“The rules are quite clear,” wo whispers. “Woman falls asleep under tree, jinn can enter. And the path is clear—through the woman’s long hair. You seem to be woman, yet your hair…”
Her hand involuntarily reaches for the fuzz of her rapidly growing-out undercut. “So then?”
To his right, a nala yawned, splitting the Meena Bazaar road in two. Trash oozed from the concavity as rivulets of sewage trickled past it. Plastic bags of green, blue, red, pink, white, and black covered the cleft. He sensed them crinkle in a corner, right near the cemented bricks that fenced the nala from the road, and a rat emerged from underneath, sitting atop bloated polyethene.
With a jerk Jiji realizes the golden feather has almost burned through, and it flashes emerald, jasper, sapphire. It rejects them all and fixes on a final color – an opalescent white, searing her vision. She winces, opening her eyes in time to note the whiteness of its demise.
His eyes fell on the boy’s face and feet, the only parts of his body visible from the sheet. His feet were leathery like everyone else’s in the village, but they seemed cleaner, shapelier and generally well-tended. They were also pointing in the direction opposite to that taken by normal feet. Khudadad had never seen anything of the sort before, and he wondered if he was really watching a Djinn