The House of Djinn

by Suzanne Fisher Staples

  Jameel smiled slightly. “Yeah—that would be a twist! Why didn’t you tell me that you’ve fallen in love? Who is it?” Muti lowered her eyes.

  “Well,” she said, sizing him up as if deciding whether to tell him, even now, “he’s totally unsuitable. He couldn’t be more wrong.”

  “He can’t be more unsuitable than Chloe!”

  “He’s a Hindu,” she said, and Jameel’s eyes widened.

  “Where’d you meet a Hindu boy?”

  “At the Lahore Club. He teaches tennis there. His family is mixed—his father’s family are Hindu. They fled Lahore during partition. He grew up partly here, with his mother’s family, and partly in India, with his father. It’s very complicated.”

  “Do they know?” he asked, inclining his head toward the house.

  “You’re joking! Auntie Leyla would kill me. Uncle Omar’s heart would be broken. They’d never let me out of the house again.” She paused. Her next thought had been that it would serve her mother right—and then immediately she felt ashamed. “We meet at the club, and sometimes Fariel and I go out and meet Jag at someone else’s house.” Muti looked back toward the house. “I have to go in,” she said. “They’ve become more watchful than they were during the summer. And they’ll be even more so now that you’re here.”

  “How is this supposed to happen? When do they plan to tell us?”

  Muti shrugged and rose to her feet. “Probably not until after the funeral. But then I should think they’d move quickly. Let’s meet tonight—after the dinner, when they’re saying goodbye to everyone in the front hall. I’ll meet you here. Maybe we’ll have some brilliant idea by then.”

  Jameel nodded. The thought of the responsibility of leadership and marriage and what he was giving up weighed so heavily on him that he had to concentrate to believe that these things would actually happen, unless … he didn’t even know unless what. All he knew was that this new reality had begun to weigh on him like dirt heaped on a grave. Part of him wanted to run out the front door and keep going, without ever looking back. But where would he go? Another part of him was angry that his life had been so manipulated, without his ever having a choice or the chance to express an opinion. And still a third part of him said that he must do his duty, whether he liked it or not. Once again he had the overwhelming sense of being stuck between times and places.

  19

  Jameel came into the parlor to find his father and Uncle Omar looking for him. It was time for Baba’s male relatives to bathe the body in preparation for the burial.

  “But we have to talk about Baba’s letter,” Jameel said.

  “There isn’t time now,” said his father gently, resting his hand on Jameel’s shoulder and guiding him toward the stairway to the second floor, where Baba’s body awaited preparation for burial. “After the funeral we’ll have time to talk at length.”

  “But I don’t want to do this!” Jameel said, stopping suddenly. Omar took Jameel’s other arm and pulled him along gently.

  “I promise we will spend as much time talking after the funeral as you need. Right now we have to get on with things here.”

  Jameel took a deep breath and followed his father and uncle into the master bedroom suite, where the body lay waiting on Baba’s marriage bed. It might have been the only time his grandfather had waited patiently for anything, Jameel thought as they entered the room.

  They worked quickly, with tenderness. Jameel washed his grandfather’s hands, and felt the weight of the old man’s immense bones covered with strands of muscle and paper-thin skin. Jameel’s throat was so tight he could barely swallow, and his eyes ached with holding back tears. They were tears of anger as much as sadness. And also tears of guilt for feeling such strong anger on top of his sadness.

  Inayatullah stood by and prayed as they worked. When they were finished they wrapped Baba in a seamless white shroud, which they tied at both ends. Jameel thought his grandfather looked like a sack of mail, and felt his tears rise again.

  Jameel excused himself and went to his room to change into the silk shalwar kameez and vest laid out on his bed by his mother for the funeral. He blew his nose and wiped his eyes dry and looked into the mirror. He looked different—more mature—and he told himself it was his imagination.

  Downstairs Auntie Selma came and wrapped her large, comforting arms around Mumtaz, resting her chin against the side of the girl’s head.

