The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories Read online

  Sheikh Safar continued. “It sounds as if you are both innocent of knowing any better and you must bear in mind you may save many others from committing the same sin out of ignorance by sharing your story.” Then there was a quiver of dead air before the Sheikh barked, “Next caller!”

  KHALID ENJOYED COMING to the women’s side of the house, but was only allowed on Fridays, when his cousins would be out visiting anyway. There’d been an incident, when he was ten, that had sent him into exile for the rest of his life. The Pink Panther had been playing on the old antennae TV. He remembered how the slinky, suggestive saxophone triggered something abstractly pleasurable in his child-self. He remembered hiding behind a pile of cushions and covering his eyes with his hand. The next thing was his sisters’ shrill disgust: “Just because your eyes are covered doesn’t mean we can’t see you!” Both girls ran from the room to tattle on him. He was never allowed back but for Fridays with mother after that.

  Khalid was cringing in the throes of this memory when his mother rose from the floor cushions with some difficulty, shifting her bulk onto a metal cane and hobbling towards the women’s side of the house to perform her ablutions before prayer. “When do you plan on having a home?” she asked, as casually as a mother can ask a question like that.

  “Do you want to share me with another woman?” he teased and catching her in the doorway, he held his mother’s henna-limned hands in his own.

  “If she brings me grandchildren... yes.” And she removed her hand from Khalid’s and headed to the ladies’ side of the house, yelling, “Girls! Prayer!” before shutting the door.

  In spite of himself, Khalid began to think about marriage.

  KHALID’S UNCLE SAEED was a bombastic man. He regularly led convoys to Bahrain on paydays with a box of condoms and a thirst for Johnny Walker Red Label. He had once offered to take Khalid with him on one of these jaunts, but Khalid had shrunk at the thought. Now Saeed had found Khalid a different kind of girl. Not a Russian or Filipino in a hotel bar, but a real Bedouin girl. Saeed could be lewd about sexual encounters and was famous for his dirty jokes, but the moment coitus with a Saudi woman was involved, he turned into a po-faced, paranoid prude. As such, Khalid’s uncle was parsimonious with his wedding night advice. “She’s a Bedouin girl. Lay her face-down in the dark, so your eyes won’t meet. Eye-contact will embarrass her.”

  But Khalid’s nuptials did not go according to Saeed’s advice.

  The night of the reception, Khalid entered the rented hall. Its thin carpet built up a charge under all the shuffling greetings. Khalid’s nickname as a child had always been ‘the bear’ for his portly size and stomping gait, and he had worked up a froth of sweat on his way down the long hall to the ladies’ section of the wedding. Now he was confronted by his own face, projected on a silk curtain billowing above the wedding stage. A Filipina photographer with a light-mounted camera was flitting around, “Look to me, sir. Look to me!” she hissed from behind the blinding light. But Khalid couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was dimly aware beyond the camera’s light of the hundreds of women rowed around the stage, shrouded in a communal swath of crepe and silk. From where he stood, it was a shifting, fleshy gloom.

  The bride’s male entourage of brothers and father minced beside him onto the catwalk, brandishing daggers, with their black and beige bishts gathered up around them like skirts. He thought he looked like a lumbering beast hosting a flock of long-beaked birds. He felt dizzy from the cacophony of hundreds of mouths ululating all at once. Their gaze was heavy on him – eyes all colourful and kohl-rimmed and following him like the glowing eyes in a cartoon haunted house. The only female face exposed in the room was his bride’s. Khalid focused all his attention on the odd little figure sitting on a swan-shaped bench at the end of the dais. When he reached her, he couldn’t tell what she really looked like. An opaque mask of makiaj obscured her features and a golden green haze hung beneath a pair of acutely angled eyebrows.

  Her painted expression was one of shock.

  She might as well have been wearing a niqab for all the clues her makeup gave, but she was smiling. At him. The first thing he asked her that night, when they’d arrived at their new home, was to remove her false face.

  “But it’s the fashion,” she replied. “They call it kabuki.”

