Djinn City, page 10
“The plan please, Givaras!”
“And that unconsciously, you have been favoring this character.” Givaras held up a bit of shell that had been scraped off earlier. “This gold-and-brown God’s-eye pattern. You’ve been favoring him as your steed, probably because he’s the biggest and slowest, therefore presenting the least threat. Also, I’ve been noticing that lately your runs have gotten easier, because he is not thrashing about as much. What does that tell you?”
“He’s learning?”
“Precisely!” Givaras looked pleased. “Somewhere in his wyrm brain he’s realized that you’re not a threat so much as a nuisance, and the fantastic expenditure of energy required to throw you off is not warranted. Moreover, he’s realized that all he has to do is retreat into a tunnel, and you’ll be forced off anyways. All this gives us two vital pieces of information: a) these wyrms are individuals—we can differentiate between them, and b) they are capable of rudimentary learning and have some degree of functional memory.”
“Very fascinating,” Indelbed said, slightly dejected. It seemed as if the escape plan was in reality a cunningly disguised lecture on wyrms.
“Now what do you think these wyrms eat?”
“Other wyrms?”
“Well, yes, among rock and sand and other things,” Givaras said. “They are omnivorous at this stage. Now I suspect that these wyrms are earth dragon larvae, as mentioned in our histories. They should, given unlimited food, grow to their full potential. And what happens then, I ask you?”
“They get really big?” Indelbed said. His eyes got bigger. “They become something else?”
“Yes!” Givaras said. “Like the caterpillar, these rock wyrms will move from larval stage to adolescence. They will leave the incubation of the earth and seek the balmy comfort of water: riverbeds, my dear, riverbeds, estuaries, ocean mouths. That is the next step. For that, they must burrow; they must make a passage up to the surface.”
“And we could follow them!”
“Yes,” Givaras said. “The problem, I suspect, is that these wyrms never leave the larval stage. Evolution has caught them out. Some imbalance in their food source has resulted in their physical stunting. Thus, they live and die as worms in truth, never fulfilling their glorious future.”
“So they’re hungry,” Indelbed said. He began to see the light. “And we keep one, like a pet, and feed it! The brown-and-gold one, who’s bigger already, who can remember stuff! We kill the others and keep feeding him until he becomes a dragon!”
“Right!” Givaras rubbed his hands with glee. “I told you it was stupendous. Well, he won’t be a dragon yet, he’ll probably be some kind of river wyrm. Yet even those are unheard of these days. Can you imagine the entrance we’ll make?”
“We’re going to escape on the back of a dragon!” Visions of glory flooded his mind. Naturally suspicion took over. “Wait a minute. How long will this take?”
“We have to feed him enough to metamorphose.” Givaras smiled. “Can’t be much longer than ten more years?”
CHAPTER 13
Surface Tension
In London, Rais lived above a sweet shop in Brick Lane. He liked the sweets. The Sylhetis housed and fed him for cheap, in return for minimum rent and help in maintaining their accounts, basic stuff that he remembered from his two-semester stint at Northwestern. His parents hadn’t been impressed with that particular decision. Dropping out of expensive business schools was a thing that stretched even the Ambassador’s bonhomie. They’d cut him off for a few months in despair. Familial love had been somewhat restored when he had transferred to SOAS, to try his hand at a new city, a new continent. By this point, they just wanted him to finish something, anything. Anthropology, archaeology, Japanese boatbuilding—anything that ended in a degree.
Looking for a place to live, he found the Sylhetis online. They thought he was an immigrant and, touchingly, were very proud that he went to SOAS, often bragging about him to their friends. They were also interested in marrying him off, considering him almost a default Sylheti, and kept shoving pictures and bios of eligible girls at him. They were well-meaning, good company, the younger ones hilarious (sophisticated and cynical at the same time). It was the sheer number of them that defeated him sometimes.
