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

He felt as a child must feel as it masters language, as the first words form and are spoken, as phrases come, then sentences. The gift of language, as it arrives, allows one not only to express thoughts but to form them, it makes the act of thinking possible, and so it was that the language which Dunia opened to him and in him allowed him forms of expression he had never before been able to rescue from the cloud of unknowing in which they had been hidden from his sight. He saw how easy it was to have influence over the natural world, to move objects, or change their direction, or accelerate them, or arrest their movement. If he blinked quickly three times the extraordinary communications systems of the jinn unfurled before his mind’s eye, as complex as the synaptic circuits of the human brain, as easy to operate as a megaphone. To travel almost instantly between anywhere and anywhere he had only to clap his hands together, and to bring objects into being — platters of food, weapons, motor vehicles, cigarettes — a simple twitch of the nose would suffice. He began to understand time in a new way, and here his human self, urgent, transient, watching the sand run out of the hourglass, was at odds with his new jinn self, which shrugged at time, which saw chronology as a disease of tiny minds. He understood the laws of transformation, both of the external world and of himself. He felt increasing within him the love of all shining things, the stars and precious metals and gemstones of all kinds. He began to understand the allure of harem pants. And he knew he was just at the borderland of the jinn reality, and that he might, as the days progressed, be shown marvels for the comprehension and articulation of which the language had not yet been granted him. “The universe has ten dimensions,” he said, gravely. Dunia grinned as a parent does at a child who is quick to learn. “That’s one way of looking at it,” she replied.

But for Dunia herself existence was narrowing. The jinn have multitrack minds and are the best of multitaskers but all of Dunia’s consciousnesses were fixed on a single goal: the annihilation of those who had destroyed her father. And it was on account of the death of her father that she succumbed to an extreme version of the antinomian heresy, according herself powers of grace and exculpation normally reserved for deities, and claiming that nothing she commanded her tribe to do in the war against the dark jinn could be considered wrong or immoral because she had given her blessings to those actions. Geronimo Manezes, whom she had appointed her lieutenant in the struggle, was increasingly obliged to be her cautionary spirit, the cricket on her shoulder questioning her headlong certainties, worrying about the absolutism that gripped her as, driven by unspeakable grief, she unleashed her immense force.

“Come on,” she ordered Mr. Geronimo. “The meeting is about to begin.”

There continues to be much dispute among scholars of the subject concerning the total size of the jinn (male) and jinnia (female) populations of Peristan. On one side of the debate are those eminences who still contend, in the first place, that the number of jinn and jinnia is a constant, and, in the second place, that the species is sterile and cannot reproduce, and, in the third place, that both males and females are blessed with immortality and cannot die. Across the debating chamber are those who, like ourselves, accept the information that has come down to us concerning the ability of jinnias like the Lightning Princess not only to reproduce but to do so in quantity, and also regarding the mortality (albeit only in extreme circumstances) of the jinn. The history of the War of the Worlds is itself our best evidence in this regard; as will be seen, as will very soon be seen. Consequently we cannot accept that the total numbers of jinnia and jinn are immutably fixed for all time.

The traditionalists insist that that number itself must be the number of magic, which is to say, one thousand and one; or one thousand and one male, one thousand and one female. That is how it should be, they reason, and therefore it must be so. We, for our part, accept that the population is not large, and that the numbers proposed by the traditionalists are probably close to the truth, but we are willing to admit that there is no way for us to know the precise jinn population at any given point in time, and so to fix the numbers arbitrarily based on some sort of theory of appropriateness is little more than mere superstition. And in any case, as well as the jinn, there were and probably still are lower forms of life in Fairyland, the most numerous of which were the devs, though there were also bhoots. In the War of the Worlds both bhoots and devs were pressed into service in the lower world and marched in the armies of the four Grand Ifrits.

As to the jiniri: the historic jinnia gathering convened by the orphaned Lightning Princess in the great hall of Qâf included almost all the female spirits that existed and so ranks as the largest such assembly on record. The horrifying news of the murder of the King of Qâf Mountain had spread rapidly throughout Fairyland, generating outrage and sympathy in almost every breast, and when the orphaned Lightning Princess sent word there were very few who failed to heed the call.

When Dunia addressed the gathering and called for an immediate and comprehensive sex boycott to punish the dark jinn for Shahpal’s murder and force them to end their improper campaign of conquest on the earth below, however, her audience’s sympathy for her loss was not sufficient to prevent many of the gathered jinnia from expressing their shocked disapproval. Her childhood friend Sila, the Princess of the Plain, articulated the general feeling of horror. “If we can’t have sex at least a dozen times a day, darling,” she cried, “we might as well be nuns. You always were the bookish one,” she added, “and quite frankly a leetle too much like humans, I love you darling but it’s true, so maybe you can do without sex more easily than the rest of us and just read a book instead, but we, darling, most of us, it’s what we do.”

There was a mutinous murmur of assent. A second princess, Laylah of the Night, brought up the old rumor that if jinn and jinnias stopped having sexual relations for any length of time then the entire jinn world would crumble and fall and all its inhabitants perish. “There’s no smoke without fire, and no fire without smoke,” she said, quoting the old jinn proverb, “so if the two are not conjoined, then the flame will surely die.” At which her cousin Vetala, Princess of the Flame, unleashed a frightening, and frightened, ululation. But Dunia would not be denied. “Zumurrud and his gang have lost their heads and betrayed all the rules of right behavior, not only between the jinn and human beings, but also between jinn and jinn,” she replied. “My father is already dead. Why do you imagine your kingdoms — your fathers, your husbands, your sons, and you yourselves — are safe?” At which the gathered queens and princesses, of the Plain, the Water, the Cloud, the Gardens, the Night, and the Flame, stopped complaining about feeling horny, and paid attention; and their entourages too.

However, as we know, the sexual rejection of the dark jinn by the entire female population of Fairyland, designed to bring Zumurrud the Great and his followers to heel, proved strangely counterproductive — strange, that is, to the jinnia ladies who enforced it, who abstained and refrained, even though it was as hard for them as for any addict, and there were withdrawal symptoms, irritability and trembling and insomnia, because the union of smoke and fire was an ontological requirement of both genders of the jinn. “If this goes on for long,” the desperate Sila told Dunia, “the whole of Fairyland will come crashing down about our ears.”