The House of Djinn

by Suzanne Fisher Staples

  Jameel sighed and tried to concentrate on the music coming through the earphones of his iPod. He thought perhaps once they arrived his grandfather would sit up and shake off the illness that had overtaken him, and that things would go on as always. He’d heard of miraculous recoveries. After the meal he reclined his leather seat and gave himself over to visions of Chloe crouched above her board, sailing from the top of a ramp with her arms spread like the wings of a beautiful bird, soaring to the beat of Audioslave, her golden hair aloft around her head in a perfect circle, like the rings of Saturn.

  He awoke a few minutes later feeling as if he’d slept for hours. His father still stared straight ahead. He hadn’t even loosened his tie. Jameel looked over at his mother, and caught her staring at him. “What?” Jameel mouthed, but his mother smiled softly and closed her eyes again.

  Jameel pressed his forehead against the cool of the window beside him and was astonished to see the airplane was flying through a black velvet sky scattered with small, brilliant white lights that looked like stars. Larger white objects floated in and out of his vision—as one drifted closer, it looked like a person wrapped in a white sheet. Jameel leaned forward to get a better view.

  The figure floated still nearer the aircraft with one hand extended. Jameel recognized his grandfather’s twinkling eyes, full white beard, and highly arched black eyebrows. Their eyes locked, and his grandfather tilted his head to one side, sadness falling over his face like a veil. A chilly breeze blew through the aircraft and Jameel shivered. His grandfather slid back slightly and stretched his arm farther in Jameel’s direction, but he slipped away from the aircraft. Jameel tried to reach out, but his hand bumped into the window. He leaned forward and watched until the figure grew smaller and then was indistinguishable from the stars.

  Jameel turned to his father, who still sat staring straight ahead. “Daddy,” he said quietly. His father turned to him. “I think Grandfather is gone.” He shivered again, and his father drew a soft blue airline blanket around Jameel’s shoulders.

  “Why do you say that, Beta?” he asked gently.

  “I saw him. He was outside …” Realizing how ludicrous he must sound, Jameel stopped mid-sentence.

  “I think you’ve been dreaming,” his father said. “Go back to sleep—we’ll have a busy day when we get to Lahore. We’ll be landing in a little more than an hour.”

  Jameel did go back to sleep, a fitful sleep, dreaming of skateboarding with Grandfather, while Chloe watched from a hospital bed. Grandfather leaned into his carves and Chloe, who was dressed in a white gown, clapped her hands and cheered.

  15

  Omar and Muti reached Number 5 Anwar Road in the darkest part of night. The door shutting behind them in the quiet of that hour sounded loud enough to awaken all of Gulberg.

  They found Leyla pacing in a dressing gown in the front hallway. Omar turned to Muti.

  “You’d better get some sleep,” he said. “We have a lot to do tomorrow.” Muti nodded and went up to her room.

  She undressed slowly without turning on the light. She pulled on her pajamas, but tired as she was, she couldn’t face the solitariness of trying to sleep. All she could think of was Baba in the hospital bed, a sheet pulled up over his face. Hadn’t he been there in his body just moments before, the light lit behind his closed eyes, breathing in and out, his hand warm?

  Muti sat in the small easy chair in the corner of the room, and clicked on the reading lamp beside it. She picked up a photo in a Persian frame inlaid with ivory and brass from the tabletop. The photo was of Baba—taken when he was about twenty years old, long before the responsibilities of being a tribal leader had weighed on him. Muti guessed it was a time when her grandfather, Baba’s father, was the tribal leader. In the photo a polo mallet rested on his shoulder. He was tall and slim, his face clean-shaven and his hair dark. He looked very different, but his pointed eyebrows and mischievous grin were unmistakable.

  As Muti looked at Baba’s photo she heard voices from Omar and Leyla’s room below hers on the ground floor. She listened to them talk through the water pipe that passed from their room up to hers and to the floor above. She heard the words they spoke, but something prevented her from putting them together and applying them to herself. She felt too numb to react to one more thing. Losing Jag. Finding her mother. Losing Baba. She couldn’t absorb the loss or gain of one more thing.

