Djinn City Read online

  The Unnamed Press

  P.O. Box 411272

  Los Angeles, CA 90041

  Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

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  Copyright © 2017 by Saad Z. Hossain

  ISBN: 9781944700447

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955593

  This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

  Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely

  Cover Artwork by Brendan Monroe

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

  Praise for Saad Z. Hossain’s Escape from Baghdad!:

  “An engrossing cross between Zero Dark Thirty and Raiders of the Lost Ark that takes a sobering look at America’s troubled legacy in Iraq.”

  — Bookslut

  “Set in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, Bangladeshi author Saad Hossain’s debut novel is a riot of mordant humour and gonzo storytelling… The Gulf war may just have found its Catch-22.”

  — Financial Times

  “It’s a marvelous mix of genres, blending the visceral atmosphere of a war movie with the casual nihilism of Catch-22 or the original M.A.S.H. complete with an Indiana Jones–style treasure quest… A gonzo adventure novel that shreds the conventional wisdom that pulp can be pigeonholed.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “Hossain daringly shows us that war isn’t just hell but absolutely insane.”

  — Library Journal

  “Saad Hossain has given us a hilarious and searing indictment of the project we euphemistically call ‘nation-building.’ With nods to Catch-22, Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau and the Golem myth, Escape from Baghdad! weaves fantasy, absurdity and adventure into a moving counter-narrative to the myth of the just war.”

  — NPR

  “Hossain’s perplexingly weird debut novel, Escape From Baghdad!, captures the pure insanity of the Iraq War. At the same time, it’s not a war novel. Instead, it’s a skillfully constructed literary IED that brings together the sharpest aspects from multiple genres. It’s a Tarantino-esque Heart of Darkness set in war-torn Iraq, filled with absurdism and dark humor, a mash-up of satirical Joseph Heller-style comedy and sci-fi fantasy with a gratuitous mixture of good old-fashioned ultra-violence.”

  — VICE

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Khan Rahman Family Clan: Main Players

  Chapter 1: A Full Account

  Chapter 2: The Wrath of Sikkim

  Chapter 3: Sleeping Beauty

  Chapter 4: The Mother of all Mothers

  Chapter 5: Bahadur Siyer Dargo Dargoman

  Chapter 6: Traitors

  Chapter 7: Last Day on Earth

  Chapter 8: Kaikobad

  Chapter 9: Underground Parties

  Chapter 10: Mastery of Light

  Chapter 11: Kaikobad

  Chapter 12: Wyrming Out

  Chapter 13: Surface Tension

  Chapter 14: The New Man in Town

  Chapter 15: Coffee with Barabas

  Chapter 16: Benedict Arnolds

  Chapter 17: Kaikobad

  Chapter 18: Enter the Squid

  Chapter 19: The Man with Two Tattoos

  Chapter 20: The Myrmidon Plan

  Chapter 21: Wages of Sin

  Chapter 22: Head in the Clouds

  Chapter 23: Broken Things

  Chapter 24: Kaikobad

  Chapter 25: Glandular Fever

  Chapter 26: Moffat’s Offer

  Chapter 27: Mata Hari

  Chapter 28: Brokers

  Chapter 29: Final Solutions

  Chapter 30: Kaikobad

  Chapter 31: The Boy Who Would be Dragon

  Chapter 32: Horus Rising

  Chapter 33: Kiss the Ring

  Chapter 34: Just a Poor Boy from a Poor Family

  Chapter 35: Kaikobad

  Chapter 36: Starvation Diet

  Chapter 37: Last Supper

  Chapter 38: Fire Horse

  Chapter 39: Last Ride

  Chapter 40: Celestial Court

  Chapter 41: Storm in an Urn

  Chapter 42: Of Apes and Men

  Chapter 43: Entourage

  Chapter 44: Pipe Dreams

  Chapter 45: Kaikobad

  Chapter 46: Gangs of Old Town

  Chapter 47: Kaikobad

  Chapter 48: Siege

  Chapter 49: The Six Million Tattoo Man

  Chapter 50: Requiem of the Great War

  Chapter 51: Return of the Dragon

  Chapter 52: The Dark World

  Glossary of Absolutely 100 Percent Factual Things Meticulously Researched by the Author During His Lunch Break

