by Liz Jensen
In Dubai the native population believe in djinns or ‘jinn’. A djinn is an evil spirit which taunts people and renders their lives intolerable. It can possess them without their knowledge, and cause them to behave out of character. Like Sunny Chen’s Chinese ancestors, djinns need placating and appeasing.
When I told Ashok that I considered it logical to suspect that the Dubai case would involve somebody losing their reason and blaming some kind of native evil spirit, i.e. a djinn, or a demon child, he shut his eyes and breathed out and said oh man.
‘I am sure Farooq will have mentioned djinn.’
‘And what kind of fucked-up weirdo place does that take us, Maestro? Do we tell the client his construction empire’s spooked?’
‘No. We tell them that something caused one of their employees to regress and invoke negative childhood archetypes, and that this behaviour’s part of a mass hysterical phenomenon we have yet to fully identify. Sunny Chen. Jonas Svensson. Same pattern. In order to explain what they did in the dissociative fugue state, they conjure manifestations of indigenous belief systems. Ancestors in Chen’s case. In Svenssson’s, trolls. In Farooq’s, I predict djinns.’
That’s when he banged on the desk and made Belinda Yates jump.
But sure enough, according to the police report on Farooq’s death, which Ashok has very typically not bothered to read thoroughly, I now discover that Ahmed Farooq did indeed mention djinns. It is right there, in his wife’s statement.
Halla Farooq claims he worried that a djinn ‘who looked like a small beggar’ had ‘possessed’ him. Annika Svensson also used that word. Unlike her husband, Halla Farooq did not claim to see the djinn herself, but the natives of the United Arab Emirates – known as Emiratis – are very superstitious, and she believed in it as fervently as he did. It was the djinn, she insisted, that made him behave oddly and drove him to his death.
If I believed in the resting of cases, I would rest my case. I know what Ashok will say when I tell him.
He’ll shout, ‘Jesus Christ, Hesketh. Fucking Arab goblins. This is all I need, man!’
And he will bang on his desk and scare Belinda Yates some more.
It’s an overnight flight to Dubai. On the plane there are several children, some working their way through the airline’s complimentary puzzle books. I am congenitally incapable of coming across a puzzle without trying to solve it, but Freddy can take them or leave them. His imagination is big and free. If he were here, he’d draw dinosaurs and talk to himself in his favourite dinosaur voice, the archaeopteryx. ‘Hulooo, aya am a flooing fossil and aya weigha fifteen foosand zillion tons.’
The little bruises on my arm ache when I press them.
Freud once said ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’. He was making a point about what is or is not significant.
He was a wise man.
I take a sleeping pill and fall in and out of that insubstantial, restless aeroplane sleep that fails to nourish.
When I told Kaitlin I was leaving, I knew I would not miss her. We did each other no good. If our relationship were an organisation, Phipps & Wexman would classify it as dysfunctional, toxic or ‘hollow’. Her good looks no longer attracted me. In fact, illogically, they did the opposite. For her part, she had become impatient of aspects of my behaviour that she once claimed to find endearing.
But Freddy had done nothing wrong.
Once, driving home from the countryside, we hit a rabbit. Freddy had been staying with Kaitlin’s mother – this was before her cancer – and I’d gone to fetch him. The creature darted out of a hedgerow into the road and was under the wheel before I could react. The crunch was soft and decisive. I hoped Freddy hadn’t noticed – he’d been watching a DVD and seemed on the verge of sleep – but he saw it and yelled out. I wanted to keep driving, but he insisted that we must stop.
‘We have to help it, we have to help it!’
In the time it took me to reverse back, he’d made wild plans: he’d nurse its injuries, keep it as a pet, give it a name, keep it in a cage, find it a mate, let it have litters of baby rabbits, and then they’d have babies and soon there’d be thousands of them and we could sell them to pet shops. He had the creature’s whole life mapped out. But of course when we got there and inspected the lump of mashed fur it was stone dead. The hind quarters were completely crushed, but there was surprisingly little blood. Freddy cried and stroked its ears and stared into its death-glazed eye, and I rather helplessly tried to comfort him with some head-patting and shoulder-punching and calling him Freddy K, Freddy K, Freddy K, over and over. But he wouldn’t stop crying. Finally, a little desperate, I suggested staging a funeral. Immediately, he brightened up: we had a project. I found a plastic bag in the car and we put the dead body in it, still warm, and resumed our journey. He was now full of energy: the idea of a ceremony had galvanised him.
