The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories

by Mahvesh Murad

  Then the girl was being pulled away by her mother, down the narrow shop-alley, homeward-bound. Her eyes were still full of wonder, her hand filled with stuffed toy. How simple our wants are as children, how easily satisfied.

  Mena waved to the girl as she vanished into the transient fade of the pasar malam like a curl of smoke, as if she had been lifted away by a desert dervish, as if she had never been.

  By the time Mena got home, she was regretting her largesse. In that moment, dragged along by the exhilaration of fulfulling a child’s deepest-held wish, she had not stopped to think of how it would look later. The mother, arriving home and finding strange, unpaid-for merchandise in her daughter’s sticky fingers: What would she think? As if she would accept the girl’s version of the truth, of the spirit of the air that appeared by magic and granted her her heart’s desires.

  Mena’s mind marched in a line of colorful punishments that might await that little girl – lashing and beatings and heart-rendings, pain to remind her of the nature of this world, of the rules that bound it and bound her to it.

  Maybe it was for the better. Teach them early that dreams and wishes are things that bring only pain, that nothing comes for free, that for every piece of good fortune, somehow and somewhere the universe will balance itself out with misfortune.

  As the day ended, Mena found herself contemplating the sandy plains of her face in the mirror, the weathered architecture of it softened by the low light. Seeing it like this, the way other people did, made her wonder what they actually thought of her. People’s desires were easy to read, clear as bottled glass and just as sturdy. Their thoughts were another thing altogether: hard and opaque and filligreed with teeth and claws.

  She thought of doppelgänger-Anthony in the perfect world of the advertisement. In that small piece of paradise, seen as if through a perfume bottle, the perfect woman for Anthony had white arms and facial features exquisitely aligned just so.

  Mena squeezed her eyes to slits and through that distortion saw her face elongate, her nose forming a perfect peak, her hair straightening and darkening to pitch-perfect black. She imagined her complexion flawless, the kind that would accept the right sort of foundation, turn her into one of those doe-eyed plump-lipped girls gazing out of billboards. The kind of picturesque girl that might turn Anthony’s head. The kind of girl who was like Wendy.

  A foolish notion. She could rearrange the sands of her face, changing the composition of the earth it was made from, but to what end? What would she be? Where would she stand, this polished implant, in the grand scheme of the universe?

  Mena wondered if her vanished grandmother, the djinn, had ever thought of reshaping the world so it was more amenable to her. A world of hot wind and bursting stars, where women walked strong and brown and proud over land that sang to their bones, where the fires that burned in their veins were lights in the firmament, and not threats to be smothered into nothingness at all costs.

  She closed her eyes and let the darkness behind her lids fill her mind. Pointless, to dwell on such things. The shape of the world was the shape that it was. Tomorrow Anthony would send Wendy a text asking her to dinner, and her colleague would sit at her desk incandescent with joy, unaware of the machinations that had gone on in the dark to bring her this gift of a wish fulfilled, neon-bright and ethanol-sweet. And Mena, hands in pockets and heart hot and silent in her chest, would continue walking alone down unmapped paths, surrounded by the bright lights of things wanted and things acquired, the great exchange that went on before her, just out of reach.

  Mena opened her eyes, and, with a flick of her wrist, put out the bedroom light.

  Authenticity

  Monica Byrne

  IT STARTED WITH a knock at the door. It was Abbas, holding a plate of oranges and a white plastic knife. I was glad because I was hungry. Even after the enormous evening meal in the main house, I was still hungry.

  “I can’t stay, after,” was the first thing he said.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Come in.”

  He did, but only one step at a time, as if he were unsure how far into the room he was allowed. But my guest room was tiny, more like a cell. I let him come.

  Once he got to the other wall, he turned around. “The reason I can’t stay is because I have to be on set for a night shoot.”

  “A set? A shoot? What are they filming?”

  He looked out the window into the alley below, to see whether anyone might be listening, and then said in a low voice, “An adult film.”

  The wind made a panel of the window spring open and knock against the outside wall. We both jumped at the sound. I went to the window and pulled it closed, and fastened the clasp. The glass continued to rattle in its casing.

  “It’s like that out here, sometimes,” he said, as if in apology. “I grew up in the desert. The wind picks up right at this time of year.”

  He still held the plate of oranges and the white plastic knife, rigid, in front of him, as if he were a statue. I wanted him to put them down so we could eat. I was also torn between the wind and the adult film, as both topics seemed worthy of comment. But I was hungry. I wasn’t used to being so hungry. I put my hand on his arm and drew him to the floor, and he understood, without words, what I wanted him to do. He pushed his thumb on the white plastic knife and turned the orange in his other hand. Juice spritzed and diffused in the air as he cut. He held out a double segment for me, and I took it and ate it, and immediately wanted more. But I didn’t want to be rude. I didn’t know what manners were like here; it was best to go slow, not to frighten him.

  “I’ve never met anyone who worked on an adult film before,” I said, while I waited for more orange segments. “I watch normal films and think, How could they be skin on skin like that, and not be wet and hard, doing exactly what they look like they’re doing? But in interviews the actors say, ‘No, we don’t get aroused. Not when there’s an entire camera and lighting crew right in your face. None of our parts even touch. We bind them up in nylon.’”

