The House of Djinn (11 page)

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Authors: Suzanne Fisher Staples

BOOK: The House of Djinn
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She pressed her lips together and nodded. When she looked at Omar again, she could see light reflecting from tears that streamed down his face. Mumtaz leaned toward him.
“She's lived with Selma all this time,” Muti whispered. “I didn't know. I'll tell you the rest—but we must keep her secret. Please help me!” Omar nodded and closed his hand over hers.
“After I drop you at home there will be no time,” he said. “I must know now.” His voice came out in a harsh whisper. Mumtaz explained quietly how her mother had allowed her—all of them—to believe that she was dead to protect herself and Muti. When she'd finished, Omar looked out the window and they didn't speak again for the remainder of the ride home.
J
ameel sat in the window seat of a row in the business-class section of the jetliner bound for Pakistan. They had made stops in Toronto and Manchester, and had been traveling for more than twenty hours. Jameel's father sat beside him, and his mother was in the aisle seat. Three plastic cups filled with orange juice sat untouched before them on fold-out trays. Cabin attendants seemed to glide up and down the aisles, bending to spread stiff white linens on the trays and distributing little packets of plastic forks and knives. The yeasty, salty smell of mushrooms for business-class omelettes emanated from the galley, making Jameel's stomach churn.
Every year when Jameel and his parents made this same journey, Jameel felt that the airplane was traveling backward in time, as well as narrowing the distance between his home in San Francisco and his mother's family home in Lahore. Especially when they visited his grandfather's ancestral home in Okurabad, Jameel felt as if he was in a time warp. All of
the Amirzai lands centered around Okurabad, where things hadn't changed much in the last five hundred years. In Lahore, Jameel and his parents behaved more formally than they did during the rest of the year in California. It was almost as if they'd entered the Victorian era when they came to Lahore. Jameel felt caught somewhere between out of place and comfortable in both cities.
Jameel's father sat tight-lipped, staring straight ahead. Jameel wondered what went on behind his fixed and troubled eyes. He knew his father and grandfather had not always seen eye-to-eye. His grandfather was reluctant to admit that anyone was good enough to be married to his daughter, even after all this time. And Jameel's father, Tariq, bridled when Nargis insisted they spend most of every summer holiday with her father, rather than with Tariq's family, who lived in Karachi. By custom in Pakistan, the husband's family had first consideration. But they had not lived in Pakistan since shortly after their marriage sixteen years earlier. Despite Tariq's resentment he found the old man charming, and his progressive views on Islam and Pakistan interesting. Gradually Baba had won him over.
Tariq and Baba had come to love each other in the involuntary way that tends to glue together family members for whom it might be more comfortable to grow apart.
Jameel was relieved that his parents seemed not to require him to participate in a conversation. His mother reclined her seat, pulled an airline blanket over her, and closed her eyes.
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.
O
mar 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 throat. “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.

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