‘I’ll bury it and put a cross on the grave and say some words.’
‘What kind of words?’ I was curious about what notions he might have, at six, of burial rites.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know when?’
He laughed. ‘Yet. So go on then. Tell me.’ Freddy didn’t realise it, but his child’s perspective provided me with a cognitive path to the world we both lived in. So I quoted him the ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’ lines of the Christian burial rite, and explained how in other countries and religions they say other things. But how a lot of the words are very similar no matter where you live, just as the types of prayer are, and the things people pray for. Then he wanted to know how long it would be before the body became a skeleton which he could dig up and glue together, to keep in his bedroom. I explained how dead bodies rot in the earth. How insects and maggots would come and eat the rabbit. We went into life cycles and protein and the food chain and he fired more questions at me. Those straightforward exchanges of information about the world always made me feel more at home in it. Who and where, how and why, when and what. Nothing slippery. No double meanings.
‘So it rots and it feeds the earth and the earth feeds the plants and then the plants grow and then we eat the plants,’ he summarises.
‘Yes, Freddy K. Correct.’
‘So why don’t we just eat the rabbit?’
‘Good idea. Rabbit stew. We can find a recipe.’ That took us on to knives and blood and skinning techniques. We’d look up how to do it. We’d remove the guts, and inspect them. We might see its heart, and we could compare it to the one in my da Vinci book, which he loved. We’d identify and dissect its liver and its kidneys and its brain too.
Back in London, Freddy burst into the kitchen brandishing the plastic bag and gabbled the story of our adventure and our intentions to Kaitlin. She was in a good mood. She was glad when we did what she called ‘boy things’ together. The creature’s skin came off like a coat. We cured it by staking it to a piece of chipboard and covering it with salt and then leaving it on the car roof in the sunshine to dry. Then we butchered the meat and Kaitlin made a stew with prunes and Armagnac, which Freddy declared ‘epic’, but left largely on his plate.
I wake in time to see the sunrise over the city as the plane comes in to land. It’s Sunday 23rd September. I don’t know the weather forecast, but I can guess it will reach well above forty degrees later in the day. Sprawling next to a glittering sea, pincushioned with construction cranes, the city gives the impression of an unfinished and unfinishable project.
Outside, it is indeed hot. My taxi driver is Afghan, so I try out a few words in Pashtoun. On the drive to the hotel, I get the impression of a city of gleaming, sun-baked glass and metal, of broad highways, improbably green lawns, of vast clean malls and building sites at every turn. I know that virtually nothing that I see around me is made here: that virtually everything except the sand is imported, and that in one of the shopping malls there is an indoor ski slope. The tall palms that line the roads are kept alive by water from desalination plants. Dubai uses more water than any other city in the wor
ld. It consumes more carbon per capita. It is home to the world’s tallest structures. The slender needle of the 800-metre-high Burj Khalifa rears into the sky, the sun glinting pinkly off its glass and steel. It is magnificent. It looks like CGI.
I remember a story from Arab tradition.
A young man falls in love with a princess. He marries her, but when he touches her on their wedding night she turns into a pillar of flame. It turns out that she is not a princess at all, but a djinn in disguise. Djinns are created from smokeless fire. The fiery djinn-bride is cruel. She burns the young man’s flesh to punish him, but he never finds out what his crime was, and why he was so viciously barbecued on what should have been an evening of sexual passion.
The story does not tell us, so we can only guess.
