Djinn City Read online

  Fired up somewhat by curiosity—imagining for a moment that he was the secret prince to some underground kingdom—he poked around his father’s books. They were a sorry lot, most of them water damaged. The drawers held plenty of notebooks, handwritten both in English and Bangla, and even some in Arabic script, which was probably Urdu. He knew that some of the older members of the family spoke Urdu, but only behind closed doors, because after the war it had become unfashionable to do so.

  He tried to read a few of them, but he didn’t know most of the words, and the slanted handwriting confused him. There were diagrams of the human body and various medical notations, including pages and pages of recurring letters: ATCG. Then there were solid pages of math, numbers and letters jumbled together in bewildering formulas. Indelbed couldn’t be sure if this was genuine work the Doctor had been doing or simply the gibberish of a deranged mind. These notebooks covered a number of fairly recent years, the cheap paper undamaged yet by age, the handwriting steadily deteriorating as the drink wrecked the Doctor’s nerves. He resolved to ask Butloo about it tomorrow. The man didn’t know how to read, but he knew the mind of the Doctor, and if there was some horrible secret, he was sure to have a clue. Feeling slightly let down, he left his sleeping father and went upstairs to his room, only to find that Rais had appropriated his bed and was now lounging on it—with his shoes on, no less—smoking cigarettes and yapping away on his cell.

  “I’m going to be a while, buddy,” Rais said, looking up. “You better grab the guest room.”

  “That’s just great.”

  “Sorry, dude.” Rais at least had the grace to look remorseful. “Girl I’ve been seeing here. Trying to dump her gently. I hate this part. This might be a long night. Don’t want to keep you up.”

  Indelbed grabbed his stuff from the bathroom and stalked out, glaring at his cousin. He wasn’t sure what “this part” or “dump” meant, but he was sure the girl was better off. The guest rooms were not habitable, of course, having neither bedding nor, for that matter, working beds. Plus they were full of mosquitoes, since the windows did not close properly, and if anyone thought mosquitoes were not a big deal, they’d never spent all night fending off bloodsuckers the size of sparrows.

  He sat at the foot of his bed and waited, arms crossed.

  “Sorry,” Rais said, finally hanging up after twenty minutes. He didn’t look the least bit sorry. “You talk to your father?”

  “He was asleep,” Indelbed said. Fat good you were, though.

  “Find out anything mysterious? I had my ear to the door, back at the party. Heard pretty much everything GU Sikkim said. His voice really carries.”

  “I’ll be sure to warn him next time,” Indelbed said.

  “So you actually got a tattoo or what?” Rais asked. “Why’d they keep hassling you about it?”

  Indelbed shrugged.

  “I’ve always wanted one,” Rais said. “My mom would kill me, though. Plus they hurt a lot I bet.”

  Indelbed wordlessly lifted his shirt and showed the mark on his back.

  “Whoa! You do have one! It looks a bit like a snake swallowing its tail,” Rais said. “If you squint. Pretty cool.”

  That made him feel better. He hadn’t really ever felt cool before. Rais had a way of making everything seem easy.

  “I was going to ask Father about it, but he hasn’t even woken up yet,” Indelbed said.

  “It’s the drink,” Rais said knowledgeably.

  “Rais bhai,” Indelbed ventured, “what is a mongoloid?”

  “It’s like a baby with an extra chromosome,” Rais said. He looked at Indelbed. “I don’t think you’re one; they always have stretched-out heads.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Their brains don’t work properly. Yours is fine. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Thanks. And what’s ‘sterile’?”

  “You know how kids are made, right?” Rais made a halfhearted poking gesture with his hands.

  Indelbed shrugged. He didn’t really, but it didn’t seem like particularly secret knowledge. After all, the world was full of kids.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “GU Sikkim called me mongoloid and sterile.”

  “I’m sure that can’t be right,” Rais said. He frowned. “You look perfectly normal to me.”

  “Well, you’re not studying to be a doctor anymore, are you?”

  “History major for now. I did the premed stuff, but I definitely don’t want to be a doctor.”

