DJINN.

By Alizah Hashmi

“Iss ne kya jinn dekh liya hai?” (Has she seen a djinn?)

My mother shook her head, apologetic, carting me to a standing position. I resisted, my legs making faster, faster circular paddling motions on the ground. My face was furrowed and sour. I was an ugly child with a horrid countenance.

Sohail Sahab sobered. He was some relative –who I knew as just that. Relative. A compromised stranger.

“Apni kurri ka mun theek kar lo,” he started, clasping one set of ancient fingers in the opposite hand so my mother would not miss the gravity of his counsel. I could understand him well word for word, even with the heavy Punjabi verdigris, which I was unable to speak but not unfamiliar with. He was telling her to fix my face. He offered the succinct elucidation that my face was “sarrial”. Rotten, unpleasant. Disinterested.

If I had been plucky and ugly, I would have told him I was just chronically constipated, but I was only ugly, so I said nothing, instead looked over the room with the sort of malice one didn’t conceal because then what would be the point?

A shopkeeper at a toy shop, whose unsolicited salesperson prattle my parents welcomed as parenting rubric, seconded Sohail Sahab. He added that it was their job as parents to correct my disposition.

Obviously, my parents, doting as they were, failed. I was as nasty at 21 as I had been as a child. I was still ugly, fouler in conduct –also fattest of all the women in my house. I was a case infrequently seen in good families, and ours was a very good family, even if generation after generation was straying away from that archetype, each a little at their time. All ramifications of the progressing debility of the zamana (“the times”). But mine was a childhood condition –so there were, empirically, only three differentials: a medical aberration, a bad upbringing – or the blight of djinns.

After my likening to them, djinns had been an oft-referenced conversational topic in our house. It was one of the few topics my father would put aside his phone to indulge. He would always tell of a time he got lost on the way back from his village school and found a little goat with a broken leg. He thought he would carry it home and hauled it up over his shoulder, but on the way back he felt it growing progressively heavier, until it was too much and he chucked it back onto the ground. The goat stood up on its hind legs and started speaking as if she were human; told him that had he carried her any farther she would have killed him. Every time we heard a slightly different variant, but the plot remained the same and I believed all of it every time.

My father’s side of the family had an entrenched belief in the preternatural. A cousin of his, we were told, had been possessed by djinns that made her disobedient and vulgar. They goaded her into violence, and many broken pots and glasses later they simply took her away. My mother sometimes liked to mention she was happily married and settled in another city with a husband no one talked of, but that was besides the point. Long ago their ancestors had moved into a house that was later ravaged during the 1947 partition. That house had housed djinns. Political ones – because they inspired a great uncle of mine to join the Muslim League, the political party of Pakistan’s founder and one of the central architects of partition. In retrospect it was admitted they were good djinns, but at the time –when politics was thought a precarious inconvenience for the middle class –the family had tried to wring djinns out of said uncle. And so djinns remained – real, and more real when they could be subcontracted as bearers of guilt.

Sometimes I, too, found myself wondering if my condition could be explained as such. Compounding like interest, the wasteland of my face produced new savagery each year. In the years between 13 and 18 it had sprouted squishy thickets of acne, colored like an overused palette where all the colors were mixed up. Reds, browns, pinks. At the end of an elaborate exercise that spanned all my teens, and the only definite upshot of which was unusual grossing for most of the city’s dermatologists, the pimples were still there. Except in my twentieth year, as if in friendly recompense for all the times I had purposely failed to subject them to prescription ointments, they disappeared. Now I had a face with only a couple dozen scars, small circles and rugged half-moons.

I was not coming of age – that age for me had come and gone equally dryly. But even at this age when I should have felt a willow of maturity spreading its branches of wisdom and acquiescence inside me, I had begun to find the air of my house pricklier. Everything around me became more banal than me and the concentration gradient sometimes meant I was expected to exude something plush – a thought, word – that I could not do. The effort was not, intuitively, worth it.

My mother shared some of my wistfulness, but in a drawn out, powerful way. She was an auteurist even with her discontent. She told my father everyday after his return from work that she was feeling drab and his lack of attention had restricted her to her mental territory, a minimalist landscape of cooking and child-rearing. My father did what fathers do – scrolled his phone and pronounced syllables of agreement. More tangibly, however, her territory was vast –she loomed over the whole house like a phantom, anything that happened, even if it wasn’t related to her, would always end up having her the victim in her recounting of it to my father, the only recounting that mattered.

My father was the perfect head of the household – running it on the outside, but a docile caricature to all that happened inside. Like a good husband he had outsourced that to my mother, and like the most wayward child, I did not like that at all.

One of these days the TV was blaring its dutiful background orchestra as my mother told my father of some trouble she had run into. My father peaked at me through his glasses – a stray but almost purposeful gesture.

