“But this is my horse and I behave how I please,” she said.
Zubair gave a guffaw. Then he said, “I offered you this handsome horse, Duniya, and it seems you’ve accepted him. But what have you given me in return, my little one?”
“I will marry you,” she said.
When she was a little bigger Duniya heard the story of how Zubair’s former wife fell in love with a jinn, whom she bore several children. Zubair had been married to her for almost twenty years, with grown-up sons and daughters who had by then given them grandchildren; and he was busy courting the affections of a much younger woman. When his wife was gone for a few days, everyone assumed she was visiting her children and grandchildren — no one at first had any idea of her affair with the jinn. But as Zubair’s sumptuous wedding to the young woman approached, people began to show interest in his first wife’s reactions to the goings-on, only to discover she wasn’t there to answer their queries. When the story of her jinn-lover was told, the townspeople’s initial attitude was more or less dismissive, rationalizing that such tales were bound up with the understandable sentiments of a jealous, hurt woman.
So Zubair’s first wife lived her life undisturbed, vanishing when she pleased, reappearing without explanation. One day, two young men, one of them her cousin, the other Zubair’s, decided to get to the bottom of it and followed her right into the bushes. Later they reported that they had never known anyone, male or female, who walked as fast as her. Reaching her destination, she built a fire and began to prepare a meal. While doing so she held a conversation presumably with jinns, whom the young men couldn’t see and whose language they couldn’t comprehend. Inferring that the woman and her jinn-lover were preparing to make love, the young men withdrew discreetly.
Zubair married the younger woman, his dream, his virgin. He was a wealthy man, reputed to own ten thousand camels divided into various herds, in the care of distant cousins and hired hands. As many as twenty head of cattle were slaughtered to feast the invited and uninvited wedding-guests.
But on the first night with his young virgin, Zubair felt unmanly. Also he kept hearing voices, as if a drone of jinns were speaking to one another, inside his head, in an alien language. Just before dawn, his young bride died, untouched, a virgin.
When his wife reappeared after a few days, Zubair had a serious talk with her, alone. In their frank confrontation he told her everything that had taken place.
“I’ve given you five sons and two daughters, what more do you want from me?” she said. “I had never known nor desired any other man until I saw that your lusty eyes had fallen on a younger woman, with firm breasts, healthy skin and a handsome body. Imagine then,” she went on, “when less than a week later I met a man as good-looking as an angel, who declared his love to me. It was only afterwards that he revealed his identity to me, that he was a jinn, not human. But this didn’t bother me, in fact it made my affair more romantic, requiring more courage. I bore him children, half-jinn, half-human, and we are happy together.”
“Did your jinn-lover kill my bride on our wedding night?”
“Are you mad?”
“Was it he who interfered with my erections?” he asked, desperately humiliated.
Her lips began to move. She seemed to be whispering to someone in the room whom Zubair couldn’t see, only sense. She turned to him after her low-voiced consultation. “Could it be that you killed your virgin bride to hide your shame?”
“This is preposterous,” Zubair said.
Again his wife entered into a whispered debate with invisible parties. She chuckled, then said, “Perhaps next time something disastrous occurs to you, you’ll blame my jinn-lover for it too.”
Not long after this conversation with his estranged wife, Zubair was in the midst of dawn prayers when a curtain of darkness suddenly lowered upon his sight, rendering him totally blind. It wouldn’t lift, no matter what he did; nothing would restore his vision.
Asked how he felt, he would respond, “It is as if two wicked, playful little jinns are mounted on the unlit rays of my pupils, depriving me of my vision. Maybe they’ll tire of playing their vengeful games one day and dismount.”
But they did not alight. Instead, his wife was taken ill. Meanwhile, Zubair stopped saying his prayers altogether. Finally Zubair’s wife died a quarter of an hour before Duniya was born.
Nearly seventeen years later: a gesture of kind violence!
Duniya’s father was on his bed, awaiting death. Zubair was his constant visitor, coming and going, Zubair whose stick kept tapping the unseen wall separating their houses, a sadly omened sound. When together, the two friends talked of death, agreeing that only Allah knew who would join Him first.
An intimation of his imminent death that day made Duniya’s father speak his last feverish words. He decided to offer, as he put it, “a gesture of kind violence” to his friend and peer Zubair. Would Duniya please take him as her lawful husband?
The curse of it was that no one else was there, only Duniya’s mother. And Duniya accepted to do her mother’s bidding, for one cannot argue with the wishes of the dead and the elderly, people said. Either one does as the dead say, or one doesn’t, but one has to face the consequences of one’s actions. Duniya didn’t wish to look over her shoulders in anticipation of the moment when she might spot the evil of her parents’ malediction lurking in every depression, every valley or shadow “Let’s get on with it,” Duniya said courageously And to Zubair who had never seen her with his own eyes but who had known her all her life, Duniya, his new bride and virgin, said, “Go and prepare for my coming.”
Family friends and relations tried to convince Duniya not to grant her father’s dying wishes. Zubair, for his part, lest he be accused of offending her pride, pretended to have grown a numb set of toes. But Duniya’s mother, speaking loudly as people with hearing difficulties do, reiterated that her late husband had suggested their daughter marry Zubair, there was no question about it, she had heard it; the young woman might as well comply.
Then Duniya’s half-brother Shiriye, a lieutenant in the army, arrived unannounced. When told what was afoot, he vowed to put a stop to this nonsense, arguing that Duniya’s mother was virtually deaf. But by late evening Shiriye had changed his mind. And Zubair would not confirm or deny the rumour that he had made the customary overtures a bridegroom makes towards the bride’s blood brother. And Shiriye left in haste the following morning.
Years later Duniya would write to her full-brother Abshir that their half-brother had departed from Galkacyo like a man with something to hide. The truth was that Shiriye had secretly accepted a gift from Zubair.
“Do you remember that I offered to marry you when I was four, giving you my hand in exchange for a handsome horse?” Duniya asked Zubair when her father’s funeral rites had ended.
“Yes, I do,” he replied.
“Now where is that horse?”
“Times have been hard,” he replied.
“Let’s get on with it then, without pomp and show, without the beating of a single drum, or a trill of ululation.”
“Yes, letus.”
“Go forth and prepare for my coming,” Duniya said.
Several nights later, Zubair admitted her to the room prepared for their honeymoon. On the floor was a large mattress decked with cushions and pillows (on one was Duniya’s name embroidered in green, for luck). The most prominent item was a rocking-chair, a gift from Zubair’s seaman son. It dominated the room from its vantage point. They sat in it together, they made love in it, and now and then they even fell asleep in it, holding each other in a loving embrace.