From the hotel, I email Annika Svensson my further condolences. Sunday is a work day here, so at 8am local time I contact the legal team at Eastern Horizons’ lawyer to ask for the translated transcript of Farooq’s confession. I am told that this will take longer than the rest of the documentation because it contains complex technical terminology. I then visit the company’s headquarters and talk to several of Farooq’s colleagues – largely Europeans, Indians, Americans and Australians – who all express their horror at his act of sabotage and subsequent suicide. The phrase ‘out of character’ is used eighteen times. After witnessing Annika Svensson’s grief I am not enthusiastic about meeting Halla Farooq, but I press for an interview nonetheless. This is refused so adamantly that I suspect I have made a gaffe with respect to her grief, or that Eastern Horizons is embarrassed by her ‘small beggar-djinn’ allegations. Or both. However, this afternoon I have an appointment with Farooq’s immediate deputy, Jan de Vries, who has agreed to my request to see one of the current construction projects Ahmed Farooq was in charge of when he died.
I have time to kill before this meeting, so I return to the hotel and sit by the infinity pool – nineteen storeys up, with a view across the waterfront – and read about the crisis in particle physics. Since the Japanese verification of CERN’s famous neutrino experiments the furore, with string theory at its centre, has been raging on an epic scale. ‘Einstein’s laws of cause and effect have so far meant that time can only travel in one direction. But now that is questioned, the paradoxes flood in,’ says a theoretical physicist. ‘Maths has known for decades what physics is only just discovering: that there are dimensions we can’t see, and possibly never will.’
I like this idea, but it unsettles me because how can one get the measure of something that’s apparently destined to remain immeasurable? I would like to discuss it with Professor Whybray.
The article ends by quoting a joke:
The barman says, sorry we don’t serve neutrinos.
A man goes into a bar.
It takes me a little while to ‘get’ it. But when I do, I enjoy its cleverness in obeying the rules of the classic ‘man goes into a bar’ joke format, while simultaneously upending it. When the waiter comes to ask me if I would like a drink I consider trying it out on him, but decide against it because I am not a natural joke-teller and I fear it may fall flat as he may not have read enough about particle physics to appreciate it.
I order a Coke. Most of the hotel staff come from the Philippines. On the construction sites they tend to originate from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India or Afghanistan. Ninety-seven per cent of Dubai’s ever-shifting population is non-native. So only a small percentage of them will be familiar with djinns: they will have their own spirits. How significant this might be I do not know.
While the neutrino experiments have shown that there are dimensions that we cannot yet grasp, because they operate outside the membrane we inhabit, I have never fathomed the notion of faith, or recognised the dividing line that the traditionally religious draw to distinguish their own belief systems from those of superstitious people who believe in ancestors, goblins, djinns, trolls and other legendary manifestations. Anthropology shies away from juxtaposing religious faith and non-religious belief. But to me, there is no difference: irrational belief is irrational belief, no matter what the creed or how much money its followers can raise to build and maintain their houses of faith. Perhaps it is precisely because of my immunity to belief systems that they fascinate me. Having studied those in thrall to non-existent forces which they generally claim represent either good or evil, I know that there’s always a pragmatic explanation for their terrors. But often it’s one they’d rather not face. So if their baby has altered beyond recognition it won’t be thanks to a blow to the head, but because he’s a changeling. If they lose something, a goblin stole it. If a woman gets pregnant when she is supposed to be a virgin, it’s holy intervention. Superstitious conviction is born of an unconscious decision, in the face of the unthinkable, to fabulate.
This is something I could never do.
‘Which is why you chose to study it,’ Professor Whybray said, when I told him of my decision.
He was usually right.
At 10.30 I am heading upwards in a shaky construction elevator to the thirty-first floor of a half-built multi-storey skyscraper with Jan de Vries, who smells of stale beer, partly masked by aftershave, and who is now talking to me about his boss Ahmed Farooq: Ahmed Farooq who is dead, who swallowed rat poison on the alleged provocation of a small beggar-like djinn, and therefore died in extreme agony like Gustave Flaubert’s fictional anti-heroine Madame Bovary.