  “Your mother is leaving for Cholistan tonight,” Selma murmured. “You should go with her.” Muti pulled her head back and looked into Selma’s eyes, which surprised her with their intensity, and wondered whether she knew of Baba’s plans for her and Jameel. Perhaps she and Jameel should go to Cholistan with her mother. She nodded slowly.

  The family spent the next hour and a half in the grand formal parlor, receiving guests who came to pay their respects. Muti sat with the women on one side of the room, its walls inscribed with verses from the Quran. Jameel was with the men on the opposite side of the parlor. Their grandfather’s shrouded body lay upon a string cot with ornately cast silver legs in an open space at the front of the room. The whole time Inayatullah stood near the body, murmuring prayers, asking for forgiveness for Baba’s soul.

  Jameel’s mind clicked over like one of his grandfather’s beloved engines. He considered ways out: it would be difficult. His mother and father kept all of their passports and traveler’s checks in the vault in Baba’s study, and he didn’t know the combination. He only had a little money, the fifty rupees on his dresser and the few U.S. dollars he’d had in his jeans pocket when he left for the airport. And he doubted he could change that to rupees—certainly not without his passport.

  The governor of Punjab Province was first to pay his respects, dressed in a Western suit and moving down the first row of seats where Jameel’s father, Uncle Omar, and he stood to shake the governor’s hand. Three long-stemmed fans swirled overhead.

  The governor was followed by many dignitaries from the Punjab Provincial Assembly, and then by tribal leaders from all over Pakistan, followed by doctors, lawyers, businessmen, ambassadors, consuls general, and other prominent La-horis. Last came the farmers of the Amirzai tribal lands, mourners—many of whom had taken buses and then walked the rest of the day, some in bare feet, to get there—in a line that snaked around the garden, through the front gate, and out into the street.

  As Jameel sat with his family he felt several times the light warmth of a hand on his shoulder. It was the same hand, he thought, that had touched him in the car on the way from the airport; Jameel sensed it was his grandfather, letting him know he was near. Each time Jameel turned to see, nobody was there.

  Once Jameel caught the eye of Uncle Nazir, and when he did, Nazir continued staring at him. Jameel realized Uncle Nazir had done the same thing as they bathed Grandfather’s body. Jameel stared back this time, and eventually Nazir looked away. With all of the greetings and condolences and handshakes and bear hugs, Jameel didn’t have time to think much more about his misfit uncle.

  Late in the afternoon the procession, led by Maulvi Inayatullah, formed to accompany the body to the burial ground near the gate of the Badshahi Mosque, not far from the tomb of Alama Muhammad Iqbal, Pakistan’s national hero and poet. The hand on Jameel’s shoulder was a light and constant touch, and Jameel had grown so used to it that he hardly noticed it was there.

  As the procession neared Badshahi Mosque they passed a knot of Amirzai village women who keened and beat their chests with their fists. Jameel winced at this display of grief, but he knew it was traditional, and he passed by the women without speaking or looking at them.

  The rest of the funeral was a blur of faces and hands shaking his hand, dry-eyed mourning, the maulvi’s prayers, the family murmuring the Janazah, asking for forgiveness to speed Baba on to the next world. Over everything lay the sense that an era had passed.

  In keeping with the old man’s wishes, a festive dinner followed under a red, green, and blue shamiana in the garden at Anwar
Road, with men and women served together from one common table, just as Baba always insisted. The women filled their plates, and then, out of habit, stood on one side of the garden under the shamiana. The men retreated to the other side. Because no curtain was raised between the two parties, Jameel caught Muti’s eye several times. Each time he looked at her she was watching him.

  As the guests began to leave, Jameel was overcome by jet lag. He nearly fell asleep on his feet.

  “Go to bed, Beta,” his mother said. “Tomorrow is another day.” She laid her palm against his cheek and smiled at him tenderly. Jameel felt the hand that had been on his shoulder drawing him now by the elbow in the direction of the garden. For the first time the hand was insistent, rather than gentle, and he had to fight against it to move in the general direction of the front hall so his mother and father would see him heading up to bed instead of to the garden to meet Muti. The hand pulled steadily at his elbow, causing him to walk in a wobbly diagonal line between the hallway that would lead to the back garden and the arch to the main stairway. To end the struggle, Jameel came to a stop.