  Appendix A: “The Charnel Road” (Djinn Nursery Rhyme)

  Appendix B: Excerpt from the Register of Kings by His Excellency, the Grand Ifrit Mohandas, the Most Efficacious, Lord of the Frozen Waters and the Lands Therein, Holder of One Hundred Patents

  KHAN RAHMAN FAMILY CLAN: MAIN PLAYERS

  Kaikobad: Emissary, drunkard, polymath

  Indelbed: His son, a little boy of no particular importance

  Butloo: Their butler

  Grand-Uncle Sikkim: Patriarch of the Khan Rahmans

  Vulubir Khan Rahman, the Ambassador: Kaikobad’s cousin, one of the stalwarts of the Khan Rahmans

  Juny: Badass wife of the Ambassador, loan shark to the djinn

  Rais: Their son, a wastrel

  Uncle Pappo: An eminent doctor and Khan Rahman by marriage

  Barrister Asif: Well-respected legal counsel for the family

  Barabas: Patron djinn of the Khan Rahman clan*

  *For more on the djinn players, please see the glossary (page 399), which includes complete lists of djinn types and djinns relevant to this story; also see the appendices, which include the charming djinn nursery rhyme “The Charnel Road,” as well as an excerpt from the Register of Kings, by His Excellency, the Grand Ifrit Mohandas, the Most Efficacious, Lord of the Frozen Waters and the Lands Therein, Holder of One Hundred Patents.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Full Account

  The first persistent conviction of Indelbed’s life was that he was poor. This was not in itself a surprising observation, for he was surrounded by the poor in a country notorious for being poor. It would have been a statistical aberration had he not been poor. The problem was that Indelbed could see certain signs of incongruity in his family’s particular brand of poverty, minute and widely prevalent indicators that: a) they had fallen from grace in some way, and b) his father had been responsible for this calamitous disaster not too far back, for which many members of the extended family still shunned him.

  They lived in Wari, in a rambling building whose original outer shape was no longer visible. It had been covered by outgrowths: add-ons, lean-tos, television towers, dish cables, animal shelters, and other superstructures of such fantastical nature that no sane human could discern their purpose. Surrounding buildings had encroached on its airspace. The entire thing was a decrepit, jagged fire trap, one fatuous giant’s stomp away from collapse.

  For as long as Indelbed could remember, his family had assured him that Wari had at one point been a very fashionable area. Most of these people lived in the actual fashionable areas of Gulshan, Banani, or Baridhara. Some of them lived in the semi-fashionable area of Dhanmondi, which was still much better than Wari.

  The gate of the house was an immense work of ironmongery, gently settling to rust. It opened into what had once been a dr
iveway and then a garage, evidence that they—or some progenitor—had at some point owned more than one motor vehicle. The approach to the house must have been spacious too, matching the ambitious width of the gate, but steady encroachment by shops, habitations, and boundary walls had narrowed the street into a choke point only several feet wide, capable of allowing, at most, the egress of the pernicious three-wheeler baby taxis. No car could ever squeeze through the gate now. When Indelbed visited relatives in other parts of town and they deigned to drop him off, their cars had to park at the mouth of the alley and let him down on foot, right next to an open drain.

  This was humiliating enough, although in hindsight it was perhaps a blessing that his cousins did not have to approach the house and perhaps meet his father by accident. Indelbed’s dad was a perfect adornment to the house: an eccentric drunkard so incoherent with rage that he was often bereft of speech altogether. In moments of lucidity he expounded on the misfortunes plaguing his life, one of which was Indelbed, although to be fair most times he was classified only as a minor irritant.

