Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (10 page)

Now that we know about the War of the Worlds, the main event to which the strangenesses were the prologue, the bizarre cataclysm which many of our ancestors did not live through, we can only marvel at the courage of young Jinendra Kapoor in the face of the terrifying unknown. When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far. So it was with Jimmy K. He had no control over the wormhole’s first appearance, or the entry into his bedroom of the giant Ifrit, the dark jinn, disguised as Natraj Hero. But on this second night, he made a choice. Men like Jimmy were needed in the war that followed.

When Jimmy Kapoor plunged his arm into the wormhole, as he afterwards told his mother and his cousin Normal, a number of things happened at
mind-blowing speed
. In the first place, he was instantly sucked into that space where the laws of the universe ceased to operate, and in the second place, he at once lost his sense of where the first place might be. In the place where he found himself the idea of
place
ceased to have meaning and was replaced by
velocity.
The universe of pure and extreme velocity required no point of origin, no big bang, no creation myth. The only force at work here was the so-called g-force, under whose influence acceleration is felt as weight. If time had existed here he would have been crushed to nothing in a millisecond. In that timeless time he had time to perceive that he had entered the transportation system of the world behind the veil of the real, the subcutaneous subway network operating just below the skin of the world he knew, which allowed such beings as the dark jinn and he had no idea who or what else besides to move at FTL speeds—speeds faster than light—around their lawless land for which the word
land
seemed inappropriate. He had time to hypothesize that for whatever reasonless reason this, the underground railroad of Fairyland, had been sequestered from terra firma for a long time, but had now begun to burst through into the dimension of the actual to wreak miracles or havoc amongst human beings.

Or it may be that he did not have time for these thoughts and that they actually formed in his mind after he was rescued, because what he felt there in the tunnel of swirling black smoke was a rushing towards him of something or someone he could not see or hear much less name, and then he was tumbling backwards into his bedroom with his pajamas ripped off his body so that he was obliged to shield his nakedness with his bare hands from the woman standing before him, a beautiful young woman dressed in the casual uniform of young women her age, skinny black jeans, a black tank top and lace-up ankle boots, a person even more thin-thin than the girl his mother wanted him to marry but with a far more attractive nose, the kind of girl he would have loved to date obviously, except that she was not glamazon shaped, but he found he didn’t care so much about that, but in spite of or because of her stick-thin beauty he knew she was far out of his league,
forget about it, Jimmy, don’t make a fool of yourself, stay loose, play it cool.
And this was the girl who had saved him from the vortex of velocity and who apparently was a being from the other world, a fairy or peri from Peristan, and she was talking to him. This stuff that was happening to him now: it did his head in. Vow,
yaar.
No words. Just … vowee.

The jinn are not noted for their family lives. (But they do have sex. They have it all the time.) There are jinn mothers or fathers, but the generations of the jinn are so long that the ties between the generations often erode. Jinn fathers and daughters, as will be seen, are rarely on good terms. Love is rare in the jinn world. (But sex is incessant.) The jinn, we believe, are capable of the lower emotions—anger, resentment, vindictiveness, possessiveness, lust (especially lust)—and even, perhaps, some forms of affection; but the high noble sentiments, selflessness, devotion, and so on, these elude them. In this, as in so much else, Dunia proved herself exceptional.

Nor do the jinn alter greatly with the passage of the years. For them existence is purely the business of being, never becoming. For this reason, life in the jinn world can be tedious. (Except for the sex.) Being, by its nature, is an inactive state, changeless, timeless, eternal, and dull. (Except for the nonstop sex.) This is why the human world was always so attractive to the jinn. The human way was
doing,
the human reality was
alteration,
human beings were always growing and shriveling and striving and failing and yearning and envying, acquiring and losing and loving and hating, and being, in sum, interesting, and when the jinn were able to move through the slits between the worlds and meddle in all this human activity
,
when they could tangle or untangle the human web and accelerate or hold back the endless metamorphosis of human lives, human relations, and human societies, they felt, paradoxically, more like themselves than they ever did in the static world of Fairyland. It was human beings who allowed the jinn to express themselves, to create immense wealth for lucky fishermen, to imprison heroes in magic webs, to thwart history or enable it, to take sides in wars, between the Kurus and Pandavas, for example, or the Greeks and Trojans, to play Cupid or to make it impossible for a lover ever to reach his beloved, so that she grew old and sad and died alone at her window waiting for him to arrive.