On Friday, he ate ramen alone in his room, as he typically did. He ate in silence, reading a book and fanning himself in the heat. If the Sylhetis detected him, they would force him down to join in their three-hour-long family meal. He finished all the forkable bits in his Cup Noodles and then drank the soup. When it was all gone, he stood up reluctantly. Then he threw away his cutlery and unplugged the microwave, wiping the inside. There were a few objects on his desk, things he had picked up on his trips: a stone from the temples in Karnak, where he had spent weeks one winter trying to read the hieroglyphs; a small round-bellied fertility statue from Angkor Wat; beads from the Mundeshwari Devi Temple in Bihar; a little rock from the Feroz Shah Fort in Delhi, where people gathered to write letters to the djinn. He touched them a few times, mementos of failure, for he had never found any of those creatures, seen nothing but charlatans and madmen. He swept it all into the trash and emptied his little can into a garbage bag. He did a final sweep through the room, dumping papers, an errant sock, an old toothbrush, an empty cologne bottle, his collection of half-finished soaps and shampoos. There was a pile of pennies in one corner, and he stacked them nicely on the table. Finally he stripped his sheets and pillowcases, balled them into the clothes hamper. The room now looked exactly as he had found it.
His suitcase was a battered Mandarina Duck his mother had given him a few years ago. It was already packed. He sat on his chair and wrote a short note, mentioning his address in Dhaka and the promise of future visits.
His ride to the airport was covered on Uber. He had cash in his pocket for the rest of the night, enough to close the tab at the bar and then one last splurge in town. He put his ear to the door and listened to the cadence of the footsteps outside. He could tell from the creaks on the narrow stairs who was coming and going. When he was sure the path was clear, he sneaked out for the last time. He felt a brief pang leaving like this, but had they been preinformed, they would have insisted on feasts and farewell speeches and quite possibly a shotgun wedding to Mina, the very pretty third daughter of the house he had secretly hooked up with. It was just easier. He left them all little notes, and a much longer one for Mina.
He took the tube to the Bernard Street station and then walked through Russell Square, saying good-bye to the SOAS buildings he had come to love. He lingered in various spots, exchanged words with passing acquaintances, and eventually wound his way to the bar. The stage upstairs was giving off strange noises, some ethnic band gearing up to play. Soon the place would be thick with people, the smokers spilling out on the streets, hugging the stairs, and the bar below would be swamped. Mercifully it was still half empty.
He smoked half a Marlboro outside and went in, hoping Achike was tending bar. She was alone, propped up with a book. She waved at him, and he sat in front of her, as he had done a hundred times, and ordered a beer. She was half Nigerian, half something else, typical of SOAS, where you could find almost any mongrel mixture if you looked hard enough. It was her accent he had loved at first, that sarcastic lilt that made every joke funnier, every drunken pronouncement a scathing indictment of the world. Achike was fiddling with her tap, but she paid attention to him eventually, frowning.
“What?”
“What?” Rais raised his eyebrows.
“You look sad, man. I thought you passed everything.”
“Yeah, couldn’t drag it out any longer. I thought Easton would fail me, but the fucker refused. I didn’t turn in the last two papers, for god’s sake.”
“Easton wouldn’t fail a lobotomized hamster. Well, congrats. Drinks on me.”
“Thanks.”
“You seem depressed.”
“I’ve been doing postgraduate studies for six years in three different universities.”
Achike shook her head. “Your parents are angels. Fucking angels.”
“I ran out on the Sylhetis. Not a word. Not one good-bye.”
“You’re an absolute dick.” Achike knew about the Sylhetis. He’d taken her to tour Brick Lane once. “Wait, what do you mean you ran out?”
Rais took out his ticket, slid it across the bar.
She stared at it. “You’re leaving.”
“For real.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I thought about it.”
“That’s the kind of asshole you are.”
“Achike, you know I love you, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got tits and I’m a bartender, believe me, I’ve heard it—”
“No, I mean I’ve spent the last three months wishing I had the courage to ask you out. Properly. Never had the nerve.”