Perhaps he wanted to speak to me, or about me. But he was too seasoned a man to interrupt my mother, the creases in his forehead deepening along the midline like a man who knew the consequences of the interruption exceeded those of the delay.

He was also an astoundingly intelligent man. He started slowly, steering from an angle that met his wife’s approval. “Did you ever tell someone in the waiting area of a skin clinic they looked like a djinn?”

I mulled over it a while. My mother immediately said it was quite possible. Then I remembered it, but in my memory it was insubstantial. There was a woman there whose hairdo and makeup did a hack job of hiding her years. My little brother had told me her lips, too plump, reminded him of a movie character. I had told him she looked rather like a shapeshifting djinn; I hadn’t said it to her, though. We had giggled; tittering, I told my father the same.

Three more months and I was married. I wondered why three months – which was around the religious waiting period for widows and divorcees looking for remarriage. The idea was to allow a pregnancy to become apparent, just in case. I don’t think anyone had ever thought me rotten of that sort.

The modiste – a monocled, dowdy woman – made an acerbic comment about my “puppy” fat, that was making it hard to tailor the designs I told her I liked better. I would have submitted to her discretion, except my husband, who seemed like he had no time in the world to spare, one day just dropped a package which included a dress and a ring and that was that.

Of all the commotion and emotion, I only remembered my mother telling me, her hands wrung, “Don’t have a baby until you’re sure you want to raise it with him.”

We moved to New York, where he was working at the time. My parents had first seen each other the day of their wedding – my father bedecked with, in his family’s signature parsimony, a garland of 100 rupee notes which were deviously as red as 5000 rupee notes. My mother in a bright red gharara that fit none of her daughters now. They had known nothing about each other. I wanted to get off to a slightly better start than them – so I looked up my husband on Linkedin before I married him. He was an oil trader. The only likeness that conjured for me was a uniformed PSO station employ putting the petrol gun into our car at a petrol pump and tweaking the meter unless my father stepped out to keep an eye. I decided it was none of my business what he did for a living anyway.

I was hoping I could zip my oddity in my mother’s dowry trunk and forget about it when I moved, but a heirloom of unknown origin – like the dubious periapts handed out by roadside peers that could cure infertility in a night – it stayed with me.

In the restroom at the airport my husband sent two separate women inside to check on me. It irked me that the object of his concern was so easy to pinpoint, but it didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t sick – I was just peeling off a coat, two turtle-necks and a camisole to get rid of a designer bra my mother had ordered for me. She had been too optimistic about the size and the lace had dug into my shoulder for all 13 hours on the plane. When I had resealed myself in my travel finery I had been instructed to not take off because America was always cold, I heedlessly tucked the bra into my coat’s pocket, and when my husband asked for my passport I put my hand into the wrong pocket and offered a shocking pink Women’s Secret bra instead. Battle scars reprised from a lifetime at airports marching on direction (and mostly in the wrong directions) as part of the travel regiment commanded by my father – who fisted everyone’s passports, did all the talking, shuffled the allotted plane seats to optimize person-person pairings.

In the cab I carefully folded all my limbs so that they could not percase touch anything – my husband, or the car door. I felt anything I touched I would brand or destroy. A djinn. Making everything go wrong for me. Too soon. It had followed me here. I wanted to cry. To my husband’s credit, he said nothing. 

In fact, he didn’t say much at all; that suited me well. I had learnt to thrive in silence, in frugal mediocrity. The barely furnished apartment, the Portuguese neighbors who eyed with me perpetual incertitude, the on-foot commute to everywhere was all fructuous soil in which I could root myself in familiarity. Once he had suggested I take up a job at a day care, but I had politely declined –because what sort of toddlers would enjoy a prune-faced caretaker that wanted to go home just as much as them?

I lost a lot of weight, then. I walked 35 minutes to a bistro my husband was obsessed with every day 7 pm for dinner. Then I walked back. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford a cab –it was that he liked to walk, and it had never occurred to him that I could not like it. I always forked my food and brought it back in Styrofoam boxes, from where he ate it for breakfast the next day.

During this time I would pretend to observe a street performer I could see through the window. He had braided hair and a blank sort of face – dark skin, blanched eyes. He seemed to be dancing. Incantatory and fluid. No sense. I knew whatever he was doing would never sell as entertainment in Pakistan; indeed I often privately scoffed at what all passed off as art in New York. With inward déjà vu I couldn’t help but think this was how someone actually possessed by djinns would act.

Every time we left my husband handed him and his partner money and said something cordial. A Friday night my husband was paying the bill and I stepped outside to wait.

“Serious?” The performer stuck his thumb at the door I had come out from.