  “I want to see what you look like.” It had been an expensive makeup job and Aneeza had only gotten to wear it for a few hours. The effervescence in her smile went flat. “As you like,” she said, defeated, rising glumly from the bed to the en suite.

  Khalid glanced around the room at her bridal trousseau, which had exploded from a pearlescent Samsonite.Beside the coat rack, where several abayas hung like sullen shadows, was a rack of weights. He disliked this; it meant she was vain about her body, and why should she be vain about her body if no one was going to see it?

  “Is this better?” Aneeza appeared behind him in the mirror. Without makeup, she looked like her brothers. He wondered mildly to himself if he might look like his sisters in makeup.

  Khalid lied. “Yes.” Now Khalid saw that Aneeza had oddly wide-set eyes and had plucked her eyebrows to high points.

  “You shouldn’t pluck your eyebrows. It’s haram.”

  “Who says?”

  “Sheikh Safar.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll stop.”

  She lay down beside him, the feather trim of her apple-green negligee tickling his nose.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “For what?” he asked and allowed her to rest her head on him.

  “My cycle started.”

  A cold shiver of nausea ran from where he felt her ear pressed to his thigh like a cold shell.

  “Oh,” he replied, noticing the glitter from her hairspray had shed onto his sirwal like dandruff. “Never mind.”

  Khalid was rafting on an internal river of doubt when her approach sent him down a tributary of dread. He needed to get away from this. He slid her off of him by getting up to go to the en suite. He didn’t intend to look, but saw a rumpled pink package of Always hidden behind the toilet seat. A coil of padded paper rimmed with a bright spreading red, wrapped in a teal blue sachet. He felt sick, admonished himself for looking. Did he think it would be blue like in the commercials?

  When he went back he lay on the far side of the bed staring at the ceiling. Aneeza lay opposite, staring at him with her head propped on the palm of her hand. It was tensely silent between them for some time.

  “Have you ever loved before?” she asked, to break the stand-off.

  He was taken aback by the directness of the question. He gave it real thought.

  “I had a cat once.” She gave him a look, encouraging him to explain further. “I left her on the roof. She was a white Persian. I remember her fur was all matted with sweat on the side she died on.”

  Aneeza sat up straight. “I didn’t mean that kind of love, silly.” And she slithered across the sheets towards him. Silk on silk.

  A vivid disgust rose in Khalid’s heart. He protested. “But your period.”

  “Shh.” She cooed. “There are other ways.” And she tended to him with efficiency, as if he were a doll she’d practiced on before. As if she’d had some education in these matters.

  The fluorescent overhead light set off the ashy freckles under her skin as her eyes flickered up at him and then back down to a crescent of expressive lash. Khalid had to close his eyes, but there she was inside his brain too. Staring, grinning, licking her teeth, reaching across his body.

  He soothed himself with a mantra – We’re married. We’re married. – and tried to concentrate on a vague goal slowly coming into focus. First it appeared as a silvery hole, aglow in his mind’s eye. Now it was black as a cave and throbbed pink at the edges where the ceiling lights penetrated his eyelids. He was sinking into a soft, rocking movement.

  “Hey!” he leapt up out of the bed like a cat scrambling from a bathtub. “What are you doing?!”

  She slipped her tongue
back into her strange little mouth and withdrew her hand from his sirwal. “I thought you’d like it.”

  “Why would you do that?” he said, sitting up.

  He turned the TV on urgently, like a cook opening a window to fan smoke out of the kitchen. He stood there blocking the screen, hand on one hip, remote in hand. On it were ponderous shots of the new Masjid al Haram building, all white stucco columns and rotating fans. From above, the marble tiers of Mecca. Twelve cranes studded the edge of the site as if marking the pilgrims’ progress around some great hourless clock.

  “It looks like City Centre Mall now,” Aneeza piped up from the bed.

  Khalid’s nostrils flared. “How can you compare Mecca to a mall?” Aneeza shrugged. “I’m sleeping in the majlis,” he announced. There he turned on Right Guidance and fell asleep, feeling safe under Sheikh Safar’s watchful, muted gaze.