  “And it’s true,” he said, handing me another segment. “You never see scrota.”

  He was matching me, tone for tone, reveal for reveal, wit for wit. “But you’re filming real sex,” I said.

  “We’re filming Nilou Tar,” he said.

  I smiled, mid-chew. It was a clever name – suggesting both lotuses and music.

  “I’d be surprised if you’d heard of her,” he said. “She’s only famous in some circles. She’s setting up right now. I’m not needed till later.”

  “Digital or celluloid?”

  “Celluloid,” he said. “Nilou Tar only shoots in celluloid.”

  “How sentimental.”

  He looked abashed. I felt bad. I’d been hasty and flippant. I didn’t want to be rude in my quest for authenticity.

  “Well,” he said, gesturing with the knife, “all artists need constraints, don’t they? Infinite possibility is actually limiting.”

  Ah, so he was artist-minded, too. I’d chosen well. “I don’t think so. I think infinite possibility is thrilling.”

  “But we don’t have infinite time,” he said, monitoring my reactions from beneath ropes of dust-curdled hair. “And we can’t grasp infinity, not for more than a second or two. So we choose the constraints that are most interesting to us.”

  I was learning about him. This was turning out to be part of my work here. I willed myself to be content, to flow alongside him. “All right. Why does Nilou Tar find celluloid an interesting constraint?”

  “Because celluloid is a physical medium,” he said, “and so is the body, which is the most important thing in erotic film.”

  “So are you her partner?”

  He smiled and shook his head, as if I’d made a great joke. As if to answer, he put down the knife and pulled out his phone—cracked screen, a still from The Pear Tree – and showed me a video. A young woman in a wetsuit sat on the edge of a dock, pale-skinned, blonde-haired, her legs open and her shoulders hunched; sh
e looked back at the camera once and squealed. Male voices exhorted her in English off-camera.

  “Is this Nilou Tar?” I asked.

  He laughed, and his hand flew to his mouth, to cup a little orange coming out. He pushed it back in, looking sheepish. “No. She’d call this tacky,” he said. “These are just some drunk university students.”

  “What is she doing?”

  “She’s waiting for a dolphin.”

  I watched the woman in the video, and the grey dolphins streaking back and forth just below the surface, and the rippling black waters beyond.

  “You don’t have to watch,” he said, second-guessing his choice to show me the video. He took the phone back, pressed a few buttons with his thumb, and then set it down again. “I was just making a visual analogy. Nilou is waiting for her partner. That’s the whole point of this shoot. The plan is for her to sit just like this, on top of a dune overlooking the desert, and then...we’ll just wait.”

  I smiled at him, which made him uncomfortable. He solved it by talking more.

  “We don’t know what they look like. We don’t know if they’ll come. We don’t know if we’ll even be able to see them, if they do. But,” he said, dropping his voice, “the guesthouse owners said they live in a community just a few kilometers north of here. I love them. I know I’m not supposed to, but I do.”

  He smiled. He had one of those concave smiles with more teeth showing at the edges than in the middle. It gave him the appearance of a crazed cartoon character.

  I swallowed the last of my orange and told him to close the door.

  He did so.

  I told him to turn off the lights.

  He did so.

  I saw his hands shaking a little. I wondered how experienced he was. He went to the corner and began to pile the blankets in a sort of nest. I waited. It was sweet. The orange mist lingered in the air like an incense.

  Then he sat in the middle of his nest with his legs drawn up against his chest. He laughed, nervously, and spread his hands as if to say, Well, here I am.

  I crawled to him and tapped his knee. It fell to the side, taking the suggestion. Then both legs fell open, like his body was blooming, and then his arm curled around the small of my back, and I was being kissed all over my face, as if I were a beloved doll.

  How did I think it was going to be, when I first saw him? I’d been having dinner in the main house, on my third helping of everything on the table – flatbread, cream soup, khoresh, dizi, lamb kebab, chicken kebab, saffron rice, Shirazi salad, and pistachio gaz made on the premises, for which the guesthouse was famous – when I saw him at the other end of the table, admiring my appetite. I was not a normal student on holiday. He’d intuited this. I was hungry for an authentic experience. Just last week, over rose tea in our favorite underground haunt, my fellow student and I had been discussing my trip to the oasis. She understood how I craved new places, new foods, new experiences, new art, new men. She asked, as if posing the question to the cosmos, “What are the men there even like?” and I just stared at her, squinting, cocking my head this way and that, turning over one possible answer and then another.

  I settled on the midpoint of the seesaw: “Strange.”

  “Strange?” she asked.

  “Strange,” I repeated.

  And then we both said the word again, locked eye-to-eye, and bent our heads to the side in sync as if we were mirror images, drawing the word out like taffy.

  I was half-asleep when I heard Abbas stir. I pretended to be asleep. He kissed my shoulder once. I heard rustling and shuffling, and then felt warm fabric settle against my skin where there’d been only air before.

  When the door clicked shut, I opened my eyes. He’d draped the bedding all around me where I lay. The plate, the rinds, the white plastic knife were gone, but the smell of oranges lingered.