We now believe that the long age in which the jinn were unable to interfere in human affairs contributed to the ferocity with which they reentered it when the seals between the worlds were broken. All that pent-up creative and destructive power, all that good and bad mischief, burst upon us like a storm. And between the jinn of white magic and the jinn of black magic, the bright jinn and the dark, an enmity had grown in their Peristan exile, and human beings became the surrogates upon whom that hostility played itself out. With the return of the jinn the rules of life on earth had changed, had become capricious where they should have been stable, intrusive where privacy would have been better, malicious to a fault, preferential with scant regard for fairness, secret according to their occult origins, amoral for that was the nature of the dark jinn, opaque with no care for transparency, and accountable to no citizenry on the planet. And the jinn, being jinn, had no intention of teaching mere humans what the new rules might be.

In the matter of sex, it is true that the jinn have on occasion had intercourse with human beings, adopting whatever form they chose, making themselves pleasing to their mate, even altering gender on occasion, and having little regard for propriety. However, there are very few cases in which a jinnia bore human children. That would be as if the breeze were to be impregnated by the hair it ruffled and gave birth to more hair. That would be as if a story mated with its reader to produce another reader. The jinnias have been for the most part infertile and uninterested in such human problems as motherhood and family responsibility. It will readily be apparent, then, that Dunia, the matriarch of the Duniazát, was, or became, very unlike the vast majority of her kind. Not only had she produced offspring the way Henry Ford learned to produce motor cars, the way Georges Simenon wrote novels, which is to say, like a factory, or industriously; she also continued to care for them all, her love for Ibn Rushd transferring itself naturally,
maternally,
towards their descendants. She was perhaps the only true mother of all the jinnias that existed, and as she embarked on the task the great philosopher had given her, she also became protective of what remained of her dispersed brood after the cruelty of the centuries, missed them bitterly during the long separation of the Two Worlds, and yearned to have them back under her wing.

Do you understand why you are still alive, she asked Jimmy Kapoor, as, blushing, he pulled a bedsheet around himself. “Yes,” he replied, his eyes filled with wonder. “Because you saved my life.” That is so, she conceded, inclining her head. But you would have been dead before I reached you, crushed to bits in the great Urn, if it wasn’t for the other reason.

She saw his fear, his disorientation, his inability to process what was happening to him. She couldn’t help it. She was about to make his life even harder for him to grasp. I am going to tell you some things you will find hard to believe, she said. Unlike almost any other human being you have entered the Urn, the pathway between the worlds, and survived, so you already know that another world exists. I am a person from that world, a jinnia, a princess of the tribe of the bright jinn. I am also your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, though I may have omitted a
great
or two. Never mind. In the twelfth century I loved your great-great-et-cetera-grandfather, your illustrious ancestor the philosopher Ibn Rushd, and you, Jinendra Kapoor, who can’t trace your family history back further than three generations, are a product of that great love, maybe the greatest love there ever was between the tribes of men and jinn. This means that you, like all the descendants of Ibn Rushd, Muslim, Christian, atheist or Jew, are also partly of the jinn. The jinni part, being far more powerful than the human part, is very strong in you all, and that is what made it possible for you to survive the otherness in
there;
for you are Other too.

“Vow,” he cried, reeling. “It isn’t bad enough being a brown dude in America, you’re telling me I’m half fucking goblin too.”

