“The danger, they have always said, is for the youngest. Because the djinn prefer the soft and the new, whose eyes are bright enough to perceive them. I am the younger daughter but it is my sister that has gone to her new bed underwater.” // HEADER PHOTO: 青蛇, 1993 © Gala Film Distribution

---

fiction, feb 25

My sister has gone to sleep in the river. There are three pebbles on her pillow, smooth and white and unnatural to the land, stacked in a teetering tower that fails to fall even when I shake the bed. Terror clutches my throat with clammy hands and I run through the house calling for my mother.

The danger, they have always said, is for the youngest. Because the djinn prefer the soft and the new, whose eyes are bright enough to perceive them. I am the younger daughter but it is my sister that has gone to her new bed underwater.

The dead of the dawn reveals full soaking footsteps tracking water from the stone floor through the dust outside. We are all awake now; it is only an hour before fajr. My mother collapses into my brother’s arms, trembling so hard her aachol falls off and bares her head. And under the lightening sky, we see where my sister has gone, the river that sits below our house. We see her face, pale and trapped under the moving surface of the river. The sight of it drives everyone mad with horror and my father pulls me violently inside the house while others clean the floors. We close the door to the room my sister and I shared, not daring to touch the bed or the stones. I hide under my katha and try to block out the look of fascination in my sister’s wide, frozen eyes from my mind.

In the morning, our neighbour downriver comes to our doorstep, carrying my sister in his arms. She is sleeping round and exhausted against his chest, thin, changed. “She was stolen,” my father is explaining. He is repulsed by his daughter and cannot touch her. “She was taken by the river.”

“Ah, bhai,” says our neighbour, shaking his head. “Ah, for this to happen to you…”

“What can we do?” whispers my mother. She holds tight to my brother.

They lay her in our bed, my sister’s and mine; I cannot find the stones and it sends shivers down my spine. One never thinks that black magic will touch one’s family, until it does.

“You must call a healer,” the adults are saying. “Something must be done…” I slip away unheeded and go to my sister. She is so cold that we have dressed her in three sets of kameez, covered her with two katha. I touch her hand and it is corpse-like. But with faint hope, I notice that her eyelashes are shivering.

“It was not supposed to be her.” I hear my father’s voice rise and my mother’s voice waver. At this, I look up; and it is me that they are all looking at. In their eyes I see the guilt, grief and confusion a natural disaster brings: the sudden upheaval of certainties held entire lifetimes. I am a child but the weight of it falls on me with a blow. And I do what I have always done when no kindness comes my way; I grab my sister. But I am wrenched away and she is gone.



I often dream that I am drowning.

I have never swum, so I cannot tell if I am in the river. But my feet are tied by invisible ropes and my mouth opens and closes, though there is no air either inside or outside of me. It is only water, dark, murky, pressing all around me like a mother’s embrace. And in my dream, I do not struggle, but wait, even as the seconds slip me further towards the end. When my throat muscles close out of my control, desperately and pointlessly trying to save me, I see my sister swim through the darkness to come hold me. She strokes my face, ignoring my dying body, and tells me to speak.

“Apa,” I sob. “Why won’t you come back?”

Her hands are cold as ice but soothe as she strokes my hair, my cheeks, my choking neck. She caresses me as she says, “Because of you, shona. I won’t come back, for you.”

“Please, apa? Please?”

And I often dream it different, because dreams change, but this never does. My sister lowers her mouth to my throat and rips me dead with her teeth.



Fourteen nights, we lay my sister on the riverbank, and fourteen days, we bring fruits to her and spread them above her head. The fruits are always gone by maghrib and though I often lie in wait to watch what happens, I never see anyone. They still disappear. My sister does not move. Her skin, once a rich, unblemished brown, has sunken into a yellow pallor. The doctor comes by and shakes his head; I do not wait while my mother falls wailing. I simply run when dusk falls, to see if the river has fed on my sister or the fruits.

No one thinks to stop me. And so, as the fourteenth day slips away, I am there to see my sister’s body awaken.

She rises as a puppet, her joints cracking in eerie symmetry, her lips encrusted with dirt, ice and flaking skin. In the past fortnight, her body has not wasted as it should so when she moves, the meat responds, but awkwardly, as if uncertain of its relationship to its owner. I am not familiar with the supernatural. We have only been taught the trivial safeties and what I know, as the escaped younger daughter, is that I am safe. Perhaps that is why I have the lack of fear and sense to approach and ask, numbly, “Apa, is that you?”

