Salman Rushdie - Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Dunia was an exception among the jinnia. She came down to earth and fell in love, so deeply that she would not allow her beloved to rest in peace even after eight and a half centuries and more. To fall in love a creature must possess a heart, and whatever we may mean by a soul, and certainly such a creature must possess the group of traits we humans call character. But the jinn, or most of them, are — as you’d expect of beings made of fire and smoke — heartless, soulless, and above mere character, or perhaps beyond it. They are essences: good, bad, sweet, naughty, tyrannical, demure, powerful, whimsical, devious, grand. Dunia the lover of Ibn Rushd must have lived a long time among human beings, in disguise, clearly, to absorb the idea of character and begin to show signs of it. One might say that she caught character from the human race the way children catch chicken pox or mumps. After that she began to love love itself, to love her capacity for love, to love the selflessness of love, the sacrifice, the eroticism, the glee. She began to love her beloved in her and she in him, but beyond that she started loving the human race for its ability to love, and then for its other emotions too; she loved men and women because they could fear, and rage, and cower, and exult. If she could have given up being a jinnia she might even have chosen to become human, but her nature was what it was and she could not deny it. After Ibn Rushd left her and made her, yes, sad, she pined, and grieved, and was shocked by her deepening humanity. And then one day before the slits in the world closed she left. But not even hundreds of years in her palace in the jinn world, not even the endless promiscuity that is the everyday norm of life in Fairyland, could cure her; and so when the slits broke open she returned to renew her bonds. Her beloved asked her from beyond the grave to reunite their scattered family and help it fight the coming world cataclysm. Yes, she would do it, she said, and sped off on her mission.

Unfortunately, she was not the only citizen of the jinn world who had reentered the human levels, and not all of them had good deeds in mind.

Natraj Hero naaching down the avenue like dancing god Lord Shiva, lord of dance, bringing world into being as he prance. Natraj young&beautiful, scorns old dudes, laughs at all the painfoot-limpy-with-heavy/bhaari-body-types. Girls, but, don’t give him a second look. Not knowing his superpowers, Creator and Destroyer of Universe, they are ignoring. That’s okay: theek thaak. He is in disguise. Just now he is being tax accountant Jinendra going for grocery to Subzi Mandi store, Jackson Heights, Quveens. Jinendra Kapoor a.k.a. Brown Clark Cunt. Wait till he rips off his outer garment yaar. Then they’ll dekho him all right, they’ll be checking him proper. Until dat time, hinting only at secret mightiness, he is prancing Thirty-Seventh Avenue like king from Desh, the old country, shahenshah or maharana or wat. Natraj dance to the bulbul tune. He is like dis only. He is Dil-ka-Shehzada. A.k.a. Jack of Hearts.

Natraj Hero did not exist. He was the fictional alter ego of a young would-be graphic novelist, Jimmy Kapoor. Natraj’s superpower was dancing. When he “ripped off his outer garment” his two arms turned into four, he had four faces too, front, back and sides, and a third eye in the middle of his forehead, and when he began to dance the bhangra or bust out his best disco moves — he was from Queens, after all — he was able literally to shape reality, to create or destroy. He could make a tree grow in the street or make himself a Mercedes convertible or feed the hungry, but he could also knock down houses and blow bad guys to bits. It was a mystery to Jimmy why Natraj hadn’t leapt up into the divine pantheon with Sandman and Watchmen and the Dark Knight and Tank Girl and the Punisher and the Invisibles and Dredd and all the other Marvel, Titan and DC greats. Sadly, Natraj had remained obstinately earthbound, and tax accountancy in Jimmy’s cousin’s practice on Roosevelt Avenue was beginning, at his low points, to feel like the young artist’s fate.

He had begun to post episodes from the career of Natraj Hero online but the big boys had notably failed to call. Then, one hot night — one hundred and one nights after the storm, though he hadn’t worked that out — up there in his third-floor bedroom with a red moon shining through his window, he woke up with a start of terror. There was somebody in the room. Somebody … big. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness he observed that the far wall of his bedroom had disappeared completely and been replaced by a swirl of black smoke at whose heart was what looked like a black tunnel leading into the depths of the unknown. It was hard to see the tunnel clearly because a gigantic many-headed multi-limbed individual was in the way, trying to fold those limbs into the cramped space of Jimmy’s room, looking like it — he — was about to knock down the other bedroom walls, and complaining loudly.

The individual did not look as if he — it — was made of flesh and blood. It — he — looked drawn, illustrated, and Jimmy Kapoor recognized, with a shock, his own graphic style, Frank Milleresque (he hoped), sub-Stan-Lee-ite (he conceded), post-Lichtensteinian (this when in the company of snobs, himself included). “You’ve come to life?” he asked, being incapable at that moment of depth or wit. Natraj Hero’s voice, when he — it — spoke, sounded familiar, a voice he’d heard somewhere before, a snarling multi-mouthed echo-chamber voice of divine authority, ruthlessness and wrath, the very antithesis of Jimmy’s own voice, a poor thing filled with fears, insecurities and uncertainty. The correct response to this voice was to quail before it. Jimmy Kapoor made the correct response.

Fuck yaar no space in here sala having to make self smaller, chhota like fucking ant, or I will take roof off your pathetic ghar. Okay, better. See me? Check me? One two three four arm, four three two one face, third eye looking straight into your piddling soul. No, no, please to excuse, respect must be shown, because you are my creator, isn’t it? HA HA HA HA HA. As if great Natraj was dreamed up by tax accountant in Quveens and hasn’t been around and dancing since Start of Time. Since, to be precise, I personally have danced Time and Space into being. HA HA HA HA HA. You think you have summoned me maybe. You think you are a wizard maybe. HA HA HA HA HA. Or you think it’s a dream? No, baba. You just woke the fuck up. Also me. Returning after absence of eight-nine hundred years, featuring many long snoozes.

Jimmy Kapoor shook with terror. “How didid you get hehere?” he stammered. “Ininto my bebedrooroom?” You have seen Ghostbusters fillum? responded Natraj Hero. This is like that only. That was it, Jimmy understood. It was one of his favorite films, and Natraj’s voice was like the voice of the Sumerian destruction-god, Gozer the Gozerian, speaking through the lips of Sigourney Weaver. Gozer with kind of an Indian accent. Portaal is busted open. Border between what imagineers are imagining and what imaginees are desiring is leaky now like Mexico-USA, and we-all, who before were caged in Phantom Zone, can go fast now through wormholes and land up here like General Zod with superpowers. So many wanting to come. Soon we will be taking over. Hundred and one percent. Forget about it.