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C
an you give me a lift to Fariel's?” Muti asked as Omar stood up from the breakfast table and wiped his lips with a linen napkin. It was the week after Jameel and his parents had left for America, a monsoon morning that smelled lush and damp.
“Does her mother know you're coming?” Leyla asked without looking up from her newspaper. “You shouldn't be pestering them. Fariel will be having her school clothes made this week.” Leyla tapped her bright crimson fingernails on the table.
“Five minutes,” said Omar, setting his napkin beside his plate.
“Yah,” Muti said, swallowing the rest of her sweet lime juice in one gulp. “Fariel and I're going with Shaheen to the bazaar to look for fabric. Their darzi is making school clothes for both of us.”
“Really, Mumtaz,” Leyla said, “why do you say âyah'? You do it just to annoy me!”
“Sorry,” said Muti, lowering her eyes. But she was not in the least sorry. A long time ago Muti had heard Leyla mutter under her breath, “She's a low-born Gypsy just like her mother.” Remembering always made Muti want to behave like a Gypsy. And sometimes that compulsion cost her dearly.
“Sorry, what?” Leyla demanded, and Muti looked straight at her.
“Sorry, Auntie,” she said, her eyes holding Leyla's until Leyla was forced to look away.
Leyla was not her auntie at all but a half sisterâthey were both Rahim's daughters. Leyla insisted, however, that if Muti was to live with her and Omar, she must call her Auntie. And Omar was not Muti's uncle but her cousin. Baba was not her grandfather but her uncle. Muti had learned at a tender age that very little in her world was what it appeared. She went along with Leyla's version of family relations to keep peaceâif this uneasy tiptoeing around could be called peace. Muti had grown accustomed to the shifting ground that was her family.
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After Muti's mother and father died, she'd been sent to live with her mother's family in the Cholistan Desert. Although her grandparents and Auntie Sharma were kind to her, Muti
missed her mother terribly. She never stopped watching the horizon for her mother's return, and her stomach ached constantly.
One day Muti thought her prayers had been answered. Shortly after sunrise on a spring day, a tall horseman appeared like an apparition from behind a sand dune. He rode his fine black stallion deliberately toward where Muti sat helping her grandmother roast roti on a flat black pan over a small hot fire.
The rider was Omar, and when she saw him she jumped up and ran to him. She threw her arms around his neck when he got down from his horse and knelt to say hello. “Have you come to take me to my mother?” she asked. She thought of the happy days at the haveli when Omar had been her mother's friend and was part of their lives.
Her grandmother hushed her and sent her to fetch her grandfather, who was at the well, hauling water for the camels. Omar looked very much like his Uncle Rahim, and the old woman easily guessed who he was.
They all shook hands several times, and Mumtaz's grandfather held on to Omar's hand after the introduction was over. Shabanu's parents had loved their son-in-law. They invited Omar to sit with them on a dhurrie beside the cooking fire. Muti and her grandmother poured tea and offered Omar freshly roasted roti, which he ate while he explained why he'd come.
“Shabanu's fondest wish was that Mumtaz should go to school,” Omar said. Grandfather said nothing, and Grandmother
looked down at her hands. “I've come to bring her back to Lahore to live with my family and to attend St. Agnes Academy.” More silence followed.
“Mumtaz is all that we have left of our Shabanu,” Grandfather said finally. “We would not like to let her go.” At that, Grandmother raised her eyes.
“We would miss her terribly,” she said. “But she has been here for several months and still she has not adjusted well. Perhaps she would do better in the city where she remembers living with her mother and father.” And so it had been decided, and Muti had lived with Baba and Omar, Leyla, and their son, Jaffar, ever since.
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“May I please leave the table?” Muti asked, standing abruptly.
“I want you back by teatime,” Leyla said. “Your cousins are coming, and I want you to help.” Muti set her mouth. What Leyla meant was they were having their weekly tea party, and Muti would serve them all cakes and tea, and then she would look after her little cousins and nieces and nephews to keep them out of their mothers' hair so the women might gossip in peace.
Babysitting and serving tea were not very high on the scale of pinpricks. The worst pinprick underlay all that Leyla said and did. Muti knew that Leyla would evict her from the house with the least provocation. But like a moth drawn to flame, Muti could not keep herself from provoking Leyla.
Muti also knew Baba and Omar wouldn't let anything happen to her. And so Muti and Leyla struggled in a perverse tug-of-war.
“Yes, Auntie,” Muti said, her eyes still lowered. “Umâbye!” She turned from the table abruptly and ran out through the arch into the front hallway, her bare feet slapping on the cool marble floor.
“Stop running!” Leyla shouted after Muti. “And since when do we come to the table without shoes?” Muti pretended she hadn't heard and took the steps two at a time.
She stopped outside the doorway to Baba's bedroom/ sitting room to say good morning. Muti couldn't love Baba more if he really were her grandfather. Through the partly open door she heard the restless movement of his legs under the bed linens. She stepped closer and tapped softly on the doorframe.
“Baba?” she whispered. There was no answer. She knocked again and peered around the doorframe in time to see a flash of what looked like a small ball of extraordinarily bright firelight just over Baba's form in the bed. Her heart leaped, but the flash disappeared so quickly she thought perhaps she hadn't seen it at all. Normally Muti was not one to doubt herself. But this time the spacious room lay dim, and she wondered whether her eyes hadn't deceived her.
She tiptoed into the room. She wondered if the flash had come from outside. She pulled back the heavy green velvet drape and looked down over the garden. Could it have been a reflection of the sunlight from something on the groundâthe mirror of a car? Or from something overheadâa small,
low-flying airplane? She let the drape fall back over the window and turned around. Baba seemed quieter now, and she decided to let him sleep. Her dear Baba had seemed to slow down at times these last few weeks. Sometimes he seemed to have no energy, and other times he was his old self. She must keep a closer eye on him, she thought as she tiptoed out and into the hallway that led to her own room.
Muti sat on the bed and slipped her favorite worn sandals onto her feet. She stuffed a pair of white churidar pajama, the closer-fitting drawstring trousers she wore for tennis, into her duffel with a folded, fresh white tunic, a towel, and her tennis shoes and racket.
Tugging at the back of her mind was another peculiar event of a few days earlierâthe day after Jameel left. That early morning she awoke suddenly, as if something had disturbed her sleep. She sat up and squinted at the luminous hands of the clock on the bedside table. They pointed to five-thirty. She swung her bare feet over the side of the bed and got up. She didn't bother turning on the light because she knew the bathroom was a clear shot across the bare floor. Muti had taken to cleaning her bedroom every day so that Leyla would not have that to complain about. Just a few feet from her bed she tripped over something soft. Each step took her deeper into what seemed to be a sea of clothing.
She flipped the switch to the overhead light when she reached the wall next to the bathroom door, and was amazed to see that someone had emptied every hanger and shelf of her closet onto the floor. Towels were spread around the bathroom as if someone had used each one and discarded
it. When she had gone to bed both rooms were as neat and tidy as if the ayah had just been there, followed by the sweeper with his dust cloths and whisk broom. Muti crossed to her closet and threw open the doors. The hangers were empty and knocked askew, where they had been evenly spaced on the bar before she'd gone to bed; the shelves were empty. She knew very well that she had taken to folding every shawl and dupatta neatly and stacking them with mathematical precision on top of every other shawl and dupatta.
It was absurd to think someone had crept into her room in the middle of the night and turned it upside down. Muti would never have slept through it. She had spent the rest of the early morning hours before breakfast returning everything to its proper place. The entire time she thought about how this chaos might have fallen on her room. While she did not suffer from self-doubt, neither was she one to keep a closed mind.
Muti thought of the day early in the summer when she and Jameel had asked Baba to tell them about the djinn. They were in the garage, where Baba was under the hood of the car, working on the ancient engine of his Mercedes Benz. Khoda Baksh held tools for him, and they talked softly as Baba worked.
“Baba,” Muti had said, “please tell Jameel the story of Great-grandfather and the djinn. He doesn't believe me.”
“I just don't believe that the house is haunted,” Jameel said, “that the djinn have always lived here.”
Baba came out from under the hood of the car and
straightened. He reached for a cloth and wiped his hands.
“Let's go up to the house and get some tea,” Baba said. When they were seated in the old wicker chairs beside the pool, Baba told his story.
“When I was Jaffar's age,” he began, “my father died. I didn't believe he was gone because I still saw him once or twice every week. Sometimes he'd come into my room and wake me up to talk. Sometimes he'd come into the house when I was the only one there. Sometimes he appeared as a very bright light that moved freely around the room.”
“Couldn't anyone else see him?” asked Jameel. “How do you know it wasn't just your imagination?”
“The Quran says that God creates a djinni for each one of us. It's the djinni's job to lead us astray, to cause mischief in order that we should learn from the tricks he plays. A djinni can even cause harmâbut his purpose is to improve us, sometimes even through temptation. Everyone has a djinni. Mine just happened to be in the form of the spirit of my father.”
“Why was your djinni in the form of your father?” Jameel asked. “And why doesn't every house have djinn if the Quran says they're supposed to help us?”
“The maulvis say Allah created djinn as fiery beings that can fly and take the shape of animals or humansâthey can really take any shape, and they can pass through solid objects like walls. I've asked the Maulvi Inayatullah why this house has them. He says the Quran doesn't explain why they appear to some people and not to others. He believes this house is hospitable to them for some reason.”
“So why do you think they're at Number 5 Anwar Road?” Jameel asked.
“Since Allah created man with free will, I believe he put the djinn here to trick us into finding our own path. Perhaps it's because we're tribal leaders. Finding the right way ourselves, we believe more faithfully than we would otherwise.”
Jameel was still dubious when the conversation was over. And Muti didn't know what to think.
“I'd believe anything Baba says,” Muti said to Jameel later. “I just don't know what he means because I've never seen a djinni.”
Now she thought perhaps she'd seen the first evidence of a djinni at Number 5 Anwar Road.
But it also was possible that Leyla was behind the disruption of Muti's room, just as she often was behind other disruptions in Muti's peaceâdeath by a thousand pinpricks.
Muti came back downstairs and left her canvas duffel beside the front door. She hesitated in the front hall before returning to the dining room to ask Leyla to check on Baba in a little while. Leyla disapproved of tennis, and Muti didn't want the scolding to start all over again. She didn't want to be told today, of all days, that she couldn't go to the Lahore Club.
She did not even consider telling Leyla about the strange flash of light. Leyla might try to use it as proof that Muti was unbalanced, perhaps suggesting a new ploy to remove Muti from the house for good. Muti resolved to ask Baba more about the djinn and their proclivities for light.
“ ⦠and you let her get away with anything,” she heard Leyla say from the dining room. Her voice was harsh and bitter. Muti stopped outside the doors. A silence followed. “I put up with her because you have inflicted her on me. I do it for you, but you won't discipline her.” Muti heard Omar sigh.
“I'll speak to her,” he said quietly. “But it would help if you didn't always find faultâ”
“Really, Omar,” Leyla said, “if I could think of someone suitable at Okurabad I would seriously consider arranging her marriage. We can't put it off forever.” Omar interrupted, but Muti didn't wait to hear what he said. She picked up her tennis things and headed out the front door, forgetting everything but her need to escape. Because her hands were full the door slammed, and she heard Leyla shout something from the dining room.