  I turned over and stretched, enjoying the new aches, and then let my limbs settle into new delicious positions. I’d done well. I wanted to do that again. That was a good authentic experience. But the more I tried to remember the details, the more they slipped away – as if there was a veil in time, dividing the before and after. It bothered me. I tried to fall back asleep, but I couldn’t – the exhaustion had knocked me out at first; now, it kept me awake. And the wind was still so loud, as if the guesthouse were a plane careening through the sky at a terrible speed. How could they be filming porn in this wind?

  I turned on my back and blinked at the ceiling. My questions weaved together and acted as a membrane that kept me from falling back into sleep. I sat up and started putting on my clothes.

  When I was pulling my door shut and locking it, careful not to wake the other guests, I saw the tiny skull of a jackal mounted on the wall. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. Had I walked right past it? I tapped the bone snout, to test for realness. Maybe it was new, something the wind had blown in. I looked into its big black eye holes and admired its little teeth. I could smell the calcium dust of old bone.

  Outside, the wind pushed me sideways and forward. I had to hold my headscarf down to keep it from unraveling and blowing off. In between gusts, I could hear the snuffling of camels in the corral next to the main house, and the crow of a rooster in the palm forest. But then the stone alleys gave way to dark dunes like standing waves. Abbas had said the community lived to the north of them. I saw a faint reddish glow in that direction. That must be the set. I made for it.

  The wind got quieter, but the sand got deeper. I sank and slid sideways on my sandals. I hadn’t brought the right shoes. But I continued, now wondering whether I’d be welcome. Surely they were afraid of the police. I had a story ready if anyone should ask why I was there: I was curious, a progressive, open-minded film student. Which was the truth. Abbas would recognize me and confirm, having been inside me just two hours ago.

  At the top of the ridge, I saw two people silhouetted black against a warm pomegranate light: a figure behind a camera, and a figure sitting on a rug. I assumed that was Nilou Tar. I could only see the back of her – she was sitting cross-legged, swathed and regal in black, on a long Persian rug.

  “Stop!”

  I stopped. One silhouette was marching toward me. It was a woman in a hijab – the director, I assumed. Nilou Tar remained facing the desert.

  “Who are you?” asked the director.

  “I’m just a guest at the guesthouse,” I said. “I’m a student.” I felt stupid and childish, as if caught in a lie. From what I could see of the director’s face, that’s exactly what she thought.

  “So you’re a student?” she asked with a touch of mockery. “What do you study?”

  “Film,” I said.

  She smirked. “Celluloid or digital?”

  Like with Abbas, I felt this was a test of some kind. It was only fitting to be honest. “I’ve only worked in digital,” I said.

  “Tell me why.”

  I felt my face get hot. “It’s my native medium. I’m young,” I said. She didn’t look impressed. I remembered what Abbas had said, about artists choosing a set of interesting constraints. “I like how much I can do, how finely I can cut, how quickly I can move. I like that I can make quick decisions and splice segments, one into the other. I like that it moves as quickly as I do.”

  The director’s face remained impassive. She was not convinced.

  “But I want to learn other ways,” I said. “I was curious. I wanted to watch, or even help.”

  Then Nilou Tar turned around on her rug. I could only see the shadows of her face in red and black, as if seeing the contours of an eroded goddess at Persepolis. She was much older than I’d expected – in her fifties.

  “She can clear me of sand,” Nilou called to the director in a voice firm as an oboe, without even looking at me.

  The director nodded. Apparently it was as good as done.

  Nilou turned to face the desert again, and the director started walking back up toward her camera.

  I sensed I shouldn’t wait for fur
ther permission. I staggered after her to the top of the dune, where the director handed me a long elegant horsetail brush in passing. I took it, felt the coarse hairs over the palm of my hand. I’d never felt such a thing. As I came closer to Nilou, I saw that the rug was laid over the ridge of the dune, which was so sharp it was almost a right angle. Her legs were dangling over the side, much like the blonde woman in the dolphin video Abbas had shown me earlier. Where was he? He’d said he wasn’t needed until later; how much later, I didn’t know.

  I chose a position right at the outside of the pool of red light, making sure I wasn’t casting a shadow or showing up in the camera’s line of sight, and knelt, and shifted back and forth to make comfortable wells in the sand for my knees, and waited.

  The wind gusted, like a soundtrack. I looked at Nilou, outlined in the red light. She looked serene. She had a severe, queenly beauty, not the girlish cuteness I’d expected of a porn star. She was looking north in silence. It was hard for me to be silent, or even very still. I tried. To distract myself, I tried to remember more about Abbas. But it was as if there’d been a jump cut in my life, an edit ahead to a later time. Memory depends on the medium, I thought; brains are such imperfect recorders. I needed to see him again. I needed to remember.

  The wind was picking up again. My eyes were closing of their own accord, against the wind and the red light. The sexual exhaustion that had first allowed me to sleep, and then forbade me to sleep, was now washing over me again.

  Through half-closed lids, I saw Nilou sit up.

  I opened my eyes fully and sat up, too. The director had gone rigid behind the camera. I looked to where they were both looking.