Here’s the thing with magic. It has fallen into disrepute ever since we discovered science. Yes, your auntie will tell you to tie a charm around your ankle but she will not look up the Book of Secrets when her molars give her trouble; she’ll get her and her mystic beliefs to a dentist and she will demand some new-fashioned anaesthesia.
Not for her the three pence of mercury ground fine — did the mage who devised that recipe ever see mercury in his life? How does one grind it fine when it’s running about all the time? — and inserted into the tooth with a goose quill. She’ll squeak about heavy metals and Minamata but will still advise St John’s wort when you’re blue.
Move your hand through
But simply because we are so in thrall to science, magic has made all kinds of comebacks in literature. Sixteenth century
audiences would feel right at home at a reading of Harry Potter or a telling of some Sandman tale from Neil Gaiman. Only, they would believe this is possible. We mostly don’t, or there would be a daily dose of bloody noses between platforms nine and ten of King’s Cross Station.
All this by way of warning. I do not take fantasy fiction very seriously. I only look for a good yarn. Saad Hossain’s Djinn City is a corking yarn. There’s a mouldering old mansion in Dhaka in which live Kaikobad, a drunk, and his son, Indelbed.
Now this begins to confuse me immediately because Kaikobad is the name of the founder of the Kayanid dynasty, heroes of the Avesta , and so on. No problem there but who is Indelbed?
What does his name mean? Kaikobad, as every Parsi boy knows, was father to Kaikhushro. No help there. Never mind. Indelbed’s mother is dead and all he knows is that he killed her by being born. Then one day he discovers that his mother was a djinn. His father is put into a supernatural coma, he is kidnapped and held in a subterranean prison, and we’re off.
Now novels have many purposes and one of these is to hold up a mirror to society. One way to do this would be to set a mouldering old mansion in Dhaka and put a family in it and have them squabble over real estate. Voila, realist fiction.
But when someone begins to explain magic in terms of science, then you have magical scientism. Here’s a sample:
“Imagine that these different kinds of matter exist in the same space but do not affect each other. So when you move your hand through what you think is empty space, you are in effect going through some sort of ‘dark’ or ‘other’ matter except neither you nor it can feel each other. I imagine they are particles or quanta of energy that do not interact at all with regular matter, unless under special circumstances... A djinn is, in my opinion, simply a creature who can manipulate two radically different kinds of magic.”
I loved that “in my opinion” because now it is possible to differentiate between what a djinn is and what a djinn is believed to be or what a djinn is because of what s/he can do.
And if the dead lady of the house is a djinn and the djinns of the world/ universe/ this section of the multiverse are concerned with dignatas (like dignitas, only spelled this way), then you have a free pass. You can say what you want and some can nod and say, ‘A-ha, this is a prism and through its refractions, we shall see much more,’ and most other people will say, ‘Is there a web-series?’
Take this passage:
“Now republicanism started more as a voluntary association, a loose gathering of like-minded djinn who joined forces to achieve some single project and then disbanded. What it means now is very different in human terms, because, as usual humans have corrupted everything. But in the pure form, we were really arguing about rule versus nonrule, and lucky to say, nonrule won...”
Like your auntie
All to the good then but over time, “...we started getting a conservative party who valued the Lore, sometimes to a literal extent, and was very eager to ‘return to the way things were’, which is funny because possibly most of them have no idea how things actually were and would not like it all if things went back to that.”
Much like your auntie who wants to remember how thick and pure the milk flowed in her village but none of the oppressive caste practices that went with it, never mind the belief that women should be kept uneducated at home.
Most of the time, this is kept low-key and the story leaps and bounds forward. Totally immersive and great fun. I hope there is a sequel. And yes, a film, by some Spielberg type person.
The writer is a poet and novelist.
Djinn City; Saad Hossain, Aleph Books, ₹499
