s only contact with her daughter—if one could consider observation at second hand the same thing as contact.

  It was an oddity of Selma’s that she would not come to the roof of the haveli at night, or at any time before noon. In the deadening heat of pre-monsoon summers, Selma and her husband, Daoud, who had been a judge in the Lahore High Court, used to sleep on the roof to catch whatever air moved high above the other buildings surrounding the haveli. One night about twenty-five years before, the brother of a murderer whom Daoud had sentenced to life in prison had taken his revenge by creeping up to the roof and burying a dagger in the heart of the judge as he slept beside his wife. Selma had slept so soundly through the heat of the night that she never knew her husband lay dead beside her until she awoke in the morning and found him in a sticky pool of his own blood. The servants believed the judge’s ghost prowled the rooftop every night, and so the doors to both stairways were kept locked. Shabanu was safe in the spacious rooftop courtyard and pavilion because everyone believed the judge’s ghost would haunt the place every night for eternity.

  Selma had regarded her husband as the twin of her own soul and could not bear to face his apparition on the roof because she could not admit to her suspicion that she might have saved him had she slept less soundly. Shabanu found comfort in the nocturnal prowlings of Daoud’s ghost, for he was her protector. She smiled when she stumbled over a potted palm that the judge’s ghost moved into her path to trip her as she walked the perimeter of the roof after sunset. When she heard him humming late in the night sometimes, she took out her flute and accompanied him. When it came to ghosts, it was the djinn in Gulberg that Shabanu feared, because her daughter lived among them and Shabanu wanted desperately for her to be safe.

  When Shabanu got to the weathered gray wooden doors of the outer courtyard of the haveli, she hurried past and ducked around the corner and into the alley that ran behind the old house. She picked her way over mango pits and onion peelings and shreds of plastic bags that had been tossed over the back walls of the houses at the beginning of the lane. The way was dim, shaded by the towering walls of the haveli and the houses on either side. Gray
drain water sloshed up over the narrow ditches that ran along both sides of the alley.

  A young man and an older woman also hurried along the lane, on their way home to their midday meal, but neither of them paid attention to her. She strode quickly to the blue-painted heavy steel gate at the back of the haveli and pulled the rusty iron key from the bundle of keys tied in a handkerchief around her wrist to keep them from jangling, and fit it into the heavy lock in the gate.

  Once back inside, Shabanu shut the gate quietly behind her and relocked it, then turned to slip up the back stairway to the rooftop. Standing in her way were Selma and Samiya, their hands on their hips, their lips pursed, so that despite the differences in their age and size they almost looked alike in their widows’ white saris and angry scowls.

  “What are you thinking, Shabanu?” asked Selma in her sternest voice. “We have gone to such lengths to hide and protect you, even from your own family—and you slip in and out like a thief!” She made a clicking sound with her tongue, eloquent in its disapproval.

  Shabanu reached out and touched the arm of her sister-in-law, who had suffered so much, had saved her life—still saved her life every day. Shabanu left her hand on Selma’s arm and looked into her eyes. After a moment she pulled the burqa off and smoothed back her hair.

  “I am thinking that I am not yet thirty years old, and I have been buried on the rooftop for one third of my life,” she said, her voice level and reasonable. Samiya stepped forward then and took the burqa from Shabanu’s hands and draped it over her arm.

  “Have you forgotten Nazir?” asked Samiya. “How do you know he doesn’t have spies around the city? He may look old and defeated, but how can we be sure he has given up?” Her voice shook with fear more than anger.

  “I can’t spend my entire life locked away,” Shabanu replied. “I feel like one of those plants that’s been neglected in the back of the courtyard, the ones that turn white for lack of sun and water just before their leaves begin to drop, just before they die!”