  There seemed to be some implacable, invisible doom stalking Indelbed’s father. He had started life with all the trappings of wealth and success, and in a few short decades he had squandered everything. This too had a story. The house in Wari had once been the principal residence of some important ancestor. This gentleman, apparently anticipating the arrival of Indelbed’s father, had left his property entailed to the male line in a complicated legal maneuver, which meant that it could never be sold, leased, mortgaged, developed, or gambled; in short, it was absolutely useless to them in any form other than in its primary function, as a roof with four walls.

  Even though it was Wari, the house and grounds together constituted such a large square footage that they could easily have repaired their fortunes had they been able to sell it. Often his father lamented this very point. If only. Instead, they were stuck with the care of this humiliating pile, with walls salt-encrusted from damp, the roof seeping water, the floors a treacherous mosaic, and all the woodwork so rotten that even the termites had decamped. It was, however, his home, and in the solitary games of his imagination, each nook and crevice contained a world filled with adventure, each room a castle, each hallway a jungle trail.

  Indelbed’s father was one Dr. Kaikobad. In the bewildering tradition of his family, his father also had another and completely unrelated name, which was Dr. B. C. Khan Rahman. The custom was to have a Muslim name and then an eccentric one, and this accounted for Indelbed’s own current misfortune, for his father, completely hammered on the eve of his birth, had simply named him Indelbed, entirely forgetting to give him a proper name.

  Possibly the larger misfortune was that Indelbed’s mother had died in childbirth. Indelbed sometimes fantasized that she had instead taken the opportunity of childbirth to escape, perhaps by the back door. “Death by Indelbed.” This was the official cause written on the death certificate, scrawled in Dr. Kaikobad’s own hand.

  In any case, it wasn’t easy going around without a proper name. By the time the Doctor had sobered up, the birth certificate had already been issued. Kaikobad refused to rectify the error, apparently overcome with grief. He had subsequently proceeded to combat this grief with bottles of dubious vintage for the next decade.

  Thus this branch of the Khan Rahman family remained at two. The Doctor never married again, perhaps from fear of being saddled with a second Indelbed. Indelbed had tried to procure siblings through purchase, yet had failed, not the least because he had very little money. The two children he had managed to entice as far as the living room were scared off by the Doctor, whose charming habits included roaming the halls in his dressing gown with a full-length British cavalry saber in his hand.

  Indelbed’s great-grandfather had apparently killed a British cavalry officer in Calcutta during the Great Mutiny, taking both his head as well as his sword. The sword was still in good condition. The head had been pickled in a jar, and although it was still resident among the family heirlooms and given pride of place on a center table, it was not possible to verify now whether it was in fact a British cavalry officer’s skull or just an ordinary local makeweight.

  Indelbed, for this and many other reasons, did not receive visitors at home.

  His father had, once upon a time, been very well educated. The doctorate was real. He was a physician as well as a PhD in mathematics, with a near-genius IQ. However, the drink prevented him from practicing medicine, and higher mathematics had fled his mind upon the death of his wife. Indelbed’s uncles always said that the Doctor was living life in reverse. He had started out with everything and gradually lost it all. Whiskey had been helpful in this regard, and in line with his reversal of fortune. His first drink had apparently been a priceless single malt stolen from a cache hidden by his father, who had been a well-respected judge. He had meandered through Johnnie Walker Black Label, then Red Label, and finally just anything foreign. Of late, the Doctor was lucky to drink something that contained ethanol. Quantity, in fact, had replaced any sense of taste he had previously been burdened with.

  The Doctor had his first drink at twelve P.M., as a sort of hair of the dog. Lunch was a fluid affair depending on finances, but some kind of meal was served any time between one and three by the ancient butler. This gentleman claimed to be a butler (he pronounced the word but-loo) but had in fact been the old driver’s son, from that ancestral time when there had been cars in the driveway. Butloo had vague ideas about the dignity of his station, dimly remembered from back when his father had served in a more prosperous home.