  Leyla’s voice rose in anger, and suddenly the room felt chilly. Muti looked up—the window stood open. Warm air should have been pouring in through the screen. She heard the tree frogs outside. She thought perhaps she felt chilled because she was so tired.

  Both voices downstairs were raised in angry disagreement. Mumtaz knew they were talking about her, but she could not admit the words into her consciousness. A Nepali shawl lay across the back of her chair, and she pulled it around her shoulders. The air grew colder still and a musty smell settled around her.

  Muti lay down and pulled her sheet up over the Nepali shawl and thought of what Baba had told her and Jameel about the djinn. They were impish spirits, he’d said, sent by Allah to each person to teach something. Sometimes they were evident because of a change of air in the room. She couldn’t think yet about the words from downstairs. She concentrated instead on what her djinni might be trying to tell her.

  She thought of how she’d given away her mother’s secret without even realizing it. She could trust Omar, she thought. But she did not like it that he knew her mother lived on the roof of the haveli. Once again the feeling of not belonging, of never being safe, rose up around her, and she didn’t have the strength to fight it.

  Downstairs Leyla continued pacing in the sitting room at the end of their bedroom. Omar had been telling her how Baba had died. “He actually looked peaceful,” Omar said. “Perhaps because he knew things have been settled.”

  Leyla stared at the tops of the walls and then at the ceiling, all the while looking more anxious. “I haven’t slept a wink,” she said, her voice accusing, as if her exhaustion were Omar’s fault.

  “There are some other things I must tell you,” Omar said. The tone of his voice rather than his words captured Leyla’s attention. Omar was sounding more authoritative than he ever sounded.

  “Jameel has been named tribal leader to succeed my father.”

  Leyla stared at him in disbelief. “Jameel!” she said. “Jameel!” Her words came out in a near shriek. “What about you? What about Jaffar?” She had put up with the old man’s eccentricities, the slights, the honors bestowed on Baba by everyone from the sweeper to the Chief Minister of the Punjab Assembly, only because she knew that the cloak of leadership would pass from her father-in-law to her husband, and then to her son. That was how it should be!

  “I refused the leadership long ago, when Uncle Rahim died,” Omar said. “I’ve had enough of the intrigues of leadership. I watched Uncle Rahim get killed over power and I lost my stomach for it. I have no interest.”

  “But how long have you known?” Leyla asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We had all been sworn to secrecy,” Omar replied. “And the other thing is that Jameel and Mumtaz are to be married.”

  “Mumtaz?” asked Leyla as if she didn’t understand what Omar had said. “How can that Gypsy possibly fit in—”

  “Mumtaz is a bright girl. She is a direct descendant of my grandfather. She’s a good girl, and she will be a good wife. She and Jameel are compatible, and it’s settled, so there’s no use making a fuss. This marriage will take place soon. We didn’t want Nazir to get ideas in his head about upsetting the plans and taking control himself.”

  “And here I’ve been wasting my time trying to arrange something in Okurabad,” Leyla said accusingly. “You could have saved me the trouble—”

  “It’s time you got some sleep,” Omar said, interrupting her. “I’m leaving now for the airport. We’ll have a lot to do in the morning.” His voice sounded as if it had squeezed through a very narrow opening in his t
hroat. “At seven-thirty or so, Asrar can begin to telephone people from government. You call your family on your mobile, and I’ll call my side of the family.”

  Leyla opened her mouth to say something, then shut it again. This was not the time to complain. She was not accustomed to her husband taking strong positions. She was not accustomed to his giving orders to the servants. She resumed her pacing.

  I must take action, Leyla thought. She looked at her watch. In a few hours the muezzin would give the call for early morning prayer. She would not dither like Omar. She would take decisive action.

  Leyla sat down at the desk in the front hallway and wrote out a note to Uncle Nazir telling him of Omar’s plan for Baba’s succession. If Omar wouldn’t assume power, then Nazir should take over. That way Leyla would have time to put some plans in place for Jaffar’s future as tribal leader. Nazir didn’t have a son, and she had been careful to be kind to him when none of the rest of her father’s wretched family gave him the time of day. When she had finished, she went to the cupboard under the stairway and fetched a light cotton chador, which she wrapped around herself as she walked briskly through the kitchen to the servants’ quarters. She went straight to the door of Spin Gul’s room and tapped lightly.