My sister’s neck nearly snaps as the head turns towards me.

“Leave,” she croaks.

The river is mere inches away from her feet. Its ripples lap lovingly at her heels.

As if her throat is crushed to pieces. As if she has a mangled tongue. Fear is quickly coming to me, but I stay because it looks like my sister. The voice emerges, enraged and mutant, “…leave!” and I run backwards, shuffling and tripping over my feet in haste. Baba was right to be afraid, I think, and I hate thinking it. The river has eaten my apa and spat out a demon.

And then, she chokes out, “Shona…” and I am stopped. It is her voice, it is Apa’s gentleness, and it tugs at me; I am stopped by a sinking caution.

I ask, “Are you my apa?” The body raises a hand to its face and rubs it in a human gesture. My sister keens, “Shona…” and does not answer my question. She shudders forward and I, like an imbecile, leap forward to catch her before she falls. It is Apa, I say to myself, my heart racing, my knees trembling, it has to be Apa. She came back, she wouldn’t leave. They couldn’t take her because she came back for me. My dreams lie.

Apa feels frozen in my arms. I cannot hold her weight and am already beginning to buckle. Then her hands grip tight around my forearm and twist hard.

I feel my arm dislocate and scream, wrenching myself away. The corpse of my sister raises its bloated, darkened head and bares gummy teeth in a malevolent smile.

“Shona,” growls Apa. “Run.”

I run.



I have no memories outside of Apa, but my sister remembered her first memory of me. She whispered it to me once, holding my neck cupped in her hand, the heat of her palm sinking into my skin. She said she saw me sucking my thumb and I looked so awake and interested that she fell in love instantly. She was only seven, she was not allowed to touch the baby, so she slept beside the bed like a doting dog. One day, she overheard our father say of me: “If only she wasn’t so dark as sin. A demon could not be darker. She does not look like a child.”

My mother had said, “She is the younger daughter. The djinn will take their own.”

And Apa had pressed her lips to my forehead and cried over how casually cruel parents could be. To dislike a child for the innocence of their skin. And she said that that was when she knew our mother and father would love her as a daughter. And then she whispered her first promise to me, but I have forgotten it.



Children grow up hearing and telling djinn stories during play. We trade them, hearing them from older brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts on the dinner mat, repeating them with a mingling of unease and excitement. The closer one’s story to something that actually happened, the more social cachet one has. But, real or unreal, there are fundamental truths to djinn and therefore the stories we retold: number one, they prefer the child, the closest to Allah and his angels. Number two, the mischief is always done at night for the djinn fear the touch of sunlight. And number three—in all stories ever told, the djinn take the younger sibling.

Those of us born the youngest grow up with the threat of becoming a story hanging over our heads. Running back home by asr, watching dusk arrive from the safety of our walls. Wearing our tabiz bracelets long past toddlerhood in the hopes that the prayer given to us when we were born will continue protecting us. Avoiding coconut trees religiously. Often, I felt curious about djinn stories where those taken would come back, sometimes found sleeping in the exact spot they were last seen, sometimes found on their doorstep staring blankly until someone touched their shoulder and then, they would wake having no memory of where they had been. Apa went to school with someone like that. I once followed Apa to her class to catch a glimpse of her, expecting to see someone addled and demented. Instead she was a normal girl who could recite the Quran from memory and run as fast as a boy. I went home vaguely disappointed but also relieved.

And then there were those who would come back with spirit sickness. My village had one like that. A firani who never came out of her bedroom, who prayed all the time, who they said was married to a jealous male djinn. On Sundays, people would travel to come see her for their ailments, from physical health to marital prospects. It was unheard of for a girl in her twenties to remain unmarried, but few made mockery of Suhela Firani: the one and only time her parents tried to marry her off, her djinn possessed the intended and made him starve for a month. The police came and jailed her for the crime, but that very night, Suhela walked out of her locked cell and went back to her bedroom.

The day after my sister rises from the river and disappears, my parents visit Suhela Firani’s house. I follow behind them, knowing my father would send me back if he caught sight, but unable to forget my sister’s monstrous voice. He had beat me with a belt when I returned to the house and reported that my sister was awake; he had beat me again when, upon running fast to the riverside, he and my brother found nothing but a single polished rock. But my father’s anger induced less fear in me than the idea that my sister was now a shuffling zombie and all because I left her behind instead of helping her.

Apa would never have left me behind.