How young he was, she thought, and stronger than he knew. Many men, seeing what he had seen in the last two nights, would have lost their minds, but he, for all his panic, was holding himself together. It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye. This was the kind of thing young Jinendra confronted regularly in his art, through his somewhat derivative (and therefore unsuccessful) Hindu-deity-transplanted-to-Queens superhero: the monster rising from the deep, the destruction of your home village and the rape of your mothers, the arrival of a second sun in the sky and the consequent abolition of the night, and in the voice of his Natraj Hero he answered horror with scorn, Is that all you’ve got, is that your best shot, because guess what, we can deal with you, motherfucker, we can take you down. Now, having practiced courage in fiction, he was discovering it in his real life. And his own comic-book creation was the first monster he had to confront.

She spoke gently, maternally, to this brave young man. Be calm, your world is changing, she told him. At times of great upheaval when the wind blows and the tide of history surges, cool heads are needed to navigate a path to calmer waters. I will be here with you. Find the jinni within yourself and you may be a bigger hero than your Natraj. It’s in there. You will find it.

The wormhole closed. He was sitting on his bed holding his head in his hands. “This is what happens to me now,” he muttered. “They build a transworld railway station three feet from my
bed
. No construction permit, yo? There’s no, like, zoning laws in hyperspace? I’m a
complain
’bout that. I’m a call 3-1-1
right now.
” His hysteria was talking. She let it play itself out. It was his way of dealing with the situation. She waited. He flung himself down on his bed and his shoulders shook. He was trying to hide his tears from her. She pretended she did not see them. She was there to tell him he was not alone, to introduce him to his cousins. Quietly, she planted the information in his mind. The jinn part of him absorbed, understood, knew. You know where they are now, she told him. You can help one another in the time that is to come.

He sat up, clutched his head again. “I don’t need all this contact info at present,” he said. “I need
Vicodin.
”

She waited. He would come back to her soon. He looked up at her and attempted a smile. “It’s a lot,” he said. “Whatever
that
was … whatever you are … whatever you’re saying I am. I’m going to need some time.”

You don’t have time, she told him. I don’t know why the portal opened in your room. I know that what appeared last night was not your Natraj Hero. Somebody took that form, to frighten you, or just because it was funny. Somebody you should hope never to meet again. Move out. Take your mother to a safe place. She won’t understand. She won’t see the swirling black smoke because she is not of the Duniazát. That comes from your father’s side.

“That bastard,” Jimmy said. “He sure disappeared like a jinni or wat. Didn’t grant us wishes, but. Just, went off in a puff of smoke with Secretary Bird.”

Take your mother away, Dunia told him. It isn’t safe for either of you here anymore.

“Vow,” Jimmy Kapoor marveled. “Worst. Halloween. Ever.”

The discovery of a girl baby in the office of the recently elected mayor Rosa Fast, swaddled in the national flag of India and gurgling contentedly in a bassinet on the mayoral desk, was thought by our superstitious and sentimental citizenry to be, on the whole, a good thing, especially when it was announced that the baby was approximately four months old and must have been born at the time of the great storm, and survived it. Storm Baby, the media called her, and the name stuck. She became Storm Doe, conjuring up the image of a Bambi-like fawn bravely facing down the tempest on unsteady legs: an instant short-term heroine for our instant and forgetful times. It won’t be long, many of us surmised, considering her apparent South Asian ethnicity, before she’s old enough to become the national spelling bee champion. She made the cover of
India Abroad
and was the subject of an exhibition of “imaginary portraits” of her future, adult self, commissioned from prominent New York artists by an Indo-American arts organization and auctioned off as a fund-raising ploy. But the mystery of her arrival enraged those who were already outraged by the election of a second consecutive woman mayor of progressive inclinations. It would never have happened, these nostalgists cried, back in the tough-guy days. Whether the rest of us agreed with that or not, it was true that in the age of maximum security her arrival on Mayor Fast’s desk felt like a small miracle.