Word Count: 2626 | Reading Time: 9 min
She is walking through a Punjabi shower where the drops are so weighty they leave bruises on her skin. [One would always remain, faint and pleasantly achy on her left shoulder, a little buzz every time she hoisted her absurdly heavy tote bag.]
There had been no storm forecasted for this day, although she knew that no weather app worked properly here. When she had set out, flute, pen, and notebook in tow, the sky had been entirely clear. Still, it was “saavan ka mahina,” a phrase from a song she would turn to repeatedly back in California, the singer’s diasporic-indie-Brooklyn whine longing for this emotional maelstrom of a rainstorm.
As the red dirt turns to molten chocolate around her, her mud-caked sandals quickly weigh her down. Spotting dry ground underneath a large tree nearby—a perfect spot for a shrine—she kicks off the muddy shoes, wipes her feet with her drenched yellow scarf, and settles under the tree, waiting for the rain to pass.
Pen to paper? But the pages of the journal were entirely soaked, a month’s daily entries running together in one inky mess. Might as well play a little music.
She only really knows one song, and after a month of lessons, it is all she can do to make flute-like sounds at all. She plays it hesitantly: “Heer,” adapted from a guitar arrangement a boy had taught her over the phone when they had been twelve, his soft unbroken voice hesitantly relaying fret numbers. “5-4-3 … no sorry 5-4-1 … nooo 5-4-2….” The folksy tune morphs into every tragic love story to ever have passed along the rivers of Punjab. Sohni’s earthen clay pot disintegrating in front of her eyes as she tries to row herself across the Chenab to her beloved Mahiwal. We’re all trying our best, she thinks, right before her own music lulls her to sleep.
She wakes to a pair of silver eyes staring right at her in the twilight. A jackal? She decides not to break eye contact.
“Well?” wo spoke.
“Quite well, thanks,” she replies “And yourself?”
“Kind of stuck, actually,” wo responds.
She can feel a kind of windlike pressure pushing its way into her in waves. “Are you trying to enter me?”
“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?”
“So then I’m out of the tree but I can’t make it into you,” tears spring into wo moonlit eyes.
[Locked into mutual anguish, their tears fall silently, both yearning for a completion they can just barely taste.]
“The binds break at dawn, don’t they,” she murmurs, remembering her mother’s warning that women should stay home when jinns ran free from dusk to dawn. “Do you want to tell me the story of how you got here?”
“Fuck no,” wo replies. “I’m not reliving my pain for you. You can tell your story if you want.”
She rubs clayey fingers over her face, unwittingly painting on a mustache. Wo smiles.
“I am traveling by train from Karachi to Rawalpindi,” she says eventually. “I mean, it takes less time than taking the California Zephyr from Emeryville to Chicago, and no one had any questions when I did that alone (except why are you avoiding air travel? which let’s be real no one wants to hear) so I decided I would do it and my worried grandparents et al could deal with it—I am almost thirty years old!—who’s asking permission? Not me. And I knew there was a shrine off of the Multan station (besides the ones in the city proper, obviously) so I thought I would set off to look for it since the train to Lahore from here is delayed anyway, and then it started to rain so I sat down under this tree and fell asleep and woke up in the darkness to your blush-inducing eyes, and so here we are and why are you laughing, dude?”
“You would be from California.”
“Excuse you, I am from Islamabad, born in Pindi,” she says defensively.
“Okay, but you’re wearing Birkenstocks, and you called me ‘dude,” so…”
“What else am I supposed to call you? You didn’t give me a name.”
“I hereby dub thee Taara. How’s that?”
“Funny. But really what is your name? And far be it for me to, like, assume gender…” Taara trailed off.
“Then don’t.”
Silence. Waves of pain coursing through them.
“What were you playing anyway? After that terrible sufi-rock ‘Heer’ catastrophe?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Right before you fell asleep. That melody. What is it?”
“A jinn that doesn’t know folk music, huh?”
“Shut up. Fewer folk musicians wander out here than sad sufi-esque boys looking to make their telecom jobs more palatable. Oh, and Diplo. He smoked part of a hash brick on that hill over there.”