The firani’s mother attended the line of clients waiting outside their home. It was a beautiful two-storied stone house, with a red-tiled roof and lovely iron windows. It could have been in a city. The house did more for Suhela Firani’s reputation than even her magic capabilities did; it was clear to everyone that she was popular. My parents go directly to her mother. I hide beside two women in niqab and watch as my father gesticulates wildly and my mother squeeze the woman’s hand in hers, as if willing her saviour to appear. By now, the word has surely spread. Suhela’s mother speaks to mine and walks into the house without further word to my father; this alone warms me to the firani.

“Allahumma ajirni min al-nar,” says one of the women, watching my father berate my mother at full volume. “May Allah protect you from the hellfire.” Her tone negates the dua.

An hour later, Suhela’s mother comes out but, to my astonishment, comes to me. She pulls me by the hand and tells my parents, “Suhela Firani will see you today, but she stipulates that you must bring this child. We can go see her now, if you wish.”

“She cannot come,” says my father. His hand twitches. “I forbid it.”

“She will come or you will leave,” says Suhela’s mother sharply. “Do not be a fool, bhai. Your pride has led you to this.”

“How dare a mere woman speak to me like this.”

“You came to see a woman.”

“I came to see the djinn,” says my father imperiously. “Your pride is unearned, Suhela’s ma. When your daughter is no longer the sacred host for this djinn, do you believe she will matter anymore? She is your shame for having no husband at her age. Watch your tongue.”

I feel the ripple of shock at my father’s rudeness run through the silent audience that has now gathered around us. There is no shock on Suhela’s mother’s face but it is red and twisted. She turns to me and says, “Come, child. Suhela Firani has requested it. We must help your sister.”

Invoking my sister stills my father in his tracks. He pushes my mother angrily forward and refuses to look at me, but that matters very little. The idea of being alone with the evil hate my parents house towards me makes me nauseous with fear. What if the firani tells them that I abandoned my sister? What if my father beats me to death when I go home? Apa isn’t by my side anymore and what if they ask the firani to send me to the djinn too? I follow into Suhela Firani’s home thinking my last days have also arrived.



The firani never left her room, the rumours always said. The rumours never explain why. It seems like a normal house to me: the dull hum of family members in other rooms give the stone hallway an ethereal feeling of being a portal to another world, leading us away from the human. Walls are adorned with beautifully framed quotations from the Quran, but I cannot read them. I was a terrible student, despite Apa’s sustained efforts, and preferred sneaking off to play during my lessons with the hujurni. The two of us had embraced our different destinies with little question. Apa was not the prize daughter without effort and I was not the neglected daughter without earning some of it with my regular disobedience. Little was expected of me; little was expected to become of me; and so I did little and earned the disappointment at least. But in the comfort of the night and our shared bed, Apa would recite the three quls and then whisper a surah at random as I curled up, back against her side, her words of prayer, proclamation and protection washing over me like music. Her gentle recitations became my lullaby as I floated off into sleep; her warmth made me brave to face the nightmares, whenever they came, and I never woke when I died.

Our guide takes us deep inside the home and we follow. Anxiety buzzes in my fingertips… I have rarely been in such close quarters to my parents. They remained as uninvolved in my life as possible, my brother taking up the whole of their interest with the occasional crumbs of attention falling to Apa when she did anything worth their approval. My father, I associated with the sting of his belt and the derision of his eyes. He never let me forget the colour of my skin and he never had to speak a word to do it. I feared my mother less: Apa told me that she had never wanted her daughters and so did not know what to do with them; we were failed attempts at giving my father more sons. When Apa was alone, my mother ensured that my sister was cleaned and fed but never cared to make her feel loved.

“The one good thing my mother did for me,” she had said, “was to give me you. For you, I can forgive her for never loving me, shona.”

When we enter her bedroom, her mother opening a wooden door with a metal plate carrying Allah’s name on it, Suhela Firani rises from her prayer mat with a soft assalamualaikum, alone but for a single rock beside her. The rock is as large as a baby, and white too: the river’s calling card. The djinn’s ashon, seat and anchor in the human realm. The sight of it strikes us dumb. When the door shuts closed on our guide’s face, the din of the outer world also falls away. The room shrinks to the sound of our breathing, but the firani makes no sound at all. Suhela Firani looks like a human, but does not seem like one. Her eyes are wide set, her spaced out gaze meandering across our faces as if confused about our presence; she wears a pastel purple burqah and has wrapped her matching orna around herself modestly, not a single wisp of hair escaping her hijab; she seems to me more young girl than young woman. But still, there is something about her that holds my father’s tongue, renders him mute, respectful and sullen.