  AFTER KHALID’S FAILED wedding night, a seed was planted.

  But it was not the kind of seed his mother looked forward to spoiling.

  Khalid was an exquisitely sensitive man, and he was convinced his wife had some experience of ‘love’ previous to his own. Why else would she have behaved that way if she hadn’t learned it somewhere? And although he didn’t particularly want Aneeza, he couldn’t bear the thought anyone else would either.

  The next Friday he went to visit his mother. As usual, Sheikh Safar was on. Mecca was keyed in from on high and Khalid could see all the tiny pilgrims gathered around the Kaaba in a cosmic twist. The backdrop of the holy city provided him with a calming image in the midst of all the emotional turmoil and lurid circumstances. This Friday, a tearful woman was on the phone, worried about her effeminate son. “He steals his sister’s clothing, and every time he does, his father beats him. It hurts me to see them fighting. But he just goes back. Last week, he refused to remove nail polish from his toes.”

  The voice on the other end of the line sobbed.

  “Dear lady, your problem is very simple. The boy is possessed by a female djinn.”

  “But how?”

  “Please sister, just take him to a mutawa, who can help you to exorcise the demon. Do not attempt to exorcise the child yourself. It can be a very dangerous procedure. Especially when the possession involves sexual deviance. Do you promise?”

  “Yes.” A sniffle of gratitude. “God bless you, Sheikh.”

  Khalid took the momentary pause in programming to broach what was bothering him.

  “Mother, how did you choose Aneeza for me? I mean, what do we know about her family?”

  She answered without looking away from Sheikh Safar. “I told you, they’re our cousins’ cousins.” Khalid knew much of the exiled family, but had never heard of Aneeza or her brothers before meeting them on the night of their engagement.

  “Alright. But what do you know about her?”

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “There is something not right about her behavior. I think she might be possessed.”

  His mother scoffed.

  “She and her sisters are all from a second marriage. Good girls.”

  “Good girls?” Khalid caught a derisive side-eye from his mother.

  “Stop being so childish. She’s your wife, ask her what you want to know yourself!”

  And with that, she thumbed the volume button to maximum in welcome of Sheikh Safar’s return from a commercial break.

  Khalid rose with a petulant sigh. Mother turned her attention back to him.

  “Just talk to the girl! She’s probably more afraid of you than you are of her.”

  Khalid smiled a sad smile. “That’s the same thing you told me about spiders.”

  And as he bent to kiss her goodbye on her forehead, his mother saw an unnameable absence behind the eyes where her son used to be.

  EVERY MORNING SINCE the wedding, Aneeza had woken up after dawn prayer and put on a pair of white trainers. She’d then slip into her sport abaya and apply her niqab in a few swift tugs and ties, before going out to walk with the neighbor lady Um Rashid. Both pledged that after Ramadan, they were going to stop wasting away in front of the TV and ‘do something’; by which they meant, get some light exercise and have a good gossip. Khalid found himself watching her from the roof as she left, and waiting there amongst the clutch of satellite dishes, giving the hawk-eye to every tinted car that passed through the neighborhood until she returned.

  One morning when Aneeza left the house, Khalid went into her bedroom in hopes of finding proof of the sordid scenes he had comped her into. Her makeup was color-coordinated in its case. The limp shadows of her Abaya wardrobe were all hung neatly in the closet. Pastel-flannel pajamas and paisley jalabiyas were rolled and stacked on shelves like colorful fabric loaves. He found no incriminating journal, no photos of other men and no mobile phone to look through. The worst thing he found was a stack of Archie comics hidden in a shoebox at the back of the closet, and he used to read them himself, so he couldn’t blame her for that.

  He lay back on the bed and stared at the plush bear holding a heart she kept propped at the center of their bed. He picked it up; it was heavier than he’d expected. There was a zipper at the back. He unzipped the animal from anus to nape, and out popped an oddly-shaped knob of metal, as if a piece of molten mercury had solidified tumor-like inside the stuffed animal.