  “You probably wouldn’t know anything about it then,” Indelbed said. He sniffed.

  “No point sitting around,” Rais said, giving him a pat on the head. “Let’s look for clues to this awful secret.”

  His enthusiasm was genuine and infectious, shaking Indelbed out of despondency, and soon they were rifling through the Doctor’s private notebooks, expounding outlandish theories. Rais seemed to have no compunction about going through the Doctor’s private stuff.

  “It’s about DNA, I think,” he said finally, after poring through the pages. “See the squiggly lines? Looks like chromosomes to me.”

  “Looks boring to me,” Indelbed said.

  “Maybe he was charting the family tree or something,” Rais said. “Hey, how come there’s none of your mother’s stuff around? I don’t even know what she looked like.”

  “I don’t either,” Indelbed said, surprised. He hardly ever thought of her, and his father never spoke of her, other than reassuring him that she was dead. He realized that there was not a single picture or reference to his mother in the house. No favored artifact. No portrait. No sepia photograph of the happy couple. Not even an article of clothing. Had she been some kind of hideous monster?

  “I bet that’s it, she’s a monster,” Rais said, showing colossal insensitivity, Indelbed thought. He had always hoped that his mother was secretly alive and would one day come to reclaim him. He wasn’t quite ready to let go of that yet.

  They asked Butloo about it, but that worthy creature clamped his lips shut and said that Dr. Sahib had forbidden him to ever speak of her. The other staff had all joined after her demise and knew nothing except farfetched rumors. They claimed she had been a memsahib, a witch, a rare beauty possessed by djinn.

  “It’s got to be something weird about your mother,” Rais said.

  “Maybe she was mad?” The village of the insane always weighed on Indelbed’s mind. “That’s it, and I’m probably going to go mad too, which is why he never bothered sending me to school.” He tried to take his fate philosophically, but the little quaver in the end gave him away.

  “It’s like Jane Eyre; maybe your mother went mad, and she’s locked up somewhere in the house!” Rais said.

  Indelbed shot him a dirty look, but then another thought took hold: “You don’t think she got sent to the village, in secret?”

  Rais leaned back, wondering for a moment, and then shook it off as impossible. “Let’s just go to sleep. We can look some more in the morning, and my dad’ll be here.”

  When the Ambassador finally arrived the next afternoon, it was past four o’clock and Indelbed was quite sick with worry. The problem was that the Doctor wasn’t actually showing any signs of distress. His temperature was okay: he wasn’t sweating or shivering, and he hadn’t even vomited once. Indelbed, the veteran of two separate cases of alcohol poisoning, and numerous cases of very bad binge-drinking hangovers, just could not see how this was drink related.

  “What’s more,” Rais said, after they had told the whole affair to the Ambassador, “the bottle is only half empty. Surely Uncle wasn’t a half-bottle man…”

  “No, it would definitely take more than half a bottle to put him down,” the Ambassador said ruefully. “Still, let’s call a doctor, eh?”

  The neighborhood doctor, by dint of Butloo’s penchant for gossip, had already heard about the peculiar ailment of his colleague and had been sitting with his medical bag on his lap for the past three hours, waiting for the summons. E
verything that happened in the big house was a source of constant entertainment to the neighborhood, and he expected to live off this incident for many weeks.

  To his chagrin, he could reach no diagnosis. After checking all the vital signs, the best he could offer was a saline drip and plenty of rest.

  “There’s nothing wrong with Dr. Kaikobad,” the physician said. “He just seems to be asleep. Probably he’ll wake up. Perhaps he was very tired?”

  The Ambassador, not the least bit impressed, ushered him out with great haughtiness. They ate a take-out dinner in silence, and then Indelbed was quite relieved when the Ambassador announced that he and Rais would be staying over.

  “If he doesn’t get up by morning, boy, we’ll have to have a rethink,” the Ambassador said.

  Indelbed desperately wanted to ask what this was about, but he didn’t dare.

  “It’s probably the madness coming on,” Rais said. For an adult, even a young one, he had a peculiarly ineffective method of cheering people up.