  After serving lunch, Butloo would proudly bring out a silver tray with glass and water. The tray was one of those heirloom pieces that, inexplicably, the Doctor had never sold. Possibly because it was his drinks tray and made whatever slop he happened to be ingesting more palatable. More likely, it was because Butloo jealously guarded this prized possession, the sole remnant of a more romantic age and his badge of identity, without which his claims of being a gentleman’s gentleman would be scorned out of hand by the other domestics.

  Regardless of its undoubted psychological value, no one in the house knew how to polish silver (not that there was any money to buy polish). So the tray was tarnished black, yet still managed to gleam in a reproachful way whenever it was brought out.

  After the post-lunch drink, the Doctor often dozed off for a while or retired to his “study,” a roomful of rotting, barely legible books, the good ones having been sold off long ago. After his nap it was time for the evening drink, which coincided with the depressing dusk of Wari, which coincided with Butloo using dhup throughout the house to drive out mosquitoes. Dhup was a treatment of coconut fiber, which could be burned with coal to create a fume noxious to both humans and mosquitoes. The theory was that humans could withstand the poisoning longer than mosquitoes and thus emerge victorious.

  After this, the drinking resumed at a rapid pace and continued until the bottles were finished or the Doctor passed out. Dinner again was a fluid affair in the middle of the drinking, served anywhere between eight and eleven P.M., or not at all, depending on the vagaries of the kitchen.

  Butloo was accompanied by a half-mad, enormously fat maid, who served as both housekeeper-chambermaid and cook. She contrived to feed the four of them plus the guard at the gate with whatever pittance the Doctor gave her every week for grocery shopping. Food at the Khan Rahman household was a taboo subject. Each of the dishes had a grandiose name according to ancient family recipes—another clue to their august past. Indelbed had made discreet inquiries and found that none of his neighbors had any fancy ancestral recipes. What they did have in more abundance was actual food.

  Indelbed frequently thought that the availability of food ought actually to be the most important part of the whole dining experience, but to voice any traitorous thoughts toward anything of ancestral value was to go deeply against the family, many of whom already seemed to hate him. The recipes called for the flinging around of many
expensive ingredients, such as ghee, saffron, and gold leaf. In fact they also called for semi-expensive ingredients, such as meat and fish, which were also a problem. The cook had been forced to replace or drop so many parts from each vaunted recipe that the dishes no longer resembled anything edible at all.

  Take the ghono dal, for example: ancestrally, a mixture of lentils thick enough to stand up straight on a plate, adorned with all manner of fried onions, molten ghee, and candied ginger; the Doctor’s version resembled muddy water with three-day-old beans, which coated the rice with a tired slime. Thus they maintained a mythical bill of fare for dinner each night, where Butloo was obliged to recite a spurious number of items being served, which the Doctor would decline to eat before they got down to their rice and dal.

  Indelbed didn’t mind this so much, since he wasn’t a big eater anyway. Nor was he upset about his father’s refusal to buy him clothes, since he inevitably received all the hand-me-downs from the vast horde of second and third cousins of the clan. Taking pity on Indelbed was a sort of favorite pastime, and although it chafed a bit, he had to admit that most of the clothes were of good quality, on the higher end of the comparative scale of sartorial brilliance in his part of Wari. He was skinny so the clothes never fit right, and he had actually never had the experience of walking into a store to buy something just for himself, but he had seen it done plenty of times when following around various older cousins. Not being blessed with vanity, he couldn’t really see what the fuss was about.

  The one real thing he hated about his father was his obdurate views on schooling. At the age of six, Indelbed had realized that all the neighborhood kids were going someplace in neat blue-and-white uniforms. When charged, his father had no adequate response other than declaring that he was not about to throw away a parcel of money trying to educate a six-year-old.

  As time went by, however, Indelbed became increasingly anxious. Although all his neighborhood friends proclaimed him enormously lucky for somehow avoiding the traumatic experience of school, he was smart enough to realize that this was going to be a major problem.