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

As the calendar marched towards the thousandth day of the time of the strangenesses, Mayor Rosa Fast took a bold decision and returned to her office with little Storm by her side. Also by her side was her newly appointed security chief, Jinendra Kapoor, conqueror and petrifier of the parasite-jinn.

Judging by what you did here, Mayor Fast told Jimmy, you’re at least partly made of the same stuff as them. But when you’re fighting monsters it’s good to have a few monsters on your side too.

I’m not coming into the office, he told her. I’ve been in enough offices in my life and I’m not coming into any more.

I’ll call you when I need you, she said, and pressed a small device into his hand. This works on a maximum-security frequency, she said. They haven’t penetrated it yet. It will ring, and vibrate, and these lights around the edge here will flash red.

When Commissioner Gordon wanted Batman, said Jimmy Kapoor, he sent up the Bat-Signal. This is like waiting for your burger order to be ready in Madison Square.

It’s what you’re getting, she said.

Why is the kid looking at me like that?

She wants to see if I can trust you.

And can you?

If I couldn’t, Mayor Fast said, your face would right now be covered in the sores of your treachery. So, I guess you’re okay. Let’s go to work.

The kidnapping of Hugo Casterbridge from the Heath near his Hampstead home was a new twist in the dark spiral of the war. The composer set off for his usual early morning walk accompanied by his Tibetan terrier Wolfgango (on the original score of The Marriage of Figaro Mozart’s name had been absurdly Italianized, to Casterbridge’s great and often-stated amusement). Afterwards members of the public remembered seeing Casterbridge waving his stick at the traffic on East Heath Road as he crossed over onto the Heath. He was last observed walking northeast along Lime Avenue towards the Bird Sanctuary Pond. Later that morning Wolfgango was found barking unstoppably at the sky and guarding the abandoned knobkerry as if it were a fallen warrior’s sword. Of Hugo Casterbridge, however, there was — briefly — no sign.

It is at this point, near the end of our account of the conflict, that we are obliged to leave London as abruptly as Casterbridge had left it, and return to Lucena, in Spain, where everything began, where the jinnia Dunia had once presented herself at the door of the Andalusian philosopher with whose mind she had fallen in love, and where she bore Ibn Rushd the children in whose descendants she had now awakened their sleeping jinn natures, to help her in her fight. Lucena at this time retained much of its old-world charm, though in the old Jewish quarter of Santiago no trace remained of Ibn Rushd’s residence. The Jewish necropolis had survived, as had the castle and the old Medinaceli palace, but it is to a less folkloristic part of town that we must turn our gaze. In the centuries that had passed since the time of Ibn Rushd the entrepreneurs of Lucena had gone into the furniture business with considerable enthusiasm, so that it sometimes seemed that the town was entirely composed of factories making things to sit on, lie on, or put your clothes away in, and outside one such factory its owners, a pair of brothers named Huertas, had built the biggest chair in the world, some eighty-five feet tall; and it was on this chair that the Grand Ifrit Zabardast seated himself calmly, cold as a reptile, a giant not quite as big as his erstwhile friend Zumurrud the Great, with the helpless figure of Hugo Casterbridge held in one hand, irresistibly reminding the older cinemagoers in the gathering crowd of Fay Wray wriggling in the mighty grasp of Kong.

And it was from this chair that he issued the following challenge to his female adversary: Aasmaan Peri, Queen Skyfairy of Mount Qâf, or whatever you call yourself now, you, Dunia of this debased lower world, you who show yourself to be more in love with this pathetic globe, and your own half-breed rodents within it, than with your own kind, O trivial daughter of a far greater father, watch me now. I killed your father. Now I will eat your children.

He asked Hugo Casterbridge if he had any last words. The composer replied, It’s a terrible thing when one speaks metaphorically and the metaphor turns into a literal truth. When I said that the gods men invented had arisen to destroy them, I was being largely figurative. It is unexpected, and almost gratifying, to discover I was being more accurate than I thought.

I am not a god, said Zabardast the Sorcerer. You can’t imagine God. You can barely imagine me, but I am the one who is going to eat you alive.

Certainly I could not have imagined a cannibal god, said Casterbridge. That is … disappointing.

Enough, said Zabardast, opening his great mouth wide, and swallowing Casterbridge’s head in a single gulp. And after that the arms, the legs, the torso. The crowd that had gathered screamed and ran away.

Now Zabardast for once raised his voice and roared. Where are you? he bellowed though his mouth was full, and bits of Casterbridge fell from his lips as he spoke. Dunia, where are you hiding? Don’t you care that I just ate your son?

She was silent, and nowhere to be found.

Then something very unexpected happened. Zabardast the Sorcerer put his hands to his ears and began to shriek uncontrollably. The fleeing crowd stopped and turned to look. Nobody could hear anything, though the dogs of Lucena began to bark agitatedly. On the giant chair the Grand Ifrit writhed in agony and cried out as if a hot arrow were piercing his eardrums and scalding through his brain, and all of a sudden he lost control of his human shape, exploded into a fireball, burned the great chair of Lucena to the ground, and then his fire went out, and he was gone.

Now there was a boiling in the heavens and a wormhole opened and Dunia and Omar the Ayyar descended from the skies.

When I worked out how the poison spell worked, how to use the dark arts and compress the murderous occult formulae, how to sharpen its barbs and spear it to its goal, Dunia murmured to Omar, it was too late to save my father. But it was in time to kill his murderer and avenge his death.

It was one thing to seize tracts of the earth and declare a kingdom. It was another thing entirely to rule it. The dark jinn, fractious, inattentive, vain and cruel as they were, feared but also hated, found in a short time — even before the thousandth day arrived — that their vision of colonizing the earth and enslaving its peoples was a half-baked loaf, which they possessed neither the efficiency nor the culinary skill to cook properly. The only gift of power they possessed was the gift of force. It wasn’t enough.

Even in those violent and amoral times, no tyranny was ever absolute; no resistance was ever absolutely crushed. And now that three of the four Grand Ifrits were gone, the grand project began to come apart at speed.

We say again: more than one thousand years have passed since these events occurred, so many of the details of the collapse of the imperial project of the dark jinn are lost, or so inexact that it would be inappropriate to include them here. We can assert with some degree of confidence that the recovery was swift, indicating both the resilience of human society and the shallowness of the control of the jinn over their “conquests.” Some scholars compare this period to the later stages of the rule of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in India. The last of the six Grand Mughals did indeed extend the empire’s rule all the way to the southernmost tip of India, but the conquest was a sort of illusion, because as his armies returned to his northern capital, so the “conquered” lands of the south reasserted their independence. Whether or not this analogy is accepted by all, it is certainly the case that after the fall of Shining Ruby, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Zabardast the Sorcerer, their enchantments failed all over the world, men and women returned to their senses, order and civility were everywhere restored, economies began to function, crops to be harvested, factory wheels to turn. There were jobs again and money regained its value.