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

I thought you’d like it, said the little girl with the jinnia’s eyes, puzzled. I listened to your heart and heard your sorrow at what you had left behind and I thought this would be a welcome gift.

Take it away, he said, choking on his tears.

Bombay vanished and Peristan appeared, or rather Mount Qâf the circular mountain that encloses the fairy world. He was in a white marble courtyard of the curved palace of the Lightning Princess, its red stone walls and marble cupolas around and above, its soft tapestries rippled by a breeze, and the curtain of sheet lightning that guarded it hanging like the aurora in the sky. He did not want to be here. Anger replaced grief in him. Until a few hundred days ago, he reminded himself, he had had no interest whatsoever in the supranormal or fabulous. Chimeras or angels, heaven or hell, metamorphoses or transfigurations, a pox on them all, he had always thought. Solid ground beneath his feet, dirt under his fingernails, the husbandry of growing things, bulbs and roots, seeds and shoots, this had been his world. Then all of a sudden, levitation, the arrival of an absurd universe, strangenesses, cataclysm. And just as mysteriously as he rose, so he had descended, and all he wanted now was to resume. He didn’t want to know what it meant. He wanted not to be a part of the place, the thing, he didn’t have the word for it, in which all that existed, he wanted to re-create the real world around himself, even if the real world was an illusion and this continuum of the irrational was the truth, he wanted the fiction of the real back. To walk, jog, run and jump, to dig and grow. To be earth’s creature and not, like some devil, a creature of the powers of the air. That was his only desire. Yet here was Fairyland. And a goddess of smoke before him who was obviously not his dead wife exhumed from the grave by his memory of her. Comprehension failed him. He had no more tears to cry.

Why have you brought me here, he asked. Couldn’t you have just left me alone.

She dissolved into a whirl of white with a shining light at its heart. Then she took shape again, no longer skinny Dunia the love of Ibn Rushd but Aasmaan Peri, Skyfairy, splendid with lightning crackling like a victor’s wreath at her brow, adorned with jewels and gold and clad in wisps of smoke with a gaggle of handmaidens behind her in half-moon formation, awaiting her command. Don’t ask a jinnia princess for reasons, she said, her turn to be angry now, maybe I brought you here to be my slave, to pour my wine or oil my feet, or perhaps even, if I so please, you could be my lunch, fricasseed on a platter with a little wilted kale, these ladies will cook you if I decide to crook my little finger against you, do not imagine they won’t. You fail to praise a princess’s beauty and then ask her for reasons! Reasons are human follies. We have only pleasures and what we will.

Return me to my ordinary life, he said. I’m not a dreamer and am out of place in castles in the air. I have a gardening business to run.

Because you are my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, give or take a great or two, she said, I forgive you. But, in the first place, mind your manners, especially if my father enters the room, he may be less generous than I. And in the second place, stop being a fool. Your ordinary life no longer exists.

What did you say? I’m your what?

She had so much to teach him. He didn’t even know how lucky he was. She was Skyfairy the Beautiful and could have had anyone in the Two Worlds and she had chosen him because his face was the echo of a great man she once loved. He didn’t understand that he was standing on Mount Qâf as if it was the most normal thing in the world, even though just setting foot in Peristan would drive many mortal men out of their minds. He didn’t know himself, the great jinni spirit he bore in his blood, because of her. He should be thanking her for this gift and instead he looked disgusted.

How old are you, anyway? he asked.

Be careful, she said, or I will send a thunderbolt to melt your heart so that it runs down your body inside your clothes and fills your foolish human shoes with goo.

She snapped her fingers and Father Jerry materialized beside her, and scolded Geronimo Manezes as he always did. I told you so, he wagged a finger at Mr. Geronimo. You heard this from me first, and you wouldn’t believe it. The Duniazát, the brood of Averroës. Turns out I was spot-on. What do you have to say to me now?

You’re not real, said Mr. Geronimo. Go away.

I was thinking more along the lines of an apology, but never mind, said Father Jerry, and vanished in a puff of smoke.

The seals between the Two Worlds are broken and the dark jinn ride, she said. Your world is in danger and because my children are everywhere I am protecting it. I’m bringing them together, and together we will fight back.

I’m not a fighter, he told her. I’m not a hero. I’m a gardener.

That is a pity, she said, a little scornfully, because right now, as it happens, heroes are what we need.

It was their first lovers’ quarrel, and who knows where it might have ended up, for it destroyed the last vestiges of the illusions which had brought them together, she was no longer the avatar of his lost wife and he was plainly an inadequate substitute for the great Aristotelian, the father of her clan. She was smoke made flesh and he was a disintegrating clod of earth. Maybe she would have dismissed him then and there; but then calamity came to Mount Qâf too, and a new phase of the War of the Worlds began.

A cry went up in a distant chamber, and then came a relay of louder and louder cries, the shrieks being passed from mouth to mouth like dark kisses, until the running figure of the royal household’s chief spy, Omar the Ayyar, could be seen approaching at speed along the curved length of the great court where Mr. Geronimo stood with the jinnia princess, to tell her, in a voice bursting with horror, that her father, the fairy emperor, mighty Shahpal the son of Shahrukh, had been poisoned. He was the Simurgh King, and the holy bird of Qâf, the Simurgh, stood guard over him on his bedpost, sunk in its own enigmatic form of sadness; and after a reign lasting many thousands of years Shahpal found himself approaching lands to which few of the jinn ever traveled, lands ruled over by an even mightier king than himself, who stood waiting for the mountain emperor at the gates of his own twin kingdoms, with two giant four-eyed dogs at his side: Yama, the lord of death, the guardian of heaven and hell.

When he fell it was as if the mountain itself had fallen, and, in fact, cracks were reported to have appeared in the perfect circle of Qâf, trees split down the middle, birds fell from the sky, the lowest devs on the lowest slopes felt the tremors, and even his most disloyal subjects were shaken, even the devs most ready to be seduced by the blandishments of the dark jinn, the Ifrits, the immediate prime suspects in the matter of his poisoning, because the question on everyone’s lips was, how can a king of the jinn be poisoned, the jinn are creatures of smokeless fire, and how do you poison a fire, are there occult extinguishers of some kind that can be fed to a jinni, anti-inflammatory agents created by the black arts that will kill him, or magic spells that suck the air out of his immediate vicinity so that the fire cannot burn, everyone was clutching at straws as he lay dying, because all explanations sounded absurd, but good answers were nowhere to be had. There are no doctors among the jinn because sickness is unknown to them and deaths are extremely rare. Only a jinni can kill a jinni is a truism among the jinn and so when King Shahpal clutched at himself and cried Poison everyone’s first thought was that there had to be a traitor in their midst.