  From behind the door she heard Spin Gul stirring. Leyla shared the driver with her mother, and his loyalty was split evenly between them. He had a highly developed sense of stealth. Leyla and Amina used him for errands they didn’t want others to know about.

  Muti lay in her bed and slowly absorbed the words she had overheard from downstairs. She was still too numb to react to the plans Baba and Omar and Jameel’s parents had made for her and Jameel. She was used to feeling unsafe and unloved. She was used to not having a mother, to being all alone in the world except for Baba and Jameel. Suddenly she had a mother and the chance for a secure place in the family. But it felt strange and unreal, like a drama in which the actors read from a script that made little sense.

  16

  The flight arrived on time. Crowds of people looking for familiar faces among the travelers jostled under bright lights at the metal barricade outside the arrivals lounge. Asrar waved to catch Jameel’s father’s attention and made his way along the barricade to its end. Asrar touched his forehead and bowed deeply, then turned and extended his elbows to clear a path for them through the crowd to the VIP lounge. The night air was hot and heavy—much warmer than the daytime air of San Francisco. The noise of the crowd and traffic from Airport Road added to the feeling of heaviness. The din disappeared as if by magic as the door to the cool, quiet lounge swung shut behind them.

  Jameel tried to imagine what Chloe would make of the effusive formality that greeted his family everywhere in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Everyone knew them. His grandfather was a tribal leader, and Baba and Uncle Omar were members of the Provincial Assembly. Amirzai tribal lands spilled from Punjab westward almost to Baluchistan; he didn’t even know how many thousands of hectares in all. Chloe’s world was so different from his—she could never imagine how different, he thought.

  He pictured her in all of the details that she’d described to him about her life: curled with her back against her mother in the double bed in the one-bedroom walk-up apartment on Turk Street; bumping into each other in the dark, narrow hallway outside the bathroom when she went to brush her teeth; sitting at a small, square table in a corner of the kitchen, drinking a glass of milk in one long chug. Some of the guys made fun of Chloe because she seemed to do nothing at all but skateboard. But she didn’t care. She was better at it than any of them. Jameel’s stomach ached at the thought of her.

  Omar waited inside the airport’s VIP lounge. He rushed forward and embraced Jameel’s father and then Jameel, and held on to his sister Nargis’s hand as they followed Asrar to a sofa with ornately carved wooden legs and love seats covered in silk to match the sofa. The furniture was arranged in a U at one side of the lounge. Asrar ordered tea for them, and hurried off to arrange for their luggage to be delivered to the car. Uncle Omar sat between his sister and Jameel’s father and cleared his throat.

  “Father died tonight,” he began. He covered his mouth for a second with his fingertips, cleared his throat again, and went on. “He never regained consciousness. The ending was peaceful. Mumtaz, Selma, and I were with him.” Tears welled along the rims of Omar’s dark eyes, but he remained composed. Nargis lowered her face into her hands. Jameel’s father and Uncle Omar both gave Jameel a long look, but otherwise his father did not react at all.

  “He left this envelope in his desk for Jameel,” Uncle Omar said, pulling a sealed parchment envelope from inside his vest and handing it to Jameel. Jameel turned the envelope over and saw his grandfather’s hardly legible, loopy scrawl on the front: For Jameel, it said. It felt like a single sheet of paper. He held it as he imagined his grandfather had held it when he put it in the desk to be found after his death: lightly between his fingertips. He folded it carefully and slipped it into the back pocket of his jeans.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” asked his father. Jameel shook his head. He couldn’t imagine reading Baba’s final words to him with his family watching. They were quiet for a moment before Omar spoke.

  “We have many things to discuss,” he said. They talked about details of the funeral, which would be before sundown that day. There was much to be done. His father and uncle seemed oddly restrained, Jameel thought. Perhaps it only seemed that way because Jameel felt so keenly that the world as he knew it had ended. It made him want to beat his fists on a wall and cry and scream.