“Are you joking? Do you also keep up with Buzzfeed interviews with Diplo? He is the only person to ever call chars a ‘hash brick’––it was cringey then, and it’s cringey now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do. Anyway, do you do this often?”
“Chat with ambiguously-gendered folks under shriney trees in thunderstorms? I’d have to say this is a first.”
“What do you usually do?”
“Well, okay. This is my first time, alright? I’m new to this too. But what was that tune?”
“I don’t know what it’s called.” Taara can still hear Rania humming it, her exacting gaze directed at colonial maps of Punjab at the museum in Karachi, keeping time with soft taps from the new leather sandals they had bought from Tariq Road earlier that day — right before she had tripped on a stair. She suppressed a smile.
“Play it again then.”
They don’t move.
She checked her watch. 9 pm.
“Why won’t you play it?”
“I’ve never played it in front of anyone.”
“But it’s not like you wrote it. It’s not your song.”
No, it’s hers, Taara thought.
“Who is she?”
“You can hear my thoughts too? Fantastic.”
“If you’d get your head out of your ass, you’d be able to hear mine too.”
“You… have thoughts?”
“Oh no, only you, the true Kantian subject capable of ethical decision-making, able to hold the aesthetic of the sublime douchebag atop your ego-ideal mountain, can have thoughts. Far be it for me to have interiority, because Nietzsche said GOD IS DEAD—”
“Jesus, fucking relax dude. Yes, okay, I get it.”
She scrunches up her face really hard.
“Are you trying to take a shit?”
“I’m trying to access your thoughts, man.”
At this, wo bursts into laughter. A warm, mustard-flowery laughter, filling her with warmth up to the scalp. A laugh that turns into love, an all-encompassing feeling of suddenly knowing there is no more to be known. Silence returns.
“You can come closer, you know.”
She holds her breath. The eyes drift nearer. An arm extends forward, reaches behind her, and suddenly there is light. She looks up to see a wrought-iron lantern casting a soft glow, which, as her eyes adjust, bounces off of the red earth to create the vibe of an exposed-brick Brooklyn loft. “You can conjure fire?”
Wo casts a sidelong glance. “Solar-powered Phillips BrightHue bulb, warm white, from the Urban Outfitters Fall 2018 #Rustic collection. $34.62. That’s your only question? Not why do you look like this?”
“Why do you look like what?”
“What do I look like to you?”
A smile as wide as the sky, a nose worthy of Mughal miniatures, the floppy hair of my dreams, and those eyes, lord, help… “I guess you look like… attractive?”
“That’s kind of the point, yeah.”
“Dude are you a fuckboy or a jinn? What kind of trip am I on? And are you going to possess me and throw me in a river or something?”
“Rude. I think humans manage to throw themselves into rivers without any assistance from jinns just fine—you seem to be one obsessed with these Heer-Ranjha, Sohni-Mahiwal, Laila-Majnoon type stories. Where do you think we are, the twelfth century or something? You walked thirty minutes away from a train station and think you’ve entered some eternal past, forgetting the kind of lowkey-passé Orientalist critique you spend your time doing in grad school, wondering if you can find your way to the old Grand Trunk Road from here—fucking GT Road, man, with its potholes and endless traffic that made you nauseous every time your dad (who is otherwise a good driver) took that route to Lahore! Get a fucking grip!!!!!”
Silence.
“You’re not a jinn, are you?” she whispers.
“You wouldn’t know a jinn from your grandmother,” wo mumbles. “I am not a jinn, I just live under this tree right now.”
“Why do you live under this tree?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I don’t know man, we’re just stuck here so at this point you may as well level with me. What’s the story?”
“So, I’m not a jinn, but I am jinn-adjacent; I am one of the spirits that lived in the large cistern at the center of the old Hindu temple at Katas Raj—”
She gasps. “Where kids have always challenged each other to cannonball off of the highest window until last year when the cement company drained the water table and—”
A wave of grief sends her reeling. Wo sobs, the sky growls, and the downpour commences anew.
“Okay, alright, we won’t talk about it,” she says in what she thinks was a conciliatory tone. “But I will say I am sorry about what they did, and we did protest it at the Press Club in Islamabad, and the government did fine the cement-walas, and they say eventually the water table will rise and you won’t be an Internally Displaced Person anymore—”
Wo smiles. “Hah! Me, an IDP. In any case, once you’ve left home, you can’t go back.”