“I knew that,” she said quietly.
“So quit your shift. Come on, let’s go drink somewhere good, let’s go dancing, let’s eat random food in the middle of the night.”
She pushed his ticket toward him, touching the back of his hand. She took his drink and finished it. “Okay.”
It was a great night, a proper good-bye. She took him home in the end, when neither was anywhere near sober. In the morning, he kissed her head, burrowed inside the duvet, and felt like crying. When there was no more time left, he wrote a letter on the back of her favorite book and left. He was finally going home.
When he landed Dhaka hit him with the smell of fresh rain, of wind and thunder on the balcony; with shiny leaves; with pluviophiles jumping in puddles and drinking tea on rooftops. He wondered why he had spent so long away. Then he went inside the airport and remembered some of the reasons. The main concourse was a microcosm of the country: a utilitarian building with little pretension, creaking under the weight of thousands and thousands of passengers, just trying to process everyone in a reasonable amount of time without anyone losing their temper. It was a cowboy sort of place where errant smokers might light up anywhere, the lines snaked for miles, and people regarded signs and instructions with blatant contempt.
The immigration lines were packed, the officers gruff with their own citizens, stolidly courteous to the foreigners. The laborers from the Gulf flights, collectively responsible for earning a healthy dollar reserve for the country by working abroad, were often incapable of filling out forms. They clogged up the lines and were repeatedly sent back for mistakes, shamefully harassed in their own airport. Rais helped them fill out their forms while he waited, as he always did, and marveled at the far-flung villages people came from, the sheer courage it must take to go to a strange desert land where you were hated and abused, treated like animals by so-called Muslim brethren. They were grateful for his help, though a little bit surprised that he bothered to wait in line instead of cutting ahead, but he had never really mastered the pure dickishness required to cut queues, so he just ended up spending the extra half hour chatting with his neighbors. When it was over he waited again for his battered suitcase and then strolled through the green channel, where customs waved him on, keeping their eyes peeled for more lucrative prey.
Rais was too old for anyone to receive him at the airport anymore, but his mother had sent her old driver, who sat rheumy-eyed in the parking lot, confident that Rais would find him. Rais wanted to have a smoke in the car, craving that morning hit of nicotine, but the driver wouldn’t let him, so he ended up holding the cigarette in his fingers and sniffing it periodically.
He found his parents at the breakfast table. They made a show of keeping everything casual, as if he had just wandered in after a night out. They were scared he would spook and disappear once again, if they made a big deal about finally settling down. His father put down the paper, smiled, and offered him tea. His mother gave him an omelet. It was not their way, to be demonstrative. There was a pat on the back, slight fussing over his luggage, and he was back in the old pattern, eating the food put in front of him, stealing the sports page from the Ambassador, having a halfhearted conversation with each parent.
“Good to have you back,” the Ambassador said, once they had lingered enough. “I have to go now, I’ve got some meetings. I’ll see you for dinner. Uncle Ahmed was asking after you. He wanted some help in his office. I said you’d drop in.”
“Yes, of course,” Rais said. This was his father’s way of getting him a job. There was never anything crass like an actual interview process or an application. The post would probably be extremely cushy, and Uncle Ahmed would treat him like a treasured asset. “I’ll go tomorrow, if he’s free.” He had plenty of experience tanking “interviews.”
“Vulu, let him get over the jet lag at least,” Juny said.
“It’s okay,” Rais said. “Baba, I wanted to ask you about Uncle Kaikobad. Is he still in a coma?”
“Oh.” The Ambassador looked surprised and then slightly embarrassed. “I haven’t thought of him in years. Yes, I suppose he is. Pappo put him in a clinic. I think the trust picks up the bill every month. I’ll have to ask Uncle Sikkim. They would have told us if anything had changed. Why do you ask?”
“I guess it was the last big thing that happened before I left. It kind of stuck with me,” Rais said. “Any news of Indelbed?”