  Indelbed spent the night next to his father, trying desperately to stay awake. In the dark his father’s still form seemed monstrous. When he finally succumbed, he dreamed of ghosts with doglike faces hounding him. Several times in the dark he imagined his father reaching for him. At dawn, the sound of the muezzin woke him, and he wandered outside, bleary-eyed. He felt a miasma of unknown dread pressing down on him. The familiar objects in the house failed to comfort him. Everywhere he saw evidence of insanity and loss, years of neglect. For the first time he contemplated the awful certainty that he might soon become an orphan. He would have to leave the house. They’d probably send him to the village (where perhaps he’d be reunited with his supposedly dead mother).

  In the morning, the Ambassador and Rais rejoined him, only to learn that nothing had changed with respect to his father. The Doctor remained asleep and undisturbed. If anything he seemed even more restful than before; yet there was no movement of any sort, no response to shakes, or slaps, or pinches, or any other minor physical torture.

  The Ambassador was a methodical, sound thinking man and, in the absence of his wife, well able to handle most situations. He made some phone calls, and within the hour two more doctors came, one a relative by marriage to the Khan Rahmans and the other a promising youngster cousin of thirty years. Both of them were highly placed in the Apollo Hospital, which was the medical facility endorsed by the clan elders. Neither of them looked pleased to be out here, but they had answered the summons, and extremely promptly. Not for the first time, Indelbed marveled at the push and pull of the extended family. He had seen it in action before, but never for his benefit.

  “Well?” the Ambassador asked, after they had consulted.

  “I can’t say, Vulu,” Dr. Pappo, the uncle by marriage, said. He was a heart specialist at Apollo, a recognized expert in cardiac distress. “There is nothing wrong with him. I’ve told him many times about the drinking, but that would lead to stroke or liver failure. Nothing like this. He seems to be asleep. I can admit him if you’d like, but then what? He doesn’t even need a respirator or anything.”

  The junior doctor had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

  “A man doesn’t sleep for two days if there’s nothing wrong with him,” the Ambassador pointed out.

  “For god’s sake, he doesn’t even have a fever,” Dr. Pappo said. “It’s probably the other thing…”

  “Ahem, what?”

  “You know,” Dr. Pappo said. He shrugged apologetically. “We’ve all heard the rumors, eh?”

  What rumors? What rumors? Indelbed wanted to shout. Does everyone know except for me?

  “Thanks very much,” the Ambassador said, ushering the doctors out. “And let’s keep this quiet, eh, Pappo?”

  They went through the study again with the Ambassador, looking for clues. But of course there was nothing to be found, Rais and Indelbed having already ransacked the place. The Ambassador examined the floor and discovered something, however, bending down and tasting it with one finger.

  “Salt,” he said. “Circles of salt everywhere.”

  Gathering up some courage, Indelbed confronted his uncle. “Can you please tell me what’s going on? So what if there’s salt on the floor? He’s a drunkard. He does weird things all the time.”

  “You see, Indelbed, your father was a bit of an important man in some ways,” the Ambassador said, clearly uncomfortable. “I mean, you don’t want to know, we’ve always discouraged him—well, there was no talking to him, even before the drink. Look, let’s just focus on waking him up, and then we can let him explain everything.”

  “Didn’t Father tell you anything else when you called him?” Indelbed asked. “I know he said something. Your face changed.”

  “Hmm, he was agitated, said you were under some kind of threat,” the Ambassador said. “Difficult to tell with Kaiko, how coherently he was thinking. He said he was taking some steps to protect you.”

  Threat? Me? Indelbed was flabbergasted. He pictured the police coming after him, or perhaps the black-sunglass’d RAB guys—the rapid action battalion, a sort of SWAT team known for killing criminals in cross fires—with their big guns. He couldn’t imagine what he had done. Did they come after you for not going to school?

  “Er, neither of you geniuses checked his cell phone,” Rais said, holding up the phone in question.

  “What?”

  “Cell phone,” Rais said. “Uncle Kaiko made like ten calls to this one guy, before he croaked.”

