On the banks of the Ganges, west of the Sundarbans and east of Banaras, a little village called Kal echoed with an ear-splitting boom. It came from inside a tiny mud-hut of a boat-maker called Gangadharan. In fact, it was the fourteenth accident of the day, but the walls of the fragile-looking hut remained miraculously intact.
A sort of adjacent sub-city swallowed by Dhaka a hundred years ago, a pustule avoided by even the moderately desperate homeless, one step away from being cluster bombed into oblivion by the satellites above.
“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?”
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