  Asrar returned and they followed him outside to where the car waited at the curb nearest the VIP lounge. Jameel felt as if his eyelids were made of sandpaper as he squinted against the bright overhead lights. The air was difficult to breathe, so damp, hot, and heavy that it seemed to part like a curtain before his face as he walked.

  Two thin men in blue shalwar kameez, servants from Jameel’s grandfather’s house, stood with Khoda Baksh beside the thirty-year-old blue Mercedes Benz sedan with six suitcases and a metal trunk lashed to the rack on the roof. It was difficult to grasp that here were his grandfather’s much-loved car, his driver and lifelong friend, and servants who had worked for the family their entire lives, but his grandfather was no more. When it comes right down to it, Jameel thought, life is just a flimsy veil, one that can be worn, then tossed aside with surprising ease. He thought of the image of his grandfather slipping past the airplane window to take his place among the stars.

  The servants saluted them gravely as they stepped into the car. Khoda Baksh held the door as Jameel and his mother climbed into the back with Uncle Omar. Jameel’s father sat in front. The air conditioner blew chilled air over them as the driver put the car into gear and pulled into the traffic heading for the airport exit. Dozens of flights arrived and departed from Lahore in the middle of the night, and the roads and parking lots were more crowded than they were at midday. Jameel craned his neck to look at the saluting servants until they were out of sight. He was vaguely aware of the jumble of cars, motor scooters, trucks, and buses that shrieked and rumbled around them, the green Provincial Assembly emblem on the front bumper alerting traffic that they had the right-of-way. Everyone in the car was silent.

  When they reached the Gulberg area the headlights swept over the lovingly kept lawns and the tranquil canal overhung with willows that leaned to brush the water. Jameel began to feel the familiarity of the city where his father and uncles and grandfather had all lived when they were schoolboys, the streets where his mother and aunties walked to school every day when they were girls. Instead of the comfort he usually felt when he came here, he felt the cut of pain somewhere so deep inside him he couldn’t identify exactly the place from which his grandfather had been excised.

  As the car turned into Number 5 Anwar Road, Jameel felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned toward Uncle Omar, but his mother’s brother stared straight ahead. Jameel looked down at his shoulder. No hand lay there, altho
ugh he still felt its weight and warmth through his shirt.

  They drove through the arched gateway, into the paved courtyard, and stopped before the red sandstone façade of his grandfather’s house. Auntie Leyla came out through the front door just after the car pulled in and stood waiting under the tall, pointed arch of the main entry.

  Jameel thought of the folded envelope tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. He felt it with his right hand, the same pocket that Chloe had hooked a finger into as she walked him to meet Javed a day earlier in his other world, his other time zone. He fought an urge to excuse himself right at that moment so he might go somewhere to open the envelope in private, and find out what his grandfather had to say before he died. Jameel felt a surge of anger at Baba for leaving so unexpectedly, before he’d had time to say goodbye.

  He waited while the luggage was unloaded from the roof of the car and his parents made their salaams. Jameel had slept little on the plane, but he felt alert, on edge.

  Jameel’s parents had their own bedroom in his grandfather’s house. Jameel slept in the room where his mother had slept as a girl. He wondered where other relatives traveling to Lahore for the funeral would sleep. Servants appeared from their quarters behind the house to haul the suitcases and trunk up the winding staircase in the front hall to the second floor.

  Jameel greeted Leyla warmly and waited while his parents asked questions. He was too distracted by the stiff envelope in his back pocket to listen carefully. After waiting what seemed an acceptable time he excused himself to go to his room and read Baba’s letter in private. He bounded through the brightly lit entry hall and up the stairs. The walls were painted with almond blossoms and fruit trees, and melons on vines twined down the corners of the room. The ceiling was even more ornately painted, and the plaster was embedded with bits of mirror that sparkled and reflected light from the huge lead-crystal chandelier that hung in the center of the hall. The chandelier was exactly like the one in the dining room. Jameel remembered when his grandmother had ordered the chandeliers from Venice. They arrived almost a year later in a crate that was taller than his Uncle Omar, loaded on a wagon pulled by four white oxen.