  Rais was already hitting the redial. After some rings, a man answered. Indelbed heard his voice come across the line quite clearly: “Hello, Kaikobad?”

  “It’s his nephew,” Rais said.

  “Give it here, son.”

  “Where is Kaikobad?”

  “Hello, this is the Ambassador speaking.”

  “Who?”

  “Sorry, I mean this is Vulubir Khan Rahman,” the Ambassador said. “I’m Kaikobad’s cousin. You might have seen me on television; I’m on all the talk shows…”

  “Er, no.”

  “Sorry, hmm, this is a bit awkward. Are you a bootlegger of some sort?”

  “Bootlegger?”

  “Well, Kaikobad called you a number of times two nights ago, and then he went to sleep.”

  “Sounds perfectly normal.”

  “Well, he hasn’t woken up since.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “So the thing is, do you know anything about this? Might I ask your name?” Not for nothing was the Ambassador considered the politest man in the Foreign Service.

  “Certainly,” the man said with a flourish that somehow carried through the phone. “I am Siyer Dargo Dargoman, emissary, consultant of the occult, and barrister of contract law in the Celestial Court. You must have heard of me—I argued the case for the inheritance of Harun al-Rashid’s fifth concubine’s enchanted bedsheet.”

  “Sorry, haven’t, must have missed it…”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you human, then?”

  “Human? I am Afghani!”

  Indelbed looked at his cousin, stricken. What else could the man be but human? The Ambassador pressed on: “Well, could you help us?”

  “Yes, of course, Kaikobad has already employed me in this matter,” Siyer said. “I am more than three-quarters of the way to Dhaka. You say he’s in some sort of coma?”

  “Yes, something like that.”

  “That could be a problem.” Siyer sounded pissed off. “I normally take an advance, see, but as it was Kaikobad, I agreed to fly out at my own cost and everything…”

  “Well, don’t worry, man, I’m sure we can scrape together your lawyer’s fees,” the Ambassador said in his haughty way.

  “Really?” Siyer said. “If Kaikobad is asleep, then you can’t use his dignatas. Have you got emeralds? Or some of Solomon’s artifacts?”

  “What? What the hell is dignatas?”

  “Look, never mind, I’ve already left. I’ll reach out tomorrow,” Siyer
said. “You bunch of jokers better figure out how to pay me.”

  The Ambassador put the phone down, highly discomfited.

  “Well?” Rais asked.

  “It’s an Afghan lawyer whom Kaikobad hired,” the Ambassador said. “He’s coming here tomorrow. He wants to be paid. Not in money. In some dignatas and jewels and Solomons.”

  “What?”

  “I think, Rais, that we better call your mother.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Mother of All Mothers

  Aunty Juny took one look at Indelbed and sniffed. Then she grabbed him by the ear and marched him to the bathroom, where she made him strip and get into the shower. From the other side of the curtain, she spent a mortifying half hour taking him step by step through the bathing process. It was quite possibly the worst day of Indelbed’s life. Nearly dead from embarrassment, he came out to see her going through his closet with a look of utter disgust.

  “Is this your actual wardrobe?” she asked.

  Indelbed nodded. She unerringly spotted his best clothes and made him put them on, and then she made him sit on his bed and began to comb his hair with tight, rough strokes.

  “So you have never set foot in a school?”

  “No. Father teaches me at home.”

  “Wretched man. Can you read and write?”

  “Yes.” He hoped she wouldn’t make him take a test.

  “And these are your clothes? Hand-me-downs from the family I presume?”

  “Butloo gets the tailors to fix them when he can.”

  “I see.”

  “They’re good clothes,” Indelbed said. “The buttons never come off, and there are no holes in them either.”

  “This Butloo, is he in charge of your food?”

  “The cook and Butloo.”

  “And what do you eat every day?”

  “Rice and dal.”

  Aunty Juny frowned. “Milk? Eggs?”

  “Sure, every day,” Indelbed said. In reality it was whenever Butloo could scrounge some up, which wasn’t that often. He suspected the man used his own wages to buy them, but he wasn’t sure.