I could speak English, so I got by in the city just fine. But I’d never really made conversation beyond the things that comprised of the act of getting by. “Husband,” I nodded, fingering my glasses, mad that they’d not served as the approach-me-not decal I wished they’d be.

“Not mute, huh?” He took a brochure from his associate. “You look the type. You can do the story-telling bit, if you want.”

It was an open-to-all session, for performers, artists, storytellers, authors. For poetic augmentation it was a salvo of shocking pinks and bright blues. I thrust it at my husband once we’d gotten further along on the way back home.

“You could go tell a story.” It was all he said, knowing even from, or perhaps because of, my meticulously enacted insouciance towards him, that I wouldn’t go. Even though it sounded nice. I was too boring. I had been brined in boredom, scapegoating djinns, perennial pariah.

For the first time I was cognizant of a weighty silhouette following me. I couldn’t see it – but it was there; an eldritch high-pitch screech, a little bit like the voice of my first skin doctor. I outpaced my husband the way home.

Sometimes I called back home, a calculated enterprise which I handled like one of those athletes running a hurdle course on game shows I watched in the evening. Jump, dodge, slide through. Sticky. My mother thought I had to communicate more to improve the state of my marriage. She wondered why I hadn’t gleaned that that was the key ingredient of a successful marriage from my observation of my parents.

“I guess I should be sorry for calling your mother a djinn when she was in earshot,” I said, finally, one day.

Perhaps he liked his mother, I thought. I wasn’t sorry, really – but I should’ve been, so that’s what I said. I had seen her a couple times, each time her greeting was an unsympathetic comment about my weight loss. I knew it was because she was expecting a certain brand of weight gain, and it had been a while.

My mother in law’s name was Gulbadan. One who has the body of a rose. She spoke at some length about how her family was keen on exotic names. “That bear some resemblance to the person, too” she had emphasized. I had retorted that if I had been born into their clan I would conceivably be named Kaddoo. Pumpkin. My husband had clanked the side of his class with his fingertip; I was learning this was his taciturn gesture of approbation. For a variety of reasons my husband and I spoke in different languages, even when we spoke a language we both understood. But in this we were alike – we spoke with a sharp sort of resignation, and only if it was really expected.

“So you didn’t say it to her face?” He answered my question, downing some bad coffee I had made after dinner. “That’s too bad, I thought you had spunk.” Mock disappointment.

I felt a small hole close inside of me. “Shall I tell you a djinn story?”

“I don’t believe in djinns.” He admitted, scratching the side of my cheek. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to brush off what he thought was a crumb. It was just the solid remnant of a teenage pimple that looked rather odious as a crumb dopple-ganger. I felt the weight of my face – the face I contracted in unpleasant ways as a child, the one that housed horrible acne, the one that I had carried sullen to my wedding and leaden to New York City.

“They exist,” I argued. “It is part of our faith.”

His mouth quirked as if discerning the worth of arguing back. “Yes, that is not what I meant,” he said finally, in a way that suggested that had been exactly what he meant. “But we are Ashraf-ul-Makhlooqat.” The best of all creation.

“So?”

“That means we can beat them. You have to believe in that too.” He indicated that I should tell my story anyway.

I told him my father’s story. Of shedding a burden when it was becoming too much, a burden taken on by choice and not necessity. By the end the air felt thick even though I’d forgotten to plug in the electric heater again.

A fork fell out of its place behind us and he jerked. I snorted with overt schadenfreude –the passing scare of the story had struck him too, like a winter current.

Suddenly I had to know. “Do you feel there’s something wrong with my face?”

He looked me over, an esoteric, married stare, used to determine the right answer at a given time to a given question. “I suppose your nose is too big,” he sounded honest enough.

“Is it like a djinn?” I probed. “Below average, maybe?”

He shook his head, as if he had never taken the time to look at my face so objectively. Then he laughed a little. Shook his head again. “No.”

I too looked at him in a different way, as he ground coffee beans in his teeth and endured clumsily made coffee, day after day. He was much older than me. He was also handsomer than me – but on most days that weren’t today that wasn’t such an extraordinary feat, I knew. His hair was greying at the temples. A new-yorker’s tousle had settled in his hair from all the walking that wouldn’t brush out. How he was old and worn enough to not believe in djinns. I had never paid attention. Tonight I would pay attention.

Then I would tell him about the baby.

Alizah Hashmi lives in Pakistan. In the past her work has appeared in the Young Adult Review Network (YARN), Five on the Fifth, Litbreak, RIC Journal, Entropy, Lucy Writers Forum and The Aleph Review. She was a finalist for the 2020 Curt Johnson Prose Award and was longlisted for the 2019 Zeenat Haroon Rashid Prize for Women. She has a great sense of pride in the country she calls home and faith in its future. Her twitter is @alizah_hashmi.