  “Stop pulling at me,” he said under his breath to the spirit that commanded the hand. “You’ll land me in trouble.” He was standing under the marble arch in the entry to the main hall when he caught a glimpse of movement overhead and heard a sharp screech of metal. He looked up to see the crystal chandelier, one of the two his grandmother had ordered from Venice, tilt crazily to one side. Another screech, and the cables holding it parted and the whole thing, which stood as high as a man and weighed about a thousand pounds, crashed to the marble floor, accompanied by a shower of sparks as bare wires danced about under the ceiling.

  The deafening crash was followed by the absurdly delicate tinkling of crystal drops and beads falling down through the structure of the chandelier onto the marble floor. It was as if the entire room were caught in a still photo. Then a chaotic chorus of women screaming, men shouting, and running footsteps burst the silence. Miraculously, no one had been in the front hall when the chandelier fell.

  Jameel realized with a shudder that he might have been under the chandelier when it fell if it hadn’t been for the insistent hand on his elbow. The touch was gone now, and Jameel took advantage of the confusion to run to the back of the hallway and through the French doors that led out to the garden. There, in the hidden arbor as before, he found Muti sitting on the swing. Someone had lit lanterns, which glinted on the little pool. Small rings appeared on the glassy surface of the water, where his grandfather’s iridescent koi fed on mosquitoes.

  “Did you see—” he began, but Muti was already nodding her head vigorously.

  “I felt someone’s hand on the small of my back, pushing me out the door,” she said. “My feet could barely keep up. I heard the crash, but I couldn’t turn back.”

  “The same thing happened to me—someone was dragging me by the elbow—but nobody was there!” Jameel said. “What do you think …” Muti shook her head impatiently.

  “I’ve been thinking about a way to get out of here,” said Muti. She looked determined. Jameel sat next to her on the swing.

  “Where would we go?” he asked.

  “I don’t have time to tell you right now. Do you have any money?” Jameel shook his head.

  “How much do we need?” Jameel asked. “Who’d help us without our telling them what we’re doing?” Muti bit her lips. How could she tell Jameel about her mother? She took a deep breath and stood abruptly.

  “We need enough for a taxi and bus tickets to Bahawalpur,” she said.

  “I only have about fifty rupees,” he said. “It’s upstairs.”

  “That’s about what I have—it isn’t enough.”

  “Why Bahawalpur?” asked Jameel.

  “We don’t have time,” Muti said. “I’m going to call … someone on my mobile phone,” she said. “I know where we can go—someone who will help us.”

  “Who are you calling?” Jameel asked. “Fariel? You know her family will have to call Omar. Nobody’s going to help us!” Muti held up her hand for him to be quiet and dialed Selma’s number. It rang several times. She was about to flip the phone shut when she heard Samiya’s voice.

  “It’s Mumtaz,” she said into the phone. “May I speak …” She couldn’t bring herself to ask for her mother, but Samiya hesitated only a second before understanding.

  “I’ll take the telephone to her,” said Samiya. “It’ll be a few minutes. Hold on.”

  “Hurry!” Mumtaz breathed into the phone.

  20

  Jameel felt sick. He knew they would have to move quickly. He trusted Muti, but he didn’t like not knowing where they were going. He swallowed hard. He had never done anything so disobedient before. His parents hadn’t exactly told him not to go anywhere, but he knew that they trusted him, and he hated to break their trust, even now when they had broken their trust with him. But in the morning everything would be different. He would officially be the Amirzai tribal leader, his betrothal to Muti would be announced, and it would be too late to get away. He rose to his feet. The exhaustion that had nearly paralyzed him earlier was gone. He felt the blood rushing through his veins, and the vibration of the traffic two blocks away. It was as if the exhaustion and the crashing chandelier and the need to get away had heightened his awareness.

  Jameel walked to the small gate in the garden wall to keep watch while Muti talked on the telephone. He looked across the large formal garden behind the house, which was perfectly symmetrical in its arrangement of rose beds and rows of fountains and perennial beds. Baba had laid it out years ago in a pattern similar to that of the Shalimar Gardens. Every day the mali took the dead blooms from the plants. He and his helpers spread out in a line, squatted, and trimmed the grass to velvet perfection with steel scissors.

