Authors: Suzanne Fisher Staples

The House of Djinn (13 page)

BOOK: The House of Djinn

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J
ameel got into bed. He closed his eyes, but immediately the words of Baba's letter played through his mind. He heard them in Baba's distinctively booming voice, as if his grandfather were reading the letter out loud.

When Baba's voice finally went silent the major fact of the letter and its profound impact on his life crowded out everything else: he would not return to his friends, to school, to Chloe, to his life. That was why his mother had packed all of his clothing. His first reaction was disbelief. Uncle Omar was Grandfather's only sonâand should be next in line to rule the Amirzai people. And Jaffar should be next in the line of succession after his father. He turned on the light and read the letter again. What his grandfather wrote was clear and explicitâJameel had not been mistaken about the letter's meaning.

His next reaction, mixed with the first, was anger. His parents
and uncle, and especially his grandfatherâthe people he trusted most in the worldâhad known what was in store for him. They'd allowed him to believe he'd live a normal lifeâthat he'd go to university and become an engineer, live in America, and follow his dreams. Without ever thinking about it, Jameel had taken this as a promise.

He stared at the letter in his hands and tried to harness some of the wild thoughts that swirled inside his head. Would his father and mother stay in Pakistan? Would they sell their house in California? Would Javed and Asma live with them here?

With shaking hands, Jameel stuffed the letter back into the envelope, put it into the drawer of the desk under the window, and got back into bed. But still he could not sleep. He wondered what other arrangements his grandfather referred to.

Jameel felt as if he didn't sleep at all in the next few hours, but he was awakened by a stripe of sunlight that had escaped from the edge of the window shade and fell across his eyes. He lay still for a moment, trying to reimagine his life here, as if his parents had never left Pakistan, as if he'd been born here and not in America, as if he'd expected to live here his entire life. But there was no recapturing what had never been.

A surge of angry energy propelled him from the bed. His eyes felt gritty from lack of sleep, but he was alert and tense. He pulled a shalwar kameez from his closet, dressed quickly, and fished out a pair of chappals, which he slipped his feet
into, not bothering to pull the straps up and over his heels. Still tying the shalwar, he took the back stairs two at a time, the sandals slapping on the treads.

He heard voices from the dining room as he cut through the kitchen, where he snatched up a piece of paratha before pushing through the swinging door. His parents were seated at the highly polished table with Uncle Omar, Auntie Leyla, Mumtaz, and Jaffar. It seemed everyone was talking at once, and the talk stopped dead as he entered the room. He could tell Muti had been crying by the puffy redness of the skin around her eyes. She half stood when he came through the door, as if she wanted desperately to see him.

“Sit!” Auntie Leyla commanded, and Mumtaz sank silently back into her chair. He made his salaams hurriedly around the table, but everyone continued staring at him awkwardly. He didn't feel much like making small talk to ease things. The least they could do was feel uncomfortable, he thought.

He remembered the last time he'd arrived, at the beginning of the summer, when he and Muti and Jaffar all babbled happily at each other, catching everyone up on their news, the adults talking enthusiastically about plans for the summer. But then, everything was different this time, with Baba gone. Suddenly life was gravely serious.

Uncle Omar invited Jameel to sit, but he continued to stand, wolfing down the paratha. Muti nodded her head over one shoulder and spread one hand out on the table, all five fingers splayed before her. It was their signal to meet out in the garden in five minutes.

“May I be excused?” she mumbled, standing and leaving
before there was an answer. Uncle Omar was telling Jameel how various duties were to be divided up that morning in preparation for the funeral.

“You should come with me,” he said. “People will be calling to pay their respects, and also to greet you as the new tribal leader.” Jameel's eyes followed Muti's back as she walked through the French doors into the front hallway and out through the side door into the garden.

He waited, listening to Uncle Omar for a few more moments, and then excused himself. Conversation resumed around the table, and Jameel left through the French doors, the same way Muti had gone, ignoring his father's voice calling him back.

He hurried through the formal garden, past the swimming pool, and through the gate to the little arbor, where he found Muti sitting in the swing near the koi pond behind the rose trellis.