“No, no, of course not,” the Ambassador said. “Look, just put him out of your mind. No use stirring up bad memories. The poor boy. He’s long dead, though we never found the body. One shudders to think what this city is coming to. Look, Rais, I’ll see you tonight.”
“He does not like to talk about it,” Juny said, when her husband had left.
“It seems like everyone has forgotten Indy,” Rais said.
“I have not,” Juny replied. “I still pay the phone bill.”
“What?”
“The phone you gave him. I have paid the bill in advance for the next twenty years. I believe one day he will call.”
Rais stared at his mother. “I didn’t think you liked him.”
“That’s beside the point. Little boys do not disappear from the face of the earth. Not from my care.”
“We should have done more to keep him,” Rais said.
“They didn’t search for him, you know. Sikkim wouldn’t let me file a police report. I made them hire a private detective, but when he couldn’t find either Indelbed or the Afghan, they stopped paying for him after a month. You were still in America then. I hired my own people. They combed the hospitals, the lakes, the borders, every place a child could be trafficked. Sikkim ordered me to stop. Ordered me, as if I were one of his simpering daughters.”
“What did you do?” Rais asked, laughing.
“I gave him the look,” Juny said. “And I told him that while I certainly appreciated his sentiment, actually obeying him was absolutely out of the question. It would physically kill me to lift even one finger at his command.”
“You actually said that to his face?”
Juny gave him the look. “I see no reason to pander to his wishes anymore.”
“Do you think Indelbed’s dead?” Rais asked.
“I had RAB and CID investigate the Mirpur apartment three times,” Juny said. “They found no trace of blood, no trace of violence. Yet there is evidence that both of them at least reached the apartment alive, however briefly they stayed there.”
“You made RAB and CID investigate the case?” Rais asked in admiration. CID was the central intelligence department, a high-powered organ of the state. Juny’s inroads into these organizations were quite impressive.
“They reported to me personally, off the record,” Juny said. “Many people owe me favors.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“I think the djinn kidnapped the boy,” Juny said. “And I think the Afghan betrayed our trust. There are only three options: the djinn kidnapped Dargoman, killed him, or let him go. There was no reason to kidnap him. They did not kill him or we would have found the body. If they let him go, that can only mean he was on their side to begin with.”
“If Dargoman is from an emissary family, can we not find his clan?”
“I have tried,” Juny said. “The fact that he comes from Afghanistan makes communication difficult. There is some mention of the Dargoman clan, but no one has admitted to seeing or hearing from him. You have to understand that emissaries are extremely secretive.”
“You have been busy,” Rais said.
“So have you, son,” Juny said. “You’ve traveled a lot.”
Rais shrugged. “Normal tourist stuff before I settle down. Pyramids, temples, whatever.”
“You also went to Palmyra, to Jerusalem and Petra, then to Pakistan, to see the ruins of Mohenjo Daro.”
Rais raised an eyebrow.
“I keep track.”
“I can see that.”
“What have you been looking for, Rais?”
Rais shrugged. “You wouldn’t care for it, I think.”
“Try me. Perhaps we have been looking for the same things.”
“Djinns,” Rais said. “I’ve been looking for djinns.”
“Is this why you can never finish anything or hold down a job?”
“Well, yes,” Rais said. “I mean, how can you spend your life being an accountant or a lawyer or something, knowing that there are djinns walking around out there?”
“I wish you had told me,” Juny said. “We have wasted a lot of time.”
Juny led him by the hand to her study and unlocked the door. It was a small converted bedroom crammed floor to ceiling with shelves, the window closed off by a whiteboard, which she had covered on every available inch with names and diagrams. Other than lamps, the only furniture was a single round table in the middle of the room and one chair. Whatever she was doing was apparently a solitary pursuit. Rais dragged in a dining room chair. His mother locked the door after him.
“So secretive,” he said, sitting down.
“I don’t want the staff to think I’m crazy,” Juny said. “They think I’m writing a book.”