“That’s some melancholic migrant bullshit right there and you know it. What do you mean you can’t go back? Where else do you want to be?”
“Well, you did fall in love with me an hour or so ago. I suspect we’re tied together in this limbo-state, so it seems I’m going with you?”
“Good plan, except you’re not a jinn? So you’re trying to do a thing your…body? being? isn’t designed to do?”
“Who are you to tell me what my body can’t do?” wo leans in close, flooding her with silty riverwater-scented desire.
“Evidently nobody,” she mumbles, leaning in closer.
“So then stop making assumptions and kiss me.”
***
Much later, they find themselves at an airport gate, nervously tapping their feet. Conversation turns to wo new life by riverrun California—and didn’t the South Asian Radical History Walking Tour people say it feels like a second home for salt-of-the-earth Punjabi farmers? They are still locked into limbo, but it feels different after that kiss – jinn ho na ho, jinsi taur pe to aisa kuch nahi mehsoos kya pehle, she had thought after – and wo saath hai ab. PIA announces the departure of flight 066 to San Francisco, the speaker intones. Please proceed to gate three. “It’s the kind of place where people stop all the time and marvel at the place they’re standing in, you know? And they say ‘isn’t this so beautiful?’ like they can hardly believe they’re here, where the sun shines goldenly all year round but it is never truly warm, even when it’s eighty degrees Fahrenheit (don’t ask me what that is in Celsius, American temperatures don’t translate to Punjabi feelings anyway) because the warmer it is in the day the colder it gets at night (as if the sea is having its revenge—is that what Karachi life is like? I am only ever there in deep July where even your sweat sweats) and after a few hundred times of hearing that you begin to notice it too, but I wonder if you will feel it because I never really did, even though I now point to the sunset and say ‘look isn’t that incredible,’ as if it is not the same sunset I see every day, as if it is enough to mark the setting of the sun here, and the New Yorker in me can never earnestly appreciate that because the New Yorker in me can never do anything earnestly, even though now I am trying because my therapist asked me why are you holding on to this ironic detachment in a space where no one is ridiculing you and I said well you don’t have an inner Palvashay and she said who is Palvashay—watch your step on the gangway, I tripped on it the last time and my left big toe still crackles with discomfort sometimes—hi, seat 84B please, and are you even listening?” “Of course not.” “Fuck you, you should know what you’re getting into. It’s not like America as you know it from the movies, except when it’s exactly like America as you know it from the movies, because the kids are all sandy-haired and freckled and hang out at In-N-Out in their crop tops and faded denim and white sneakers and it could be 1974 or 1988 or 1995 yet it is 2020 and nothing fazes anyone and when they ask you how you’re doing and you tell them fine I guess they say they’re sorry and you’re like but what are you sorry about? (and when is this goddamn plane taking off?) Remember when you used to walk onto the plane from the tarmac at Islamabad Airport when back from college, and also when you landed there would be that guy hat your dad would send to receive you, and would help you skip passport control because LOL who has time for that…like what are they checking me for here, they can’t deport me unlike that lady of Bangladeshi origin in the UK that was ‘deported back to her own country’ even though she was born in like Leeds or something and I mean it’s not like your nationality rubs off like magic when you fly over an ocean and OHMIGOSH—” The realization sets in too late. As the plane flies over China, she looks into wo eyes again, trying to hold herself together even as her body desperately gives way. And by the time they land at SFO, they have become one.***
They would remember that Punjabi rain when walking through a California drizzle where drops are so fragile they barely hold surface tension long enough to land on their body. [That old rain had left bruises on their skin. One would always remain, faint and pleasantly achy on their left shoulder, a little buzz every time they hoisted their absurdly heavy tote bag.]
During the day, Mehak is doing her PhD at UC Berkeley, and is an editor at Qui Parle and its online complement Ki. Her academic work is at the intersections of contemporary Anglophone fiction, queer theory, post- and decolonial theory, and game studies. By night, she is a fiction writer, board game designer, and aspiring crossword-maker.