Muti was crying, the tears a wet film on her cheeks. He sat down beside her. She wiped at her face with the end of her dupatta, sniffing loudly. During the summer Auntie Leyla had commented several times that Muti could never quite overcome the “rough manners” she'd acquired from her mother's relatives. But Jameel knew the rough manners were a protest against Auntie Leyla and her treatment of Muti, who was proud of her mother's family.

“You've read Baba's letter?” she asked, sniffing one last time and rubbing at her nose with the heel of her hand. He nodded. They spoke softly so no one who might come into the garden would hear them.

“How long have you known?” he asked. His voice sounded unnaturally gruff. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“I only found out late last night, after Baba â¦ after he died, after you were almost here. Believe me, Jameel, if I could have prevented you from coming in time, I would have done it. But that isn't all â¦” She reached forward and put her hand on his forearm. “Jameel, you and I are to be marriedâvery soon! I heard Omar and Leylaâ”

“To each other?” Jameel blurted. “Why me? Why shouldn't Uncle Omar lead the tribe? Why don't they leave me alone?”

“It's not just you!” said Muti, staring at him in disbelief. “What about me? They send me to school, encourage me to be educated, and then just â¦ order me to marry you? Without any care for what I think? How do you think that makes me feel? I know you've got Chloeâbut I have someone, too!” Jameel looked at her closely. They were silent for a moment. Jameel felt light-headed. The scent of jasmine floated through the garden.

“Look,” Muti said, leaning forward again, whispering urgently, “I know the last thing you want is to marry me. But I don't want to marry you eitherâso don't act like I'm part of a plot to trap you!” She stopped speaking and her face crumpled. She hid behind her hands, and her shoulders shook as she cried. Jameel put his arm around his cousin's shoulders. He and Muti had always shared confidences. They'd comforted each other when Muti's puppy died of distemper. They'd told each other secrets all their lives. Marrying Muti would be like marrying his sister!

“Jameel,” Muti said in a voice muffled by tears and her hands, “I love someone, too. Even if it's hopelessâI couldn't even think until now about what I heard Omar and Leyla say last night. I want to run away, go back to the desert â¦”

“They tricked us!” Jameel said, his voice quivering with rage. “If they'd told me, I would never have come, not even to see Grandfather!”

“That's exactly why they didn't tell either one of us,” said Muti, wiping angrily at her tears and gulping away her sobs. Jameel was being so selfishâshe wanted to tell him everything that weighed so heavily on her, and he was so absorbed in how he was affectedâhe wouldn't even hear her! Most of all she longed to tell him about her mother. And she knew she could not.

“How did you find out?” asked Jameel.

“The way I find everything out,” she said. Jameel knew about the chair in the corner of her room and the sounds that traveled through the water pipe. “I came home from the hospital with Omar last night, and I heard them. They said the marriage would be arranged right after the funeral. That was early this morning, just a few hours after Baba died. They're afraid Uncle Nazir will try to make a grab for power.”

Jameel stared at her. When he and Muti were children they cut their fingers and pressed them together, sharing their blood, like characters in old movies in America. Once she had saved him from a swarm of bees, beating at them with her dupatta and leading him to the swimming pool, jumping
in with him and staying under the water until the bees flew away. They were cousins and they were best friends. But married?

“I'm sorry, Muti,” Jameel said. “But my lifeâboth of our livesâare just beginning. We have so much to look forward to â¦”

“And once we're married our lives will come to an end?” Muti looked at him hard. And then she smiled. “Maybe we should run away together â¦ so we wouldn't have to get married!”

Jameel smiled slightly. “Yeahâthat 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 mixedâhis 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 rightâand 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 tonightâafter 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 â¦ 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.

J
ameel 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 differentâmore matureâand 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 rupeesâcertainly 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, mournersâmany of whom had taken buses and then walked the rest of the day, some in bare feet, to get thereâin 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 seeâ” 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 meâsomeone was dragging me by the elbowâbut nobody was there!” Jameel said. “What do you think â¦” 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 haveâit isn't enough.”

“Why Bahawalpur?” asked Jameel.

“We don't have time,” Muti said. “I'm going to call â¦ someone on my mobile phone,” she said. “I know where we can goâsomeone 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 â¦” 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.

BOOK: The House of Djinn

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