  Jameel thought about what he and Muti were doing. There was no escape from tradition and duty to family. He knew the price many people paid for trying to get out of what was expected of them. He’d heard stories of young people trying to run away because they were in love. Their families hunted them down, sometimes killed them. He shuddered. He didn’t think his family would do that, but Jameel knew his father would never rest until he was found. And he was sure Uncle Omar would never rest until Muti was safe.

  They couldn’t get to their passports and credit cards. And then it dawned on him: Muti planned to go to her mother’s family in Cholistan.

  As he thought these things a bright light appeared at the head of the big garden. It was so bright he couldn’t see anyone behind it. The light looked as if it bobbed along on its own. A sharp intake of breath at his shoulder made him turn toward Muti, who had come up behind him. As he turned, a bolt of flame shot past his head, missing him by centimeters. If he’d been still it would have hit him in the face.

  In the split second it had taken the djinni to soar through the garden they saw a ghostly figure in a pale shalwar kameez scurry away from the fence near where they had been sitting a few seconds earlier. They could see the tiny beads embroidered in a Pashtun-style skullcap twinkling in the lights from the swimming pool.

  “It’s Spin Gul,” said Mumtaz. She had never liked Leyla’s driver, who narrowed his eyes insolently when he looked at her, rather than respectfully look away as the other servants did. “He was listening to us!” She grabbed Jameel’s hand and pulled him back toward the koi pool.

  “Wait!” said Jameel. “We’ll be trapped in here.” Muti continued to pull at his hand.

  “No—we can get out! Come this way,” she said, her breath shaking. She still clutched her mobile phone to her ear. Jameel leaped across the koi pool, but Muti didn’t quite make it. She recovered her balance, knee-deep in water, and extended her hand for Jameel to pull her out. She shook her cell phone, but it didn’t appear to have gotten wet.

  “Come,” she said, and he followed her to the brick wall at the edge of the garden. The wall was lined with lime trees, and Muti grabbed one of the lanterns beside the wall whe
re they’d sat. She held it high, looking for something behind the lime trees.

  “Hurry!” he said. He looked over his shoulder and saw the djinni grow brighter as it approached again from a different direction. Muti thrust the lantern into his hand and pulled on the branch of a lime tree at the base of the wall. Behind the tree a gate opened, and Muti crouched to crawl through. Jameel followed, bringing the lantern with him and letting go of the lime tree branch at the last second.

  Muti sank down on the other side with her back against the wall, sucking at a vicious scratch on her arm.

  “Thorns,” she muttered, rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”

  “Did your call get through?” Jameel asked. “Did you find a place where we can go at this hour?”

  “The phone went dead,” she said. “I’ve been redialing. The battery has a good charge and the signal is strong here, but there’s a strange howling sound in the phone. It was the djinni! I’ve never had that happen before.”

  “Why?” he asked. “I thought the djinn were supposed to help us!”

  “They did!” said Muti. “If it hadn’t been for that light we never would have known Spin Gul was spying on us. Come—we’ll just go there … I know she’ll help.”

  “Who? Fariel?” he asked, but Muti was already running down the lane that passed along the back garden wall.

  They left the lantern outside the gate in the hope of confusing the djinni—or anyone who might be following—and ran along the bank of the canal to an intersection where traffic rushed past in either direction. Jameel looked back down the alley they’d just left while Muti watched for a break in the traffic. The light, which clearly was disembodied, bobbed around the lantern outside the small gate, as if confused momentarily by the motionless light.

  Muti grabbed Jameel by the hand and pulled him across the street, with motor rickshaws bleating, cars honking, and brakes squealing around them. A bus overflowing with men clinging to the roof and sides screeched as it swerved to miss them. On the other side of Anwar Road, Muti ran down another alley and out onto the busy thoroughfare called Makhdoom Sahib Road. She flagged down a motor rickshaw and they both climbed inside.