  But then he discovered that it had a pink rubber button at one end. He pressed it. It vibrated. Although he’d never seen one, he had heard of vibrators from friends who had managed to circumnavigate the government censors and were more widely-travelled on the internet than him.

  Khalid took care to put the device back into the bear’s stuffing and leave the room as he’d found it.

  He fell asleep around midday to the voices on an Egyptian expose about Christian and Muslim exorcisms. “Your mother may have told you that djinn wear their feet backwards or that they prefer the magic hour of maghrib! She may have told you as a child that if you awaken paralyzed, a djinn has been sitting on your chest. But black magic is very real.”

  It cut to a respectable looking religious man with a thick black bruise in the middle of his forehead. The name Doctor Zaki Abdallah zipped across his chest as he answered questions of the interviewer. “Some of the most common signs that present in those who come to me are heavy menstruation, erectile dysfunction, excessive interest in sex, or lack of interest in sex, and often there is a psychotic element such as seeing movement under the skin or encountering a double of the supposedly cursed or possessed person –” The list carried on while Khalid silently tallied how many of these indicators Aneeza was suffering form. The symptoms leapt across his dozing mind, piling images of his wife up in the superstitious furrows of his subconscious mind.

  The same subterranean place where he went to dream of Mecca.

  Khalid was small and could not keep up in the tide of other pilgrims, so his father carried him the final perambulations of the Kaaba. Each time his father reached a hand out to the black stone as they passed it, Khalid could see the cornerstone through the crowd, framed with a vulvic sterling border. A wide kind of fear spread through his chest and he felt as if he were paralyzed as they spiralled down in a drain towards the centre where that vertical mouth waited. They passed the event horizon of the hajj and Khalid’s father lurched through the crowd to the ancient meteorite. He then hoisted Khalid into the curved silver gullet against his will. He cried out and it echoed back to him from the metal frame. It was black inside. “Kiss it!” his father yelled.

  There was urgency in his voice as a guard wrestled with him. The others were pressing closer, all fighting to touch the silver lips of the casing or peck the black stone buried inside the opening. The guard shoved Khalid’s father away and he was swept away in the crowd. Khalid was sucked inside and the opening clamped shut like a parrot’s maw. Inside was not a black stone, but a hematite cave filled with a strange mercurial crystal. Then, from within the crystalline womb of the Kaaba, he could see the crowd churning by when, withou
t warning, something peered in.

  The great slit eye of a mantis.

  Khalid awoke from a sleep paralysis. He looked out the barred window. The sun had set, but the sky was still pink outside. He could get up to pray maghrib still. He rolled over on the couch to see the TV was still on, glowing blue in the darkening room.

  It wasn’t the channel he’d fallen asleep to. The satellite frequency must have changed.

  It took Khalid a few moments to understand what he was seeing on the screen, but as he did, a strangely satisfying shudder of disgust rippled through his insides.

  It was an orgy.

  Khalid froze in a dilated sort of fear: ears open, breath sucking in a litany of prayer. He wanted to watch and wanted to turn it off, fearful of the consequence. Impossible bodies were sliding all over like a tumble of shameless lizards all licking and splayed. Men and women alike bore gaping holes like wet mouths. All open, all staring at Khalid. And then Khalid saw it entering one of the bodies – the silver knob of metal with the pink button. It moved beneath the skin of a taut belly like a beak seeking exit from an egg.

  Aneeza’s toy.

  Right there in the TV. And among the slapping and flapping and moaning and groaning in a wash of liquid crystal ripples – Khalid thought he saw her. The double of his wife, Aneeza – transported impossibly to an over-lit studio somewhere in Europe then off some stray satellite that might be hurtling towards him even now in punishment for watching this. The words of the Egyptian doctor returned: “Seeing movement under the skin or encountering a double.”

  “Habibi?” a voice whispered from somewhere.

  Khalid hadn’t noticed the room had become so dark. He couldn’t see her, but he knew she was here.

  Khalid peered at the corner beneath the air conditioner.

  A shadow darker than the others.

  She stepped forward, her movements oddly liquid and her body moving into the bluish light of the TV, looking like a column that might collapse.