The nominal ban on alcohol in Dubai has the effect of turning most of its Western inhabitants into moderate drinkers, but I have read that there are still plenty of alcoholics. Because of the smell of beer on his breath, I suspect the blond-haired, red-skinned Mr Jan de Vries to be one of them. His South African accent is very thick. He calls me ‘man’ a great deal, which he pronounces ‘mun’. He is an Afrikaner from Cape Town, he tells me in the elevator we share to the building site. When it finally comes to a shaking halt on the thirty-first level of the skyscraper-in-progress, de Vries and I step out on to the floor where the construction continues. The site is open to the sunlight, with very little shade. I count twenty-six very dark-skinned workers in thin vests and hard hats at work in three separate areas. Many are small and wiry: Sri Lankan, I guess. Others look more like they are from Pakistan. Eleven are pouring cement and sand into a row of concrete mixers, while the rest are erecting and dismantling scaffolding. Concrete has its own particular smell, and here it manifests itself in a variety of forms: raw powder, sand-mixed, wet, damp, drying and hardened. This part of the floor is in shade, thanks to a stretched white tarpaulin. But bizarrely, Jan de Vries seems to prefer standing in the sun.
It must be heading for fifty degrees.
De Vries waves at a man who is standing apart from the others, consulting a chart. ‘Foreman,’ he says. ‘Pakistani.’ The foreman waves back. ‘So, Hesketh. Take a look.’ De Vries points towards the edge.
‘I can’t. I get vertigo.’
‘That’s too bad. It’s quite something.’ He strides over to the edge, leans his meaty bulk against the security rail and gazes out at the panorama. I shift a little closer, near enough to catch what he says, but not so close to the drop that I can see what’s below. The rail is made of aluminium so it must be burning hot, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He hasn’t stopped talking since we met.
‘Ahmed was a goddam diamond, I tell you,’ he calls to me, continuing the theme he began in the lift. ‘This just was not Ahmed. Not one single element of this bloody mess was him, mun. I mean, he wasn’t a saboteur, no way. Plus, bloody rat poison, what kind of shit is that, mun? If he had to do it what’s wrong with Valium or paracetamol?’ De Vries is one of those men who become aggressive when they are upset. He sweeps out his big muscled arm to show me ‘the world’s most fantastic city. It’s just gonna keep on expanding and expanding. Why not, eh? D’you realise we have the most advanced desalination technology in the whole goddam world?’
No, I tell him. But it comes as no surprise.
De Vri
es speaks very fast, so I have to concentrate. His eyes are hidden behind very dark sunglasses that cling tightly to the bridge of his nose, making the flesh bulge to either side. I find myself almost lip-reading him, focusing on the rapid movements of his fleshy mouth. Above it, the moustache pours from his nostrils like blond lava. I am faint-headed from jetlag.
‘Sure, we had a bit of a dip in the economy, and we were reeling for a while there, I mean truly reeling. But look at it now, it’s all happening. This is a happening place, a vibrant place. Ahmed was part of that big vision, mun. I just love this city, mun. Lived here twenty years. I mean how can you not be crazy about this place?’
He says this is just one of fifty-seven construction projects managed by Eastern Horizons. Farooq was personally in charge of it. As De Vries grips the scaffold-rail and expounds on Dubai – ‘This city. It’s what the future looks like, mun’ – I begin to feel thirsty. The sun is unbearably hot. ‘I don’t know what bloody Farooq got into his head. I just don’t know. So much to live for, mun. The world was his oyster. And his wife, how d’you think she’s feeling, mun? Gorgeous lady, Halla. Very traditional. Can you imagine what it was like breaking the news to her? It tore me apart, mun.’
I want to tell him: Halla Farooq thought her husband was possessed by a small beggar-djinn. She believed that the djinn didn’t wish her husband well, just as Sunny Chen believed the ancestors stamped their curse on him with a tiny dirt smear and Jonas Svensson believed that small creatures – ‘kiddie trolls’ – had used him as a puppet. And I have a baffling set of bruises on my arm.
There is a pattern, you see, Mr Jan de Vries.
The problem is, it’s so outlandish that it makes no sense to any logical, rational, scientifically inclined mind. I am thinking specifically of my own.