I feel the seconds slip my sister further away and though fear of my father stops me, I am ready to beg the firani for help when her gaze narrows towards my face, and when she touches the ashon beside her, it inexplicably begins to glow with an inner light. Suhela Firani kneels into sijdah on her prayer mat and begins zikr with Allah’s names: al-Mu’id, al-Muhyi, al-Mumit, al-Hayy. The Restorer, The Giver of Life, The Bringer of Death, The Destroyer, and The Ever-Living. Her sweet voice rises sharply with each name, like a song, like a bird’s morning call, like a near-desperate cry for God’s attention, and I see my parents fall to their knees in awed tears and join her in zikr. My heart is pulled into the beat of her chant and I find myself moving until my feet nearly touch her prayer mat. I hear a low sound from the glowing ashon, a vibrating murmur, but I cannot make it out and it feels as if it is speaking to me. It terrifies me.

I fall to my knees… Suhela Firani rises, shaking, from her prostration and whispers my name. She tells me: “Do not be afraid,” and succumbs to the illness taking over her body. The firani goes rigid from her hands, paralysed into her seated position, up ‘til her neck. Her head lolls to the right like a ragdoll until her face snaps towards me: her eyes are wholly white and focused on me. I swallow a scream. Suhela Firani speaks.

“This one has seen you before.”

Her voice is no longer that lovely melody from before. It is as if her larynx is being manipulated by someone who does not entirely know what body part is supposed to produce sounds, but has studied its mechanics. Robotic and harsh, the firani’s mouth stretches grotesquely animated as it smiles at me. She raises a hand to my face, cradles it like a scientist: her skin is scalding and I flinch at her touch. The firani says, “This one thinks… you should not be here.”

I am too terrified to move but indignation nearly propels me into protest. I was not even intending to be here. The firani called for me. But it slowly dawns on me that Suhela Firani was not the one speaking. The firani’s body lopped her head to the left, her odd gaze studying me. It repeats again, “You should not be here.”

I ask, “Should I be in the river?”

It titters. “In the river… You go to the river. You do not come back.”

Panic grips me. I don’t understand what I saw when my sister’s corpse rose. It hurtme, and I know Apa could never raise her hand to me, but then… Why did it feel like she was still the one in that body, the one who hurt me? She was not like the firani: how completely Suhela Firani’s djinn has taken over her body, not a trace of the woman left. And then the djinn says something even more odd.

“This one is curious. How do you live in the river and still breathe?”

“Me?” I say in confusion. “I’ve never even gone swimming. It’s Apa… The river has taken her and something’s gone wrong!”

“This one has seen your sister,” says the firani’s body. “This one does not think this one can help you.”

“Apa? You’ve seen Apa? Did Apa come here?”

“Little know-nothing,” it jeers. “No one comes near mine. This one is mine. No… Your sister left.”

What? “What do you mean?”

“Your sister was not taken. This one knows.” Suhela Firani’s body is beginning to tremble against the djinn’s hold. Her eyes glow with such bright light that I need to look away. “Your sister left.”

“What?” It can’t be true. I whisper, “Why would she leave me?”

The firani’s body begins to shake uncontrollably but the djinn simply laughs, mechanical and precise. “She was to be given away, so your sister decided to leave first. A tale as old as time… But this one will stay mine.”

Commotion erupts behind me. “That asinine brat,” my father yells. “She went to the djinn herself? That selfish, useless creature! Let hellfire have her!”

“Humans,” says the djinn. “Only they can make themselves inhuman, and so they do, so often. And somehow they are the beloved of our Creator…? May Allah forgive this one.”

“Please, firani,” I say. “I saw my sister. She is not well. If she went to the djinn, why didn’t they take her?”

“Child,” says the djinn, “Your sister is beyond the barrier, beyond the surface. She sank her feet into the river and begged to take your place, but her soul sticks to the earth. She remains.”

Because she isn’t supposed to go, I think. I am.

I make myself look up at Suhela Firani, my eyes crying to shield from her supernatural glare. Her body’s paralysis creeps towards her face and her neck is popping with veins, but the djinn does not depart; it watches me intently.

“Where must I go?”



