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

We know — or we “know,” because we cannot be certain if the story is true — that this happy state of affairs could not have come to pass were it not for the great sacrifice of Dunia the Lightning Queen, at the very end of the story here retold. When she came to her senses after her duel with Zumurrud she knew that there were two things she must do. She took the blue bottle from Jimmy Kapoor. Such bottles have a magic of their own, she said. You can hide them, but they choose when to reappear. This time, this bottle must not appear again anywhere on earth, so I will hide it in an impossible place. And she went away for what remained of the night and when she returned she said only, It is done. Since that day a thousand years have passed and the bottle has not come to light. It may lie beneath the roots of Mount Everest or under the bed of the Mariana Trench or deep within the core of the moon. But Zumurrud the Great has troubled us no more.

When she returned, that last morning, after concealing the blue bottle in the heart of darkness or the fire of the sun, she told her allies gathered at La Incoerenza, It is clear that the two worlds must be separated again. When one drips into the other, chaos ensues. And there is only one way to close the slits so tightly that they will remain closed, if not forever, then for some approximation of eternity.

A jinnia, remember, is made of fireless smoke. If she chooses to shed her female form she can move through the two worlds like smoke, pass through any door into any chamber, through any aperture into any crevice, filling the spaces she enters as thoroughly as smoke fills a room; and then, if she so chooses, she can solidify again, taking on the character of the spaces she has entered, becoming brick among bricks, or stone amongst stones, and those spaces will be spaces no more, it will be as if they never existed, or never will exist again. But the jinnia, when she is so dispersed, so scattered, so multiply mutated and transformed … even a jinnia queen … loses the strength, or, even worse than the strength, the will, the consciousness, that would enable her to gather herself once more and resume her unitary form.

So you would die, Geronimo Manezes said. That’s what you’re telling us. To save us from the jinn, you would sacrifice your life.

Not exactly, she said.

You mean you would continue to be alive? he asked.

Not exactly that, either, she replied. But reason demands it, so it must be done.

Then, without a word of farewell, without sentimentality or discussion, she left them. She was there, and then she was not there. They never saw her again.

As to what she did, what became of her, whether or not she did indeed use herself to close the passages between the worlds, we can only speculate. But from that day to this, no member of the upper world, Peristan, Fairyland, has ever been seen on this lower world, the earth, our home.

That was the thousand and first day. And that evening Mr. Geronimo and his Alexandra were alone in her bedchamber, and, making love, both of them felt as though they were floating on air. But they weren’t.

So ended the time of the strangenesses, which was two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights long.

We take pride in saying that we have become reasonable people. We are aware that conflict was for a long time the defining narrative of our species, but we have shown that the narrative can be changed. The differences between us, of race, place, tongue, and custom, these differences no longer divide us. They interest and engage us. We are one. And for the most part we are content with what we have become. We might even say that we are happy. We — we speak briefly of ourselves, and not the greater “we”—we live here in the great city and sing its praise. Flow on, rivers, as we flow on between you, mingle, currents of water, as we mingle with human currents from elsewhere and from near at hand! We stand by your waters amid the sea gulls and the crowds, and are glad. Men and women of our city, your costumes please us, close-fitting, colorless, fine; great city, your foods, your odors, your speedy sensuality, casual encounters begun, fiercely consummated, discontinued, we accept you all; and meanings jostling in the street, rubbing shoulders with other meanings, the friction birthing new meanings unmeant by the meaners who parented them; and factories, schools, places of entertainment and ill repute, our metropolis, thrive, thrive! You are our joy and we are yours and so we go together, between the rivers, towards an end beyond which there is no beginning, and beyond that, none, and the dawn city glistening in the sun.

But something befell us when the worlds were sealed off from each other. As the days lengthened into weeks, months, years, as the decades passed, and the centuries, something that once happened to us all every night, every one of us, every member of the greater “we” which we have all become, stopped happening. We no longer dreamt. It may be that this time those slits and holes were closed so tightly that nothing at all could leak through, not even the drips of fairy magic, the heaven-dew, which according to legend fell into our sleeping eyes and allowed us our nocturnal fantasies. Now in sleep there was only darkness. The mind fell dark, so that the great theater of the night might begin its unforeseeable performances, but nothing came. Fewer and fewer of us, in each successive generation, retained the ability to dream, until now we find ourselves in a time when dreams are things we would dream of, if we could only dream. We read of you in ancient books, O dreams, but the dream factories are closed. This is the price we pay for peace, prosperity, tolerance, understanding, wisdom, goodness, and truth: that the wildness in us, which sleep unleashed, has been tamed, and the darkness in us, which drove the theater of the night, is soothed.

We are happy. We find joy in all things. Motorcars, electronics, dances, mountains, all of you bring us great joy. We walk hand in hand towards the reservoir and the birds make circles in the sky above us and all of it, the birds, the reservoir, the walking, the hand held by the hand, all brings us joy.

But the nights pass dumbly. One thousand and one nights may pass, but they pass in silence, like an army of ghosts, their footfalls noiseless, marching invisibly through the darkness, unheard, unseen, as we live and grow older and die.

Mostly we are glad. Our lives are good. But sometimes we wish for the dreams to return. Sometimes, for we have not wholly rid ourselves of perversity, we long for nightmares.

New York

Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven previous novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, and Luka and the Fire of Life. Published in 1981, Midnight’s Children is the only book to have ever won more than one Booker: It was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and the Booker of Bookers Prize in 1993 by two separate panels of judges, and it won the Best of the Booker Prize by a public vote in 2008. Rushdie is also the author of East, West, a collection of short stories, and three works of nonfiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, and Step Across This Line, and the co-editor of two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton, was published in 2012 and became an internationally acclaimed bestseller. It was called “the finest new memoir to cross my desk in many a year” by Jonathan Yardley and praised as “a harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document” by Michiko Kakutani. His books have been translated into over forty languages.