Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

by Salman Rushdie

  She returned to her father’s bedside and for a long time she found it impossible to leave. She sat on the floor beside him and talked. Geronimo Manezes, having recovered consciousness but with his ears unstoppably ringing, sat down on a brocaded chair a little way away with his eyes closed, nursing the worst headache of his life, still shaken, still groggy, and became unconscious again, falling into a deep sleep filled with dreams of death and thunder. While he slept the dead king’s daughter told her father all her secret thoughts, the ones he never had time to listen to while he was alive, and she had the impression that she had his full attention for the first time. The courtiers melted away and Omar the Ayyar stood guard in the doorway of the room of death and Mr. Geronimo slept. Dunia spoke and spoke, words of love, anger and regret, and when she had finished pouring out her heart she told the dead king about her plan for revenge, and the dead king did not attempt to dissuade her, not only because he was dead but also because the jinn are like that, they do not believe in turning the other cheek, if they are wronged they get even.

  Zumurrud and Zabardast and their followers knew that Dunia would come after them, they would have been expecting her assault even before she screamed, but that did not deter her in the least from making it. They had underestimated her because of her femaleness, she knew that, and she would teach them a harsh lesson, she would give them much more than they bargained for. Over and over she promised her father that he would be avenged until finally he believed her and at that point his body did what the bodies of the jinn do on those rare occasions when they die, they lose their corporeal form and a flame rises into the air and goes out. After that the bed was empty but she could see the impression of his body in the sheet he had been lying on, and his favorite old slippers were there on the floor next to the bed, lying there expectantly, as if he might come back into the room at any moment and put them on.

  (In the days that followed Dunia told Mr. Geronimo that her father appeared to her often, during the periods of hiatus which are the jinn equivalent of sleep, and that during these appearances he was curious about her, interested in everything she was doing, warm in his manner and loving in his embraces; that, in short, her relationship with him after his death was a big improvement on the way things had been during his lifetime. I still have him, she told Geronimo Manezes, and this version of him is better than the one I had before.)

  When she stood up at last she was different again, no longer a princess or even a daughter but a dark queen terrible in anger, golden eyed and trailing clouds of smoke from her head instead of hair. Geronimo Manezes, waking up in his armchair, understood that this was what his life had always had in store for him, the uncertainty of being, the bewilderment of change—he dozed off in one reality and woke up in another. The illusion of Ella Elfenbein’s return had both unnerved and overjoyed him and it had been easy to sink towards belief in it but his portage to Peristan had fatally undermined that and now the sight of the Queen of Qâf revealed in angry beauty finished off Ella’s ghost. And in Dunia too, Skyfairy the Lightning Queen, there was a change of heart. She had seen Ibn Rushd reborn in Geronimo but the truth was that she was leaving the old philosopher behind at last, recognizing that that antique love had turned to dust and its reincarnation, while pleasing, could not rekindle the old fire, or only momentarily. She had clung to him for a moment but now there was work to do and she knew how she would try to do it.

  You, she said to Geronimo Manezes, not as a lover might address her lover but as an imperious matriarch, a grandmother with hair growing out of a mole on her chin, for example, might address a junior member of her dynasty. Yes. Let’s start with you.

  He was a boy in shorts shuffling his feet before his grandmother and answering her in a scolded mumble. I can’t hear you, she said. Speak up.

  I’m hungry, he said. Is it possible to eat first, please.

  A few words about ourselves. It is hard for us as we look back to put ourselves in the shoes of our ancestors, for whom the arrival in the midst of their everyday life of the implacable forces of the metamorphic, the descending avatars of transformation, represented a shocking disruption in the fabric of the real; whereas in our own time such activity is the commonplace norm. Our mastery of the human genome allows us chameleon powers unknown to our predecessors. If we wish to change sex, well then, we straightforwardly do so by a simple process of gene manipulation. If we are in danger of losing our tempers, we can use the touch pads embedded in our forearms to adjust our serotonin levels, and we cheer up. Nor is our skin color fixed at birth. We adopt our hue of choice. If, as passionate football fans, we decide to acquire the pigmentation of our favorite team, the Albiceleste or the Rossonero, then hey presto! we colorize our bodies in blue and white stripes, or dramatic red and black. A woman artist in Brazil long ago asked her countryfolk to name their own skin colors and produced tubes of paint to represent each shade, each pigment named as the possessors of the color wished, Big Black Dude, Light Bulb, and so on. Today she would run out of tubes before she ran out of color variations; and it is widely believed and generally accepted by all of us that this is an excellent thing.

  This is a story from our past, from a time so remote that we argue, sometimes, about whether we should call it history or mythology. Some of us call it a fairy tale. But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present. To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual. If this were not true then the deed would be pointless, and we try in our daily lives to eschew pointlessness whenever possible.

  This is the question we ask ourselves as we explore and narrate our history: how did we get here from there?

  A few words, too, on the subject of lightning. Being a form of celestial fire, the thunderbolt was considered historically to be the weapon of powerful male deities: Indra, Zeus, Thor. One of the few female deities to wield this mighty weapon was the Yoruba goddess Oya, a grand sorceress who, when in a bad mood, which she often was, could unleash both the whirlwind and the sky-fire, and who was believed to be the goddess of change, called upon in times of great alteration, of the rapid metamorphosis of the world from one state to the next. She was a river goddess too. The name of the river Niger in Yoruba is Odo-Oya.

  It may be, and it seems to us probable, that the story of Oya had its origin in an earlier intervention into human affairs—perhaps several millennia ago—of the jinnia Skyfairy, in the present narrative known mostly by her later name of Dunia. In those ancient times Oya was believed to have had a husband, Shango the Storm King, but eventually he disappeared from view. If Dunia had once had a husband, and if he had been killed in some previous, unrecorded battle of the jinn, that may account for her fondness for the similarly bereaved Geronimo. That is one hypothesis.

  As to Dunia’s power over water as well as fire, it may well have existed, but it is not a part of our present narrative and we have no information about it. As for the reason why she was partly responsible for just about everything that happened to people on earth during the time of the strangenesses, the tyranny of the jinn and the War of the Worlds, however, that will be made plain before we’re done.

  When African traditions made their way into the New World on the slave ships, Oya came along for the ride. In the Brazilian rites of Candomblé she became Yansa. In syncretic Caribbean Santería her image was merged with that of the Christian Black Madonna, the Virgin of Candelaria.

  However, Dunia, like any jinnia, was far from virginal. She was the fecund matriarch of the Duniazát. And as we well know by now, her descendants too had the gift of lightning in their hands, although almost none of them knew it until the strangenesses began and such things became thinkable. In the battle against the dark jinn, this lightning became a crucial weapon. And so it was that lightning freaks, a group accused during the mighty paranoia of those days of being behind the disruptions that became known as the strangenesses, in fact became the prominent and eventually legendary fr
ont line of the resistance to the Zumurrud gang of dark jinn as it set out to colonize, even to enslave, the peoples of the earth.

  And just a very few words about the Zumurrud project. Conquest was something entirely new for the jinn, to whom empire does not come naturally. The jinn are meddlesome; they like to interfere, to lift this one up, to cast that one down, to plunder a treasure cave or throw a magic spanner in a rich man’s works. They like the making of mischief, mayhem, anarchy. They have traditionally lacked management skills. But a reign of terror cannot be effective through terror alone. The most effective tyrannies are characterized by their excellent powers of organization. Efficiency had never been Zumurrud the Great’s long suit; scaring people was his game. Zabardast the sorcerer jinni, however, turned out to be an excellent nuts-and-bolts person. But he wasn’t perfect, and nor were his lesser cohorts, and so the new scheme of things was (fortunately) full of holes.

  Before they returned to the lower world Dunia opened the secret doors in Mr. Geronimo’s head that led to the jinn nature hidden within him. If you could cure yourself of the weightlessness plague and bring yourself back to earth without even knowing who you were, she told him, then imagine what you’ll be able to do now. Then she put her lips to his temples, first the left one, then the right, and whispered, “Open.” Immediately it was as if the universe itself opened and spatial dimensions whose existence he had never known about became visible and usable, as if the frontiers of the possible had been pushed outwards and much became feasible that had been unfeasible before.

  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 yo
urselves—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.”

  We, looking back on these events, see them through the perspective of our hard-won knowledge, and understand that the practice of extreme violence, known by the catch-all and often inexact term terrorism, was always of particular attraction to male individuals who were either virgins or unable to find sexual partners. Mind-altering frustration, and the damage to the male ego which accompanied it, found its release in rage and assaults. When lonely, hopeless young men were provided with loving, or at least desirous, or at the very least willing sexual partners, they lost interest in suicide belts, bombs, and the virgins of heaven, and preferred to live. In the absence of the favorite pastime of every jinni, human males turned their thoughts to orgasmic endings. Death, being readily available everywhere, was often an alternative pursuit to unavailable sex.

  So it was with human beings. The dark jinn, however, did not consider self-immolation. Their response to the sex boycott was not surrender to the wishes of their erstwhile jinnia partners, but rather an increase in violent activity of the nonsexual kind. Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, inflamed by the denial of physical pleasure, embarked in the lower world on a savage rampage of subjugation by force, displaying an intemperate abandon which at first alarmed even Zumurrud and Zabardast; then, after a time, the same red mist rose in the eyes of the two senior jinn, and the human race paid the penalty for the jinnias’ punishment of the Grand Ifrits. The war entered a new phase. It was time for Dunia and Geronimo Manezes to return to earth.