And I go to the river alone and find the rock that is my sister’s last tie to earth. I perform ozu in the water where my sister once lay, before throwing the rock in, watching as its white surface does not sink, but disappears from sight. My actions feel ludicrous even to me, returning to the djinn that which was supposedly holding Apa to us, but who am I to argue with the mysterious rules of the river? What are humans if not pretenders of being masters of the universe? I wonder if this was what my sister felt when she swam into the river and asked to meet its spirits. I wonder how the fear did not make her run away home like I dearly wanted to. I wonder what I could say to her if she finds me, only to tell me she can’t come back because of me.

For I finally understand the dreams that took me under the river and my sister’s whispered prayers that brought me out. The djinn have been holding my seat with them ready my whole life; my parents had been right; and it was only my sister who would and could believe I had a right to life, so she had gone to the djinn to secure it by taking my place.

I submerge only my left foot until my toes meet the surface of the rock. Smooth as glass, colder than the water. It all began with those unnatural rocks on her pillow, where her scent and hair should have been, where if I had only woken in time, perhaps I could have caught her hand in mine and prayed over her for once. Suddenly, my loneliness hits me and the tears that I have been locking away deep in my chest pour out hot and heavy and I want my sister. With all my strength, I bring my foot down on the rock.

The rock is no longer there. An eruption of hands grab hold of me and my body plunges into the water at startling speed. I scream helplessly, a waste of my precious air, freezing water instantly flooding my throat and lungs, and still they drag me deeper in. The river is darkness. But this darkness is full and alive and I feel my human brain struggle to make sense of the world around me and fail. I scream, ignorant and foolish, brave to the point of stupidity, never having learned my sister’s lessons. I scream like an infant. Take me and give her back, she should never have made this sacrifice, I have come, I am here, I scream and the river swallows it. I am here.

“I am here, shona,” says my sister.

Oh… Apa looks so beautiful and so dead. Her corpse pallor, sunken cheeks, and rotting legs. Her crow-black hair, brilliant smile and wicked gaze. I am too late. She is already half river.

But she laughs at me and it is her. “You are a stubborn girl, my little sister,” she says, circling my frozen body like a shark, “and you never do listen. Perhaps I expected it.”

Take me, it is too late but I beg the river, take me and let her go.

“You do things your way regardless of what we want from you,” she laughs. “Like a headless chicken, you run into the river just because a djinn tells you where I am. You leave our parents to their indignities and you aren’t even the least concerned!”

My sister holds me, suffocating, in her arms. “How do you do it, shona?” she asks. “How does their selfishness not swallow you whole and tear you apart? I’ve never seen you cave to their cruelty even once. How do you not bargain for your right to exist?”

The firani’s words echo in my mind. Your sister left. And now my sister gazes at me as if I have answers for a pain I did not even recognise.

I finally accept her truth and look at Apa as she is, no longer one of us, an entity evolving away from me. And I ask, “Why did you leave me?”

And she says, “I haven’t left you, shona. They were going to give me away. I was the perfect daughter and primed to become a perfect bride. All I had ever asked of them was to let me be with you in peace, but the world does not work like that. The world does not reward obedience with freedom. Some lessons I think you learned long before me, shona.”

“I don’t know anything, Apa,” I say. “I just know you love me and that is all I need.”

I know my time is coming to an end. I feel the edges of unconsciousness gather as my body succumbs to the drowning, but I linger and I wait for my sister. She is quiet and so sad, her corpse no longer smiling unnaturally, and I do not understand my sister, but my heart breaks for her. Apa presses a kiss to my forehead, her grip on my neck hard and painful, and whispers, “I haven’t left you.”

I will never leave you alone, she’d whispered once, and I know she would die before she broke her word.

In my small life, I have learned some truths: that the djinn do not keep who do not want to stay. If you go to the river, you do not come back. And my sister broke the rule of the river and came back anyway. She would remain trapped in her corpse if it meant keeping her promise to me: that was how my sister loves me, how she has loved me over the course of this small life, how much her love tied me to her. And her, to me.

I had never known a moment of my life without love. I had never needed the approval of my father or mother or brother to live loudly and defiantly because of my sister, and the sting of their disdain never touched me long enough to leave an imprint because of her, and I know that, because of her, I would be fine alone. But I would miss her so much.

“Apa,” and I feel my sister stroke my hair for the last time, “You don’t need to come back for me.” She watches me fight my dimming mind to get the words out. “Apa, do you know that I love you?”

She laughs, a girl amidst the darkness.

Let me go, I ask the river and the river releases me.


In the decades that come, I tell the story again and again, slipping from memory to fable as the years and my body fades. I tell my children and my children’s children. She is alive. My